Companions in the World: Living the Vows in Haiti

By Janet O’Flynn, Far and Near Chapter

SCHC Companions commit themselves to work for social justice. For me, this work has meant the adventure of a lifetime. Here’s how it started.

I am a pediatric occupational therapist, and my husband, Donnel, is an Episcopal priest. In 1997, Donnel visited St. Vincent’s Center for children with disabilities in Haiti during a partnership trip with the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, and strongly recommended that I go to see the positive interactions of all kinds of people at St. Vincent’s. What a wonderful place! I visited and returned over the next decade or more, but with an increasing sense of the inadequacy of such visits by foreigners. So very much more could happen for the children and young adults if they could work with Haitian occupational and physical therapists, but there was no school of occupational therapy (OT) or physical therapy (PT) in Haiti.

Here’s what we did about it. In 2011, on a visit in the company of a pioneering nurse from Connecticut, Hope Lennartz, we received permission from Mme. Hilda Alcindor, dean of the excellent nursing school at the Episcopal University of Haiti to open two bachelor’s degree programs within the nursing school, one in OT and one in PT. When we got back home, I realized I didn’t know how to do that! However, I found an online doctoral program in OT at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul, Minnesota, led by Dr Kate Barrett, who has a lifetime of interest in Haiti. I studied for the doctorate for three years, while working at my job in the public school in Hamilton, New York, to learn about program development and to build a network. My husband and I invited our friends to form a US nonprofit organization to raise funds: the Haiti Rehabilitation Foundation (HRF), which now has a 16-member board. We did a search for a Haitian American or Haitian Canadian dean for the program. However, when the OT doctoral program was done, and the time came for the launch, we had not found the right dean. I was severely disappointed but resigned to letting it go, but Donnel said, “Why don’t I retire, and we can both move there?” Which we did, in August of 2015.

Here’s what has happened since the school opened: The story of the program, FSRL (Faculté des Sciences de Réhabilitation de Léogâne) has had many chapters since then, as the world has gone through COVID and Haiti has experienced hurricanes and earthquakes, a chaotic political situation, and increasing gang violence. Haiti is not yet back in a calm and orderly place; it will recover, for sure, as it has always done. I returned home to live in Montana in March 2020, when COVID hit us, but I have continued working as “dean-at-a-distance.”

During the past nine years, the OTs of Haiti founded the Haitian OT Association. That association, working with the Haitian PT Association and with an international NGO, has begun the process of petitioning the government for recognition of these professions. There have been 25 graduates, of whom six are completing their master’s degrees in Quebec, so that they can teach at FSRL. Two of those graduates have just accepted jobs at FSRL as program coordinators, one for OT and one for PT. We have an excellent Haitian vice-dean on the campus who is an educator with a master’s in higher education administration. An OT professor in Quebec is leading the effort to establish a master’s in rehab sciences at the Episcopal University of Haiti, which will accept OTs, PTs, and nurses, to assure academic support for the bachelor’s programs. With all of these life-giving developments, my retirement as dean is coming into view.

The fruitfulness of this rehab program for social justice related to this work has been a revelation. Young people in Haiti are graduating in Haiti and entering the workforce as well – qualified experts in the field of rehabilitation. Some are clinic directors already, or working for NGOs, or have opened their own clinics. And their patients? There are people who would have been isolated with a physical or mental condition that is now addressed by a Haitian OT and PT to allow them to return to their full life. There are children with situations that have kept them out of school who are now in school. There are young people with mental illness who were at risk for suicide who are going to be OK. People in Haiti living with conditions of disability had few options: often the only option was to stay in isolation, confined to home.

When I think of what the Haitian OTs and PTs are doing, it reminds me of the words of Jesus when he raised Lazarus. He said, “Unbind him and let him go.” The new therapists are providing freedom and restoring people to their families, their work, their society.