Happy birthday to ITIAH Angels for Learning! On September 14th, the organization officially turns 5 years old. We are so incredibly proud of our achievements and the work we continue to do to support the children at the EML school. Between the 2022 to 2023 school year, we raised $20,000 towards the tuition for 100 students. To help these students continue safely attending school, we barricaded the windows to protect against stray bullets, installed solar panels, and purchased fans for the classroom. Additionally, we were able to provide the school with folding cots for the students to rest and sleep on when the streets are too dangerous to go home.
Knowing that we need to support the health and wellness of the students, we also accomplished 30 physical health exams for the children. These physicals revealed that many students had various gastro-infections and urinary tract infections, which allowed us to assess their needs and focus our efforts on disease prevention and treatment. We also sent 30 Sawyer Filters and 6 water purifiers delivered by the Joe Hurston Ministry. Regarding nutrition, food scarcity continues to greatly impact school attendance and the children’s ability to concentrate on learning. To aid in this problem, we partnered with the Haitian American Nurses Association (HANA) to organize a food drive and send a barrel of food. We are thrilled that these donations were successfully shipped to Haiti and the food was distributed to the students.
We are also proud to support the students’ creative talents by partnering with Piano Marvel. Piano Marvel is ready to begin piano lessons for the students and their pen pal piano lesson program. We also successfully delivered 6 piano keyboards to the school.
Our focus currently is still on the health and wellness of the students. We are working on expanding more physical health exams for the students, as well as directing our effort towards digging a well to allow greater access to clean water. Due to the ongoing violence and gang activity in Haiti, there is also a considerable need for laptops and tablets so that students can safely continue their studies from home. Additionally, one of our goals is for the students to have greater fluency in French and English. We strive to expand access to Rosetta Stone to give these students the resources to develop their language learning and comprehension.
We are so grateful for our volunteers who have been with us since the beginning, as well as our new volunteers who recently joined the IAFL team. We are excited to see what we have accomplished together!