A massive earthquake put Haiti in the world spotlight earlier this year. Now, a cholera outbreak looms. Through Mission Manna, a dedicated crew of Ashevilleans have been reaching out to Haitians for a decade.

by Cassady Sharp . photos by David Bourne

Chris Rhoades felt she was mentally in Haiti well before she visited the country in October. But for all her pre-trip visions, nothing could prepare her for the images that would live in her mind for weeks after she returned: worm-infected children whose bellies were distended and swollen; people whose hair had an orange-ish tint because they were so malnourished.

Rhoades, a former OB/GYN nurse at Mission Hospital, first visited Haiti this fall with Mission Manna, an Asheville-based nonprofit that provides medical treatment and health education for Haitians living near the town of Montrouis. When a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck near Haiti’s capitol, Port-au-Prince, in January, world aid organizations, military groups and TV cameras poured into the country. But Mission Manna, founded in 2001, has been taking a team of Western North Carolina doctors, nurses and helping hands to Haiti biannually for nearly ten years now. They often go to Montrouis, about 50 miles from the capitol, and the team consists of around a dozen volunteers who stay for eight days and pay for their own airfare and hotel rooms. They drive cars piled with supplies down narrow backroads and hike into remote areas with medical equipment. “In a way, [this work] has nothing to do with the earthquake,” Rhoades says. “There are issues that are bigger than the earthquake there. The earthquake is the unfortunate rotten cherry on top.”

One of those issues is basic public health, and Mission Manna has hired Haitian community health workers to check in on patients after the crew heads back to WNC. The group was founded by Ashevilleans Maggie Vital-Lozier and Nancy Davis, who started working with Haitian health worker Jean Robert Dorsainvil in the late ‘90s. Dorsainvil was overseeing family planning and vaccination clinics around Montrouis, his hometown, and the two women got more and more invested in helping out after several trips to the area.

Now, the nonprofit, which runs entirely on donations, has also started working with Haitians on sustainable agriculture projects like raising goats or creating tilapia farms. One of the three Haitians currently employed by Mission Manna is called “the goat man” because he tends to goats and assists families in raising them.

Rhoades, whose children are 5 and 2, describes the October trip as “life-affirming.” But there were also painful moments—like when she visited St. Mark’s hospital shortly before the mid-October cholera outbreak. Small children were clustered in a room in metal cribs. Their IVs of glucose water clearly needed to be changed. “I remember one baby with a distant gaze breathing so heavily,” she says. “I will never forget that image.”

Despite these sorrowful instances, the Haitians’ warmth and their dire need for medical care, is gripping. Mission Manna volunteer Shearon Roberts will make her third trip in March 2011. “I was apprehensive about how I was going to help,” says Roberts, a genetics counselor at Mission Hospital. “You go to that first clinic and you see these moms who have been waiting since before the sun came up,” she says. “[They] will wait all day in the hot sun until their children are seen. That first day, I was hooked.”

A theme arises when speaking with Mission Manna volunteers who have visited Haiti: they would go back tomorrow if they could. Rhoades will return to Haiti in fall 2011. When her children were born, Rhoades took a break from nursing, but the work in Haiti has made her want to dust off her stethoscope. She’ll be getting back into the healthcare field soon, and she plans to pursue a master’s degree in public health.

Although not a medical nurse, Roberts says she’s learned enough Haitian Creole to advise Haitians on how to take their medication. She’s also become an “expert wormer,” treating children with de-worming medication. Rhoades notes that, although Mission Manna volunteers sometimes get dysentery from dirty water and treat themselves with antibiotics, so far no one has become seriously ill. Even a widespread cholera outbreak in Haiti, which made news headlines in mid-November, did not seem to deter volunteers. “When you interact with these people on the most basic human elements, they are smiling and thankful,” Rhoades says. “There is so much love within these families.”

Mission Manna will hold a fundraiser December 28 at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Hendersonville with live music and a presentation on Haiti. All proceeds go directly to medical supplies and sustainable nutrition programs for Haitians. Call 828-696-9969 or visit www.missionmanna.org for more information.