March 2010
Features /
Ali and Jamie McMutrie, of Ben Avon, and Lucy and Ian Rawson, of Point Breeze, save lives in Haiti.
By Victoria Bradley | Photography by Megan Wylie
We watched with big hearts as American Red Cross and Catholic Charities volunteers took tiny Haitian refugees off of busses and into Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh last month, swaddled in giant yellow blankets.
They were greeted inside by a team of doctors and nurses, who examined the entire group of 53 children in 50 minutes, a record time.
Later, Dr. Richard Saladino, chief of emergency medicine at Children’s, spoke calmly of the experience:
“They’re all quite healthy. We had a few cases of mild dehydration, a couple fevers, and a couple upper respiratory problems, but only two kids were kept in emergency.”
The rest were released to the county, where they were placed in their adoption homes, or in some cases, foster homes while they waited for their adoptions to finalize.
Ben Avon sisters Ali and Jamie McMutrie of the BRESMA orphanage in Haiti.
All but six of the 53 children who came to Pittsburgh in January had been matched up with families in the United States of America and abroad before the earthquake devastated their country.
They came from BRESMA orphanage in Port-au-Prince, run by sisters Ali and Jamie McMutrie from Ben Avon. The earthquake left their building in ruins, and the women were trying to support 150 children in a yard when they sent the text (from a stranger’s BlackBerry) heard ‘round the world: “If u no anyone important who can give refugee status to all the BRESMA U.S. kids. We truly cant keep babys alive, water contaminated. This is our only hope.”
The message circled Twitter and the Internet, getting the attention of officials, who organized a rescue mission. The process is called “humanitarian parole”: Their adoptions were not yet finalized, but both governments cooperated to ensure that the children’s paperwork and visas could be processed here.
“‘Expediting’ is not a good word,” says Maureen Ticich, international adoption supervisor at Bethany Christian Services Adoption & Orphan Care Agency. “All of their information is in a pile of rubble. Right now they’re saying, ‘Bring the kids who have already been matched with families here, and we’ll work out the rest from this country.’”
Ticich says another category of children is up for consideration to come to America: children who were identified as orphans prior to the earthquake, either because their parents have died, were killed, are unknown, or terminated their parental rights, but who have not yet been matched up with U.S. families.
“It is impossible to adopt a child who has been orphaned by the earthquake in Haiti,” Ticich says. “None of them have even been classified as ‘orphans.’ There’s no way to determine what may have happened to their parents.”
Ticich calls one of the hardest parts of her job is “having to see the kids who wait.” When the files for sisters Sonise, 14, Chalina, 11, and Neissa, 5 came across her desk from God’s Littlest Angels orphanage in Fort Jacques, Haiti in 2007, she and her husband, Jeff, were so touched that they began their paperwork. Their adoption was completed in October of 2009. They received the U.S. visas in January of 2010.
“My sister called and said there had been an earthquake in Haiti,” Ticich says. “I jumped onto the GLA website. They have a satellite connection and generators. No one was hurt or killed. It was a relief to know that my girls were okay.”
Shortly after the earthquake, Maureen’s girls were granted visas, and, at the time of print, the Ticich family was still waiting for word about when their daughters were coming home.
Maureen says that she’s thankful for the amount of awareness the earthquake has generated for Haitian adoptions and especially for the McMutrie sisters, who have put the heart of Pittsburgh on the map, internationally.
They are not the only Pittsburgh connection to Haiti.
Lucy and Ian Rawson, of Point Breeze, are the directors of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles, Haiti, a city 40 miles from Port-au-Prince. The hospital was established in 1956 by Ian’s parents, Dr. Larry Larimer and Gwen Grant Mellon. They were inspired by the work of Albert Schweitzer and his “reverence for life.”
The hospital is the only one in the region specializing in surgery. They also have specialists in pediatrics, internal medicine, and neo-natal intensive care.
Lucy was in Pittsburgh when the first earthquake struck. Ian was in Haiti, as always. “It was very scary,” Lucy says. “Fortunately, I heard from him before I had seen much of the news. He was OK.”
The hospital was standing. It hadn’t sustained any damage. Lucy credits its position between two mountains, the safety of the Artibonite Valley.
Neissa, 5 , Chalina, 11, and Sonise, 14 await adoption in America.
Last year, the Rawsons started a training program for rehabilitation technicians last year, teaching citizens of Haiti skills of physical therapy. The first “class” graduated in September and has been able to help to ease the pain of the suffering.
“There are a lot of heroes in Haiti today,” Lucy says. “Our staff has lost their families, and they keep working.”
Her husband hasn’t stopped for a month. She says she has to remind him to sleep.
“Is Ian going to come home? No,” Lucy says. “He’s trained his whole life for this. I couldn’t be more proud.”
Natalie Taaffe Hoffman is the managing partner of Linden Partners, the company who has handled all of the fundraising for Hôpital Albert Schweitzer over the last 10 years. She’s helped to coordinate the H’Art and Soul of Haiti benefit event each September as well as soliciting corporate proposals and individual gifts.
Since the earthquakes, Hoffman has seen an overwhelming outpouring of support from Pittsburgh and the world.
“We can’t even count the number of internet donations right now, Hoffman says, “from $3 to $100,000.” The fundraiser says that an anonymous donor called and asked for Linden to run his credit card twice, since his limit was $50,000 per purchase.
She says Pittsburgh charities such as Richard King Mellon Foundation, The Buhl Foundation, The H.J. Heinz Company Foundation, BNY Mellon, Highmark, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Bender Family Foundation have all made generous contributions. Stanford University School of Medicine has pledged $200,000 if its students, faculty, and doctors will match it.
Actor Michael Keaton has contacted Linden. He’d like to fly his own plane down with medical supplies.
Still, Hoffman says the donations are coming up short in a country where a five-pound bag of rice is selling for $5 and the people make less than $1 a day.
Every day, the hospital is going through a month’s worth of supplies.
“They’ll bring them six or seven at a time,” Hoffman says. “They have a warehouse, where we set up extra beds. When those ran out, we started laying people on the floor. Some of them come in on doors, like stretchers.”
Hoffman says that a plane of supplies lands every few days, but the fuel for the truck to go pick them up costs $12 per gallon. “It takes three hours for the truck to reach the destination to pick up supplies,” Hoffman says. “The roads are so bad.”
She’s grateful for the ongoing contributions, however small. “Make Your Mark coffee shop, on Reynolds Street, has been sending food over to our volunteers, here in Pittsburgh every day.”
The heart of Pittsburgh is forever tied to the heart of Haiti. The people of this city have rallied — to fundraise and to donate, to rescue and to relieve, to aid and to adopt. But there is more to be done, more support to lend to our hometown heroes offering aid in Haiti. More efforts are required to bring our youngest sons and daughters from abroad to sanctuaries here. Hopefully, their futures, like ours, will be marked with safe and happy homes — and, with a little luck, more yellow blankets.
For information on how to adopt, contact Allegheny County Department of Human Services, 800.862.6783, or Bethany Christian Services Adoption & Orphan Care Agency, 724.940.2900.
To donate to Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, visit hashaiti.org.