GSF responds to coronavirus

With most of the world in quarantine at home, we want to keep you informed about GSF’s little world in Haiti, and what we are doing (while we can)!

Haiti went into lockdown very early [19 March] when they discovered only 2 cases of coronavirus. It was extremely sudden, in fact schools had only an hour or so notice before the end of the school day, that all schools were immediately closed. So our efforts begun on the 17th to prepare for a possible closure, were mostly pre-empted. There are no cases in the Les Cayes or on Île à Vache to date. However both schools are closed by law.

As you know, there isn’t any way to continue classes online or even by radio and television in rural Haiti.

Note that most schools on the mainland were shut down all through the fall by the political situation and riots, so they had only had 2 months of school, since mid-January… so it appears very unlikely that this year will have exams and graduate classes even by September at this point.

In the last week we made the decision to continue all salaries until the end of June as is normal, when teacher and staff contracts expire, regardless of the staff’s inability to work. We also needed to find a way to use up the month’s food in our La Hatte school depot, and this is being achieved by continuing to cook this week and serve school meals for the children to either eat while sitting very widely spaced in small groups or take home in their own containers. This means 120 or more children have been fed for an extra 2 weeks. Other children have not been sent to eat, because of fears of contagion or the distance they need to walk.

We are currently coming up with a plan to use the already budgeted school lunch money over the next three months, to provide bags of dry foodstuffs and our eggs, to the children to take home. This is going to be more expensive than cooking school meals, plus we would like to add soap and bleach to the distributions - but in these uncertain times we cannot go beyond the budget unless we have firm commitments of help and funding in place - so it’s very difficult to see what would be best.

At the moment we are not planning to purchase pharmaceuticals other than the masks and gloves worn by the kitchen staff. This is because as a non-medical charity we cannot prescribe or control the use of OTC drugs adequately, and we put our staff at risk of contagion if it is known that they have stocks of paracetamol etc. to dispense.

We feel our energies are better used to maintain the nutritional status of the children in or charge as much as we can, and we hope for your support to that end.

—Mandy