Robenson Gedeus and Cassidy Camille talked with our staff via Zoom about how the COVID-19 virus is affecting already-vulnerable Haiti. Robenson, the village director, spoke to us from Haiti. Cassidy called in from the US, where she is on furlough.
The Children’s Village in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, is a compound where orphaned and vulnerable children live with house parents. The primary school serves these children and many from the community nearby. The trade school equips post-secondary young adults for employment. Long before the pandemic, the economy in Haiti had been devastated - unemployment is near 80-percent - by still-unresolved damage from natural disasters, political unrest, and corruption.
After the lockdown from March 20 to April 20, people say, “No people passed away. There is no corona.” So life has gone 90-percent back to normal. We have not hit the peak of the pandemic yet in Haiti. We only have a few labs to do testing, and hospitals do not have equipment so most don’t take corona patients. Only about 5-percent of people wear masks, and if you wear a mask, they laugh at you. But when people do get sick, they get threatened. Families are threatened. There has been violence and houses burned. So people, when they get sick, they say la fièvre; “It’s a little fever.” The symptoms are all the same, but they call it something else.
Robenson and Cassidy explain the economic devastation in Haiti.
We shared information with the children in the Children’s Village before everything shutdown. We have electricity all the time because of solar power. In Cap-Haitien, there are maybe 3 hours of electricity a week. So the kids have been using the sewing machines we have for the trade school to make masks for themselves and the “community families,” families of school students that live outside the compound.
Food prices are going up again. We buy what we can where we can in bulk and bring it here to the compound so house mommies only have to go to the market once a month instead of every week. On Fridays at 11a, the community families come to the school to receive a package of food – rice, spaghetti, oil – for the week. It covers a big expense for them and helps so much.
This is our normal chapel service time that we always invite the families too, even before corona. So we take the opportunity to pray with them, sing together, and evangelize. Once a month, we give homework for the kids with the food package. Schools are still closed. When we have the chance to reopen, the kids will not have lost the school year. We can resume, review everything, and have a test. [Haitian students had already lost 3 months of school in the fall to lockdown due to unrest.] Maybe September we can reopen. The government thinks if they reopen schools in September and give 2 months for review and then testing, then the new school year can start in January.
Prayer requests for Haiti Children’s Village.
Here’s how you can pray for the children, house parents, and community families at the Children’s Village as well as Robenson and his team:
Kids Alive staff and children that they would be protected from getting sick from the coronavirus. The residential kids live in group homes of 7-10 kids, with house parents, which means that a virus can spread very quickly and quarantining sick individuals would be a challenge.
Pray for Haiti that people would take the virus seriously.
Pray for all the donors that God would guide them and keep them safe.
The Children’s Village is on Facebook as Kids Alive Haiti. Visit to see more about what they do and how.
