Tag Archives: Haitians

Maine businesses unite to find best ways they can aid Haiti

Posted on February 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Coalition will provide money,

materials or expertise once

greatest needs identified

Some well-known Maine businesses have formed a coalition to identify needs in Haiti and determine how they can be met with resources from Maine as that country attempts to rebuild from last month’s earthquake.

The leadership of MaineLine Haiti includes Preti Flaherty, Unum, Kennebunk Savings Bank, Reed & Reed, CD&M Communications and Mainebiz. Other companies that have signed on are Baker Newman & Noyes, Organic Fair Trade Coffee and Woodard & Curran.

The coalition will work with Darcy Pierce, senior partner at Envoy, a Maine-based firm that attempts to connect the corporate world with work in developing nations. Members of the leadership committee will meet Thursday to talk with Pierce.

The plan is to have Pierce go to Haiti, work with non-governmental organizations there to identify the greatest needs in the rebuilding, and determine needs that MaineLine could address.

Pierce has been an early responder and provided on-site assessment after disasters, including the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and the earthquake last year in Indonesia.

Pierce said he has seen what happens in the wake of a disaster.

“Everybody floods it with money, everybody floods it with food and water, which is important – but there’s going to need to be services and solutions that are out of the box,” he said. “There’s not a great system set up to connect corporate America into that. That’s where this coalition idea came from.”

Click on the link for the rest of today’s story by Matt Wickenheiser of the Portland Press Herald.

Learn more about MaineLine Haiti at http://www.maineline.org/.

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Reviving Haiti brick by brick, mind by mind

Posted on February 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Portland professor and architect

has plans to fortify the Justinian Hospital,

wants his students to design houses

that can be quickly and easily built

He’s never set foot in Haiti, but Portland architect M. Curt Sachs has used his skills to benefit a terribly poor hospital in the country’s second-largest city.

Sachs’ first career was as a cancer therapist. He went back to school to become an architect, and has specialized in designing health care facilities.

The story of his work on the Haitian hospital began two years ago, when he sat next to a water engineer from the Woodard & Curran engineering firm on an airplane flight.

“We got to talking, and I said I was an architect, and my dream forever was to spend time designing better health care facilities for Third World countries,” Sachs said.

The engineer mentioned that her boss, Hugh Tozer, worked with Konbit Sante, a Portland-based nonprofit that has been working for about a decade with Justinian Hospital in Cap Haitien, in northern Haiti.

Sachs connected with Tozer, and he soon began working with the nonprofit, studying building plans for the hospital. He worked with Konbit Sante’s executive director, Nate Nickerson, and with doctors and others who had spent time at the hospital over the years.

Click on the link for the rest of today’s story by Matt Wickenheiser of the Portland Press Herald.

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Mainer gathers data to help Haitians who lost limbs

Posted on February 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Though he had seen the streets of Bosnia and Iraq as a soldier, the devastation in Haiti was unlike anything Adam Cote of Portland had ever encountered.

“I had seen the pictures, but to get that 90-degree perspective from pictures doesn’t really prepare you,” Cote said. “It was really staggering. The amount of damage, from a structural perspective, was similar to pictures you see of Berlin after World War II.”

Cote was in Haiti for more than a week with Global Relief Technologies to collect data on amputees who need artificial limbs and on the structural integrity of buildings in the wake of the earthquake.

“I’ve never seen so many casualties,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many overflowing hospitals.”

Click on the link for the rest of today’s story by Justin Ellis of the Portland Press Herald.

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Church congregation assembles hygiene kits for Haitians

Posted on February 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

Church congregation assembles hygiene kits for Haitians

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Children welcomed home

Posted on February 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

PITTSFIELD — “I love that everybody loves them so much already.”

Amanda Logiodice said this Sunday afternoon as she and her husband, Jediah, marveled at the scene inside the local Elks Lodge: About 50 people came together with food, gifts and well wishes for the Logiodices’ two newest family members.

David, 1, and Christella, 5, came from the His Home for Children orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and are now the family’s adopted children. They join the Logiodices’ three biological children: Donavan, 8, Braeden, 5, and Bella, 4.

In the aftermath of the massive earthquake there, the Logiodices were able to secure an emergency evacuation of the two children to the U.S., flying down to Miami a little over a week ago and returning home here on Wednesday. They had started the adoption process more than a year ago.

Sunday’s public celebration was organized by members of the First Baptist Church, of which the Logiodices are members, and the Elks donated their space for the occasion. Church member Liana Walker, of Troy, said the event was meant to show support and to welcome to two Haitian children into the community.

Walker said it’s remarkable the adoption worked out as it did, given the chaotic aftermath of the earthquake. Church families had already rallied community support for the Logiodices, sending them supplies and assistance so they could make the trip to Miami.

“It’s awesome; it’s truly a miracle they could get the children out,” Walker said.

Click on the link to the rest of today’s story by Scott Monroe in the Kennebec Journal.

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Lewiston pastors tour Haiti

Posted on January 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

They drove the streets of Port-au-Prince, past rows of collapsed buildings and rescue teams. On one pancaked structure that used to be four or five stories high, a man stood alone on the tall pile of rubble with a hack saw, cutting away at rebar.

Maybe someone was still inside. Maybe everything he owned was in there.

“It was a bit surreal,” said Phil Strout, a pastor at Pathway Vineyard Church in Lewiston. “You see the pain, and then you see the human spirit and willingness to help.”

Strout and fellow pastor Allen Austin traveled to the Dominican Republic on Jan. 17 to offer support to Vineyard churches and toured neighboring Haiti seven days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince. Austin got home last weekend; Strout returned Wednesday night, after a stop in Miami. One takeaway that they’ve reported back to national church leadership: The devastation is 10 times worse than it looks on TV.

Click this link to read the rest of this story by Kathryn Skelton of the Lewiston Sun Journal.

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Haitian children adjusting to a whole new life in Maine

Posted on January 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

Pittsfield couple says becoming

adopted parents is not too different

from births of their biological children

PITTSFIELD, Maine — The Logiodice household, with its five children, is about what you’d expect.

The four oldest — Donovan, 8, Braeden, 5, Christella, 5, and Bella, 4 — jump around and screech as they collaborate to keep half-deflated balloons off the floor. They knock a picture off the wall and Mom steps in.

“All right, guys, calm down,” says Amanda Logiodice patiently, shooing the balloons into a bedroom. A few minutes later Donovan and Braeden are at it again. “If you don’t stop I’m going to take this balloon outside and let it go,” says Mom, more firmly this time.

“Noooo!” cries Bella.

The girls are dressed in princess costumes; the boys pile a few dozen stuffed animals on the living room floor. One-year-old Jediah Junior toddles around in a constant quest to be held. Once held, even by a stranger, his kisses are free and plentiful.

But what seems like a common scene is not. Three of the siblings just met the other two on Wednesday. A week ago, Christella and Jediah Junior were in southern Haiti, where their orphanage crumbled around them in the terrible earthquake that struck on Jan. 12. They ate rationed meals of rice and water only twice a day. They lived among human corpses and all the other tragedy that is life today in southern Haiti.

Click on the link for the rest of the story by Christopher Cousins of the Bangor Daily News.

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Former resident expands services in Haiti to house 100 children orphaned by earthquake

Posted on January 27, 2010 | Leave a comment

Here’s the top of a story in the Lewiston Sun Journal about a former Lewiston, Maine, resident who was helping orphaned Haitian children. A link to the rest of the story is below.

Again, there was no byline attached to the story or I would have included that information.

The Rev. Marc Boisvert was already making an impact in Haiti before the earthquake felt around the world rocked the small island south of Cuba.

On Tuesday, the former Lewiston resident’s impact grew deeper when his orphanage, known as Project Hope, announced that the facility would take in another 100 children orphaned as a result of the nation’s deadliest natural disaster in history.

“With our staff of 250 and over 140 acres, we have the capacity to handle the extra children left helpless because of this devastation,” Boisvert said in a press release issued Tuesday by Free the Kids, a stateside nonprofit organization that helps raise money for the Les Cayes orphanage.

Click here for the rest of the story.

For more information: www.freethekids.org.

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Mainers help water flow to Haitians | Portland Press Herald

Posted on January 15, 2010 | 1 comment

 Mainers help water flow to Haitians | Portland Press Herald.

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Posted in Environment, Maine, News and Newspapers

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