It’s been a very festive week in Haiti.
We started the week off with one of our favorite holiday traditions: a food distribution for our community here in Cap Haitien.
For the past several years, the Second Mile Haiti staff have prepared a holiday meal kit for 750 of our neighbors.
This year, the kits held rice, pigeon peas, spices, cooking oil, and drinks!
Since we’re still conserving fuel, the meal kits were delivered on foot with the help of wheelbarrows.
The following day our team in Saint Raphaël did their own distribution with meals for another 750 people— for the first time.
In total,1,500 special people received a special, holiday meal.
We are so grateful you make this type of impact possible.
On Thursday, we welcomed 60+ at each of our Maternity Centers for the final prenatal education class of 2022.
They discussed two of the main causes of complications in pregnancy: high blood pressure and anemia—talking in depth about which foods add iron to the diet and how to recognize the signs of preeclampsia.
The week’s topic was serious, but the mood was jovial and light!
We ended the day with our annual staff party.
It’s a long running tradition in Cap Haitien. But this will be the first year that we celebrate in two locations.
In fact, the team in Saint-Raphaël is setting up for their party as we speak.
From year to year, many of the traditions remain the same—the games, the music, the dancing, and the menu…
But the number of people that fill the seats seems to keep growing and growing.
(And this is just half of the staff!)
In a truly challenging year, this team did it all.
They cared for 241 acutely malnourished children and started hundreds of gardens so that parents would have food to feed their babies.
They gave more than 3,100 women access to prenatal and postnatal care and family planning services.
They labored with 692 women (and their support people) through the joys and challenges of birth.
And they worked to make blood, oxygen, and clean water more accessible to the masses—delivering water filters to 600 households.
And though food scarcity, armed gangs, and a cholera outbreak threatened everyone, they took care of their own mental health and supported one another.
We are so proud to have these 60 individuals at the heart of the Second Mile family.
As we look towards 2023, we want to thank you for your support this year.
The Holiday Catalog donations, the monthly donations, and the checks you send—make this work possible.
Today, we are $22,936 short of our end of the year target.
We need your help.
If you can, consider a donation to help us continue to serve the most vulnerable in Haiti today and into the new year.
❤️
from Haiti