NEIL MACDONALD:
A 'pure heart' in Haiti cares for country's forgotten children
March 3, 2006 | More from Neil MacDonald
A 15-year veteran of CBC Television News, Neil Macdonald is currently THE NATIONAL's Washington correspondent. Macdonald joined CBC News in 1988. He was initially assigned to Parliament Hill, where, between Southam newspapers and THE NATIONAL, he would spend a combined total of a decade covering Parliament, reporting on five federal elections, and covering six prime ministers. Macdonald then reported from the Middle East for five years. Macdonald took up his post in Washington in March 2003. He speaks English and French fluently, and Arabic conversationally.
 Theresa
As she took form in her mother's belly, something twisted her feet into useless lumps of gristle and bone, flecked with a few toenails. It also fused the fingers on one hand together.
Then her mother, having given birth, took a look at her newborn girl and walked away.
In Haiti, a society so poor, so viciously hardscrabble that the term "Darwinian" barely begins to do it justice, Theresa would only act as a drag on her family's efforts to feed itself.
So, Theresa was sent to the room behind the locked door at the back of the pediatric unit in Port-au-Prince's general hospital. There, she was diapered and laid on her back, and left to gurgle and cry and generally add to the din created by her wardmates, many of whom arrived with even worse disabilities.
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Our World: Neil Macdonald reports on the clinic for CBC TV. [Real Video Runs 3:58]
There was the little girl with the baseball-sized tumour on her face, the blind, clearly retarded girl who wraps her arms fiercely around the legs of any stranger, the toddler whose maladies provoke him to shriek constantly, and, because there is only one woman tending these children, has to spend his time in a caged-in crib.
Children who go to the abandoned ward sometimes don't last very long. Theresa, just weeks old, could not have known how much more hopeless her future had just become.
 Michele Blaise
Blaise, having spent the last 29 years of her life driving a bus for a school board in New York state, had just retired. She took her savings and moved back to her native Haiti, which, despite its blights, had remained in her dreams.
In Port-au-Prince, she found a house, and joined a congregation, and that day, she says, God told her to go to the hospital after church.
So she did. And when she got there, she found Theresa.
"When He sent me there," says Blaise, "He told me, 'Look at that little girl, how she live, we can leave her like that?' And I said no, I take her to my house. And I take her to my house."
Blaise did not have the slightest idea how to care for a disabled child. But, she said she soon found out that aside from the obvious, the little girl was normal.
"I take her to the doctor, and I do everything medical for her, and I see she has no diseases, and I say 'Uh-uh, I'm not gonna let the rest die.' So I go back, and I tell them 'Why those kids die for no reason? They have no diseases.' And they tell me, 'Because we don't have nobody who need those kids because they are handicapped.'
"I say 'Oh, because they are handicapped they have to die? No. What can I do?' They tell me they don't have no room for them.
"So whatever little money I have, I come here and I rent this place, and I fix this place with what I have, and I take those kids and I put them here. And that is all I can do right now."
In other words, Madame Blaise is one of those astonishing pure hearts who can truly be described as selfless. She gives all she has, and then some — her money, even her life, which now consists solely of caring for a dozen very needy children.
So Blaise suddenly had an orphanage on her hands. But she's an amateur, and she knows it, so she reached out, looking for help.
 Gina Duncan with Theresa
Duncan, a former Montrealer, runs Healing Hands, an agency that makes prosthetics and provides rehabilitation for destitute amputees. It's the only agency providing such a service in Haiti, a place where amputations are fairly common.
Infections are the main cause, often blossoming from physical contact with the abundance of filth and raw sewage in these neighbourhoods.
Healing Hands, says Duncan, was "too happy" to help out. She gave Blaise some organizational help, showed her how to find a little charity money, and went to work on the children.
They persuaded a doctor to amputate one of Theresa's deformed feet. They plan to do the same to the other one soon. Then Theresa will get some prosthetic feet and some rehabilitation, and maybe some education. Eventually, they hope, she'll take her place in Haitian society.
 Theresa
Duncan hopes to have a rehab worker visit Blaise's new orphanage regularly. She sees other children here she believes can be salvaged, and redeemed, and given a productive life.
She's done it before.
"We have made a lot of difference in a lot of people's lives that were before not able to have any kind of respect or dignity in a society that completely excludes them," says Duncan.
And Duncan is more of a pro at this game than Blaise. She knows there's strong competition for charity dollars, and that small agencies like hers compete for attention with the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, who visited this year, and the former Playboy Playmate, Susie Krabacher, who makes high-profile trips here and compares herself to Mother Teresa. Not that their activism isn't appreciated, but they eclipse the little workers.
Duncan, choosing her words carefully, explains that Healing Hands doesn't divert one Haitian gourde to corrupt officials in order to ensure uninterrupted delivery of its supplies and operations.
And she isn't afraid to say it: she and Blaise do need money.
Gina Duncan currently has a request in for a grant from CIDA, Canada's foreign aid agency. The Canadian Embassy here is impressed with her work, and chances are good her application will succeed.
It would be hard to imagine a better use for the money.
In the abandoned ward at the central hospital, Dr. Jessie Colimon Adrien at first tries to tell a television crew they can't go in. After all this is a hospital, and there are rules, and then, clearly disgusted, the chief of medical services waves the foreigners through.
Perhaps a little publicity might do some good. God knows no one else gives a damn.
Not that she blames the parents who abandon the children.
"They are too much of a burden. [The parents] leave them, they are no longer visited, and after a few weeks, they are placed here," she says.
After ten minutes, she says she must close the locked door again.
Leaving the ward inspires shame in everyone, simply for not having done something. And the fact that the infants inside are not yet aware of their misery does nothing to lessen the guilt.
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