While Haiti is full of beautiful people, it also is full of complex problems. At times, ministry can be discouraging here as the complications continue to stack one on top of another. Systemic problems within Haiti’s infrastructure, economy, and political arena coupled with other global realities give the impression that a lot of these problems will linger for a long time.

Which is precisely why this is such a thrilling post for us to write! A decade ago, on the heels of a catastrophic earthquake, a cholera epidemic swept like wild fire through our region of Haiti. Cholera is a deadly bacteria that produces severe watery diarrhea and vomiting that causes severe dehydration that can lead to coma and death. We are grateful to our staff and several other organizations that scrambled to rise to the occasion of another crisis despite being already exhausted from months of Earthquake relief work. Ten years of challenging work was not easy, but it was not in vain.

Overall, we treated 13,637 cholera patients in our community, and by the grace of God and grit of our staff, we only lost 38 patients, leaving us with facility mortality rate of 0.2%. Across the nation of Haiti, there were 819,000 patients treated and a total of 9,789 deaths, for a national mortality rate of 1.2%. We received our fist patient on November 9, 2010 and closed our program November 28, 2020.

The highest amount of new patients we had in one day was 58, and the highest number of inpatients we had at one time was 113. The average patient stay was 2.5 nights until they were ready for discharge home. Our staffing would fluctuate based on the number of patients, with 1 nurse and 2 helpers for every 25 patients, this was in addition to support staff that would monitor the gate, clean/ laundry, and serve as reception/ triage.

Here is a post from Licia during the very first month of the outbreak. It is hard to describe how critical and how horrible some of the patients appeared when they showed up and how quickly some IV fluids and excellent medical care would help them recover. Once I received a call from Lori to take a nurse to go meet a patient on the road. We met him riding between his wife and a motorcycle driver, unconscious, his wife holding him up by his ears! Our nurse put two lines in him, squeezed a couple of bags of IV fluids in him, and within 3 minutes of being unconscious, he was climbing into the back of our truck to go finish recovering at the CTC!

I will add some links at the end of the post if you would like to go more in depth on the history and development of our cholera program and facility. After using a private house the first few years of our cholera program, we built our own cholera treatment center, which has been a tremendous blessing since opening in 2013. We now have a massive structure that is not currently being used, but dreams are currently being developed on how we can re-purpose that space to increase our impact and effectiveness in our community.

Please pray for us as we finalize these plans and begin to communicate the vision in the weeks and months to come. So many of you have been praying and supporting us since before Cholera came to Haiti, and we are humbled to be able to say your prayers have been answered, you investments have worked, and cholera is no longer a threat to those living in our community.

Thanks to our supporters and staff who helped ensure the effectiveness of this program over the years, and thanks be to God forever!

Community Health Care Educators on Cholera Prevention

Summary of year 1 of Cholera Treatment Program (Recognizes many partnering organizations)

Summary of year 5 of Cholera Treatment Program

Summary of Cholera Treatment Program in 2019

Beginning Construction on CTC

Midway on Construction of CTC

Construction of CTC Complete

CTC Dedication