Here we go again!

NOVA Hope for Haiti is sending our 11th medical mission to Haiti tomorrow. In partnership with the Church of the Presentation in Upper Saddle River, NJ, we are sending a team of 26 doctors, nurses, translators and support volunteers to open an emergency care clinic for 7 days in Cavaillon, Haiti.

The bins are packed with supplies, the texts, emails, and phone calls are flying between team members in New York, New Jersey, Miami and Port au Prince. The team is exited. The vehicles are rented, the medicines are in Port au Prince (athough some are stills stuck in customs, yet again... par for the course!) and the Aldy Hotel is waiting for our arrival.

Tomorrow we will fly to Port au Prince, retrieve our supplies in the madhouse that is the new temporary airport, fight our way through an army of redcaps, to load up our truck, and board our busses for the 5 hour drive to Aquin.

Then on Sunday, we will get a nice early start. For those team members who want to go to Church we will try to make it to Mass in Cavaillon, and then we'll be off to the community center behind Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church which we will tranform into a top notch clinic. Sheets will hang to create examination rooms, the stage will serve as the pharmacy, chairs will be staged for waiting patients, our paperwork will be organized at check in, and we will be ready to open our doors for the hundreds of waiting patients who will inevitably appear Monday morning. We hope to see about 1,500 patients again this coming week.

The days will be hot and long, but the comradery in the evenings refreshes our tireless volunteers and helps them get ready for the next hot day of great work.

To all of our donors who make these missions possible: you are part of this team, you are providing medical care where there is none, and I thank you.

And to all friends of NOVA Hope for Haiti, please keep our team in your prayers as we travel to Haiti this week, and the people of Haiti also, who continue to struggle against incredibly poverty.

Thank you,

-Joe

NOVA building project moving ahead

Last week, Charles Kordula and Joseph Nuzzi flew to Haiti for a two day meeting with Sam Moschelli, an architect from Shelter2Home to finalize updated designs for buildings that will comprise NOVA's health center in Cavaillon, Haiti. The meetings went extremely well. Mr. Moschelli surveyed the property, took some more measurements and met with us for hours to discuss in detail the purpose and design of each of the proposed buildings. He went immediately to work, and before our second day of meetings on Friday he already had preliminary drawings done and a suggested layout for the property.



Shelter2Home is now drawing up the buildings that we discussed, and providing us with final building costs for the four buildings that will make up the complex. This is a very exciting time for NOVA. The images attached are initial drawings that were drawn up a few years ago, and while they will change somewhat, they give an idea of what the future holds for NOVA in Cavaillon.



What are the four buildings? What will they be used for?

NOVA's building project reflects our mission and our goal to increase the health care we provide in the region. Below are the buildings in the order in which we will construct them:

1) Multipurpose building - This will be a two story open structure. The first floor will contain our pharmacy which will be large enough to store medicines, house a refrigerator for medicines needing refrigeration, and ample working room; a half bath and a large open space which can be sub-divided with temporary, movable dividers and used as our preliminary clinic and to host our medical missions. The second floor will have two full baths, and a large open space which can also be divided for temporary clinic space, can be used to host a small number of volunteers until our volunteer housing is built, and can be used for health education classes for adults and teens. The open floor plan of this building is flexible and makes it ideal as a first building that can be used at different times for different purposes. In the future, when the clinic proper is built, this will function as our education center and overflow clinic when large volunteer medical teams are in Cavaillon.

2) The Staff and Volunteer Residence - NOVA plans on hiring a small staff of Haitian medical professionals to provide medical care all year and supplement this care with more frequent volunteer medical missions from the US. This building will be a residence for both permanent staff and temporary volunteers. It will house up to 30 people comfortably with a full bath in each room. Volunteers will be 2 to 3 people to a room, while staff will each have their own room. This building will immensely change our volunteer missions to Haiti by eliminating a two hour daily commute for upwards of 26 volunteers and enable us to spend more time in the evenings in Cavaillon building relationships with the people in town. It will make logistics much easier and therefore enable us to more easily host volunteers interested in working with us in Haiti.

3) Dining Pavilion - Essentially this is part of the Staff and Volunteer Residence. The residence will not contain a kitchen. This pavilion will contain an ample kitchen big enough to cook for a large volunteer team, a pantry and a storage room. It will also consist of a very large covered patio open on 3 sides which will function as a dining area. The warm climate in Haiti gives us the ability to build this as an open area without having to enclose it. This large patio will also give volunteers a place to relax after a long, hard day's work, and will give us another place to host meetings, provide health education, etc. The dining pavilion and the residence must be built at the same time since both are needed to host staff and volunteers.

4) The NOVA clinic - This final building to be built is a full blown, proper clinic, which a reception area, a nursing station, a small pharmacy, exam rooms, and X-Ray room, etc. Here is where our permanent staff will ultimately work. This clinic will eventually be open all year and supplemented by volunteers from the states. This will be the last building built because the multipurpose building, while not ideal, will give us flexibility and allow us to begin providing ongoing care while we raise the funds for the whole complex.


Once complete, NOVA's complex will allow us to provide care to children and adults in Haiti who have absolutely no access to medical care. It will allow us to easily, safely and comfortable host volunteers from the US more frequently than our bi-annual missions, and it will allow us to develop more fully the educational component which has become all the more vital in Haiti since the outbreak of cholera in Haiti.

Building this complex will mean a quantum leap in the depth and reach of the care NOVA can provide and it will make a profound difference in the quality of life for whole communities in the south of Haiti.

It is an exiting time for NOVA, but we need your help. We are waiting for the final prices on these buildings but we expect the whole project to cost somewhere between $600,000 and $700,000.00. We have already raised the money to build the first building and we will begin construction sometime in March.

We need your help to build the rest. Please consider donating toward the building project. Together we can make a long-lasting and significant difference in the lives of people who live difficult lives which are compounded by their lack of any medical care. If you can, please help us make this dream a reality.

One year anniversary of the earthquake

As the board of directors continues to plan for the construction of our permanent medical facility in Cavaillon, Haiti, and as the Medical Mission team of volunteers plans our next medical mission in March 2011, we also remember with great sadness the tragic losses caused by the earthquake one year ago today. The news is full of what hasn't been done yet in Haiti: rubble still remains where it fell in many places, buildings have yet to be rebuilt, tent camps stretch for miles with no plan to move to more permanent shelter. But at NOVA we remain hopeful and committed to a brighter future in Haiti. The buildings will be rebuilt, roads will be improved, schools will be opened, and the sick will be cared for.


But the lives that were lost cannot be recovered. The lost we remember and commend to God who alone can overcome the destruction of death.

It's tempting on a day like today to want to throw in the towel and declare Haiti a lost cause. But it took great strength and resilience to just survive these past 12 months and the people of Haiti have again displayed that fortitude. Yet they still need our help. At NOVA we are not giving up and we are not throwing in the towel. Haiti has a long and proud history and we remain committed to our mission to help our friends in Haiti with much needed medical care. We thank our volunteers, our financial supporters and our friends for all of the encouragement and support you have given over the last 7 years. We thank you for not giving up either.