2015 Haiti Mission

2015 July

Dr. Shu shares a passion with Dr. Doug Stein in Tampa, FL, promoting and providing no scalpel vasectomy (NSV) services worldwide. He joined the international team in the Haiti medical mission in July 2015.

Thanks to the opening of the expanded runway at the Cap Haitian Airport, there is now jet service to Northern Haiti from Miami. The vasectomy team served three locations: the Uls Sante Clinic in Ft. Bourgeois, the town of Plaisance, and the Ft. St. Michel Health Center in Cap Haitian. About 90 vasectomies were performed.

Here are some of the daily notes Dr. Shu wrote:
As we flew over the Caribbean Sea towards the island of Hispaniola shared by Haiti and Dominic Republic, we were astonished by the beauty of the ocean beneath our plane. It looks like an idyllic pearl surrounded by pure blue beauty. As we got closer, we saw the mountain ranges whose cliffs cascade abruptly into an azure colored ocean. It is an unforgettable sense of tropical beauty.

Left to right: Drs Stein, Monteith, Shu, Suarez.

Left to right: Drs Suarez, Shu, Stein, Monteith.

The Haiti mission is much more challenging than the Philippine mission because of the poor economy with a high unemployment rate, poor public infrastructure, and an under-developed health care system.

NSVI has established a Domestic Program in Northern Haiti as it has done in the Philippines. The Haitian government has made family planning a national priority, and should be very receptive to the help offered by NSVI. This mission (1) provided more hands-on training for local doctors, (2) provided more instruments and supplies for local doctor to perform vasectomies, and (3) fine-tuned the logistics for ongoing financial support of the Domestic Vasectomy Program in Haiti.

In Ft. Bourgeois and Ft. St. Michel, Dr.Shu trained the local Haitian doctor, Dr. Muriel Pothel.

… Dr. Shu and Dr. Pothel poses with a happy patient.

Please feel free to steer a few of your philanthropic dollars toward NSVI. You probably already give to other organizations with top-heavy administrations who are strangers to you. What better gesture than to donate $45 to help a poor Haitian man (1) reduce his overhead, (2) reduce the risk to his partner of another unintended pregnancy, (3) more successfully nurture fewer children, and (4) reduce overcrowding in a small country whose environment has already been stripped of many resources by a population of over 10,000,000.