24264: Hermantin( News)Local film chronicles Haiti's healthcare crisis (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Thu, Feb. 10, 2005


MIAMI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Local film chronicles Haiti's healthcare crisis
A Miami Beach philanthropist's documentary examines the medical crisis in
Haiti. Despite the grim statistics, the film argues there is a ray of hope.
BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@herald.com

Her first encounter with Haiti's inadequate healthcare came in a remote
rural village where even curable maladies like diarrhea, malnutrition and
tuberculosis kill.

Miami Beach philanthropist Kimberly Green became inspired as she filmed a
group of Haitian-American doctors from Miami treat everything from the
common cold to HIV/AIDS in a country where 60 percent of the eight million
people do not have drinkable water.

''I fell in love with what they were doing,'' said Green, 33, the president
of the Green Family Foundation, who spent three years making a documentary
about Haiti's healthcare crisis that will premier tonight during the 22nd
Miami International Film Festival.

TAKING THE TIME

``Seeing doctors who otherwise are living in one of the most vain cities in
the country, who could be making a living off plastic surgeries, take time
out of their lives to participate in this project was amazing.''

The film, Once There was a Country: Revisiting Haiti, chronicles the
healthcare plight of Haitian peasants in a country beset by poverty and
political strife. Among them are the Sonsons, a family of eight who are
suffering from crippling tuberculosis, and LaRochelle, a young Haitian man
ostracized by his family after they learned he was HIV-positive.

Through their experiences, the 55-minute English- and Creole-language film
examines the challenges Haitians in villages like Thomonde, a dirt road town
in the central plateau region, face as they struggle to get medical care.

It looks at how Vodun has become an integral role in Haitian life -- and a
substitute for medical care -- and how poverty affects recovery in a country
where there is just one doctor for every 10,000 residents.

`I HAVE TO BEG'

''I'm so depressed. I am so young. I have to beg,'' LaRochelle says in the
film, which is narrated by poet and author Maya Angelou and her son, Guy
Johnson.

As they narrate LaRochelle's plight, both also tell the story of countless
sick Haitians whose road to a healthy recovery is often threatened by their
need to travel to places like the neighboring Dominican Republic to cut
sugar cane to earn money to eat.

''Even the best medical facilities in the world are not sufficient without
paying attention to people's social conditions,'' Johnson says.

But there is hope, the film argues, in programs like Project Medishare, a
medical mission affiliated with the University of Miami that takes medical
students and doctors to Thomonde.

''One voice, one person can help others make a difference,'' said Green,
whose foundation began funding Project Medishare shortly after she started
working on the documentary. ``Haiti is not an isolated incident, and yet the
specifics of it are so important to realize.''