Haiti & Health - news at UNC

Dear global public health and UNC community:

The Gillings School of Global Public Health has put together a website with links about the disaster in Haiti, relief organizations you can donate to, and other information. There is also a live Twitter feed you can view there. http://www.sph.unc.edu/disaster/earthquake_disaster_in_haiti_13371_8287.html.

http://www.sph.unc.edu/globalhealth/student_activities_in_haiti_13391_9308.html.

UNC Student's Experience in Haiti

Jennifer Nomides is a second year Master’s student in the Health Behavior and Health Education department. She has also completed three years of medical school at the UNC School of Medicine and will return to her fourth and final year in June upon completion of her MPH at the Gilling’s School of Global Public Health.  Her desire to work in developing countries began to grow long before the decision to pursue a career in medicine and public health but it was after two months spent in Haiti after her first year of medical school when this particular country captured her heart. Her first experience in Haiti was in the summer of 2006 through Family Health Ministries, Inc in Durham. She spent a couple of months working in rural Haiti, up in the mountains of Fondwa doing research for an infant nutrition program. Since then she has returned approximately twice a year to work with various organizations, churches and orphanages, focusing mostly on running mobile clinics and construction projects in orphanages in Jacmel and Carrefour, two of the most severely hit areas by the earthquake. Ultimately her career goal and life’s passion is to live and work in Haiti full time as a family medicine physician and public health practitioner following residency. She has been able to contact most of her friends and the people she has worked with over the past few years in Haiti and everyone is doing fine but the devastation to the buildings and land is indescribable and heartbreaking.

Faith and Love in Action (http://www.faithandloveinaction.org/) supports the orphanages Jennifer works with. In addition, Jennifer’s mother has established an online donation site if you are interested in contributing directly to the orphanages Jennifer works with: http://www.branchcreek.org/helphaiti/.

Our prayers, thoughts, and concern go out to our friends and colleagues and to the entire country affected by the earthquake and its aftermath.  It is a terrible tragedy.