Public Announcement about Embrace Relief Medical Center in Haiti
To all our donors and to the Haitian Public and the Government:
Embrace Relief has been working to operate a hospital in Croix des Bouquets, Haiti, for more than one year, but has experienced several problems with obtaining imperative paperwork and waiting for crucial materials to operate the hospital. Although we have done everything possible to make this project a success, we cannot continue to fulfill our obligations due to the problems we have faced. Therefore, Embrace Relief decided to end our medical center project in Haiti.
Our Efforts:
- Embrace Relief prepared a new webpage for the Haiti Hospital Project along with 3D drawings and a leaflet explaining the project.
- Signed an agreement with Project Cure (a member of InterAction) for all medical equipment and worked with doctors to finalize the list of equipment.
- Contacted the Minister of Health of Haiti to sign a protocol to operate the hospital and get customs clearance. We received verbal confirmation, but we did not receive any written documentation.
- We have had a bad experience in the past with the Minister of Health due to the fact that they could not get our relief items from customs. We had to abandon one container full of medical items in customs because we had waited for customs clearance for 6 months and eventually they expired.
- We agreed to work with MedShare to have them supply medicine for the hospital.
- We sent doctors to analyze the country’s health problems.
- Embrace Relief hired an advisor to help solve the problems that we had experienced while attempting to operate the hospital to no avail. He was unable to help us in the 5 months we worked with him.
- Embrace Relief applied to USAID twice, but due to recent grant cuts, we were unable to get the money we needed to continue with the Hospital Project.
