Couple makes trip of charity to Haiti

Where Janet and Eben Morrow are going, there are no quaint downtown cafes peddling grande lattes with steamed foam and lemon poppy seed muffins.

The North Garden couple are heading to Haiti, where food and money are nearly as scarce as doctors, where people shelter in flimsy homes and walk miles and work hours to earn their daily dollar.

They’re not taking a cheapskate’s vacation, however; they’re going to help. Specifically, they’re going to help retired Charlottesville pediatrician Raymond Ford at the Grison-Garde community’s Tovar Clinic and Robert Ford Haitian Orphanage and School.

Seasonal clinic

The clinic cranks up every January, April, July and twice in October when volunteer doctors and nurses arrive to treat various ailments of the populace, refer patients to local hospitals and generally help out. At the same time, folks help out at the school and orphanage, where children live, eat and learn on $800 a year.

“People in that community have little or nothing and, if you’ve never been to impoverished areas like this, you don’t know what poverty is,” Mr. Morrow said, sitting outside the Mudhouse coffee shop on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall.

“I was shocked the first time I went there,” said Mrs. Morrow. “The first time I was there, as I got off the airplane, I wasn’t sure which shack was the terminal. I don’t mean that to be insulting; the buildings are really shacks.”

The area is poor. It’s so poor that the government cannot afford to build or staff schools and relies on nongovernmental organizations known as NGOs to do so.

Seventy-eight percent of the population makes less than $2 a day, with more than half of the population living on less than a buck a day.

“There’s real poverty there,” Mr. Morrow said. “Kids play in the gutter because that’s all they’ve got. They don’t have much and they make do with very little.”

Mr. Morrow will assist at the medical clinic and Mrs. Morrow plans to help out both at the clinic and at the school.

The school consists of a 350-student primary class of kindergarten through eighth grade, and an 80-student school with grades nine through 12. Students get a meal during school days — something that started after educators found many coming to school hungry.

The school also provides some occupational training, including sewing. Due to a lack of reliable electricity, students learn on treadle sewing machines and ration cloth.

Cloth delivery

She’s arranged to send hundreds of yards of cloth and sewing materials, some bought and some donated by Charlottesville shops, including Mr. Hanks and The Needle Lady shops, to help students learn to sew.

“I have this idea that they can learn to sew scrubs and sell them to medical personnel,” she said. “It’d be a way to help raise some money for the school and the children.”

For Mr. Morrow, the school’s effort to be self-supporting, and the fact that the foundation that backs it has no overhead costs, are reasons to support it.

“The medical clinic is volunteer and everyone who goes there pays for their airfare and their food and their accommodations and gives their time for free,” Mr. Morrow said. “All the money that’s given to support the school, orphanage and clinic goes directly to the operations.”

Mrs. Morrow agrees, adding that local residents have backed the Haiti efforts with whole hearts.

“This community has been so supportive that Charlottesville should be a sister city to Grison-Garde,” she said. “I’m proud to be a part of it.”