Nursing dean Hilda Alcindor pins nurses’ caps on new graduates of the Faculty of Nursing Science of the Episcopal University of Haiti. Ann Arborites were instrumental in founding the school in 2005, and continue to support it through the local Haiti Nursing Foundation. | Photo courtesy of HNF
Alcindor runs the Faculty of Nursing Science of the Episcopal University of Haiti (FSIL in French). With help from the Ann Arbor–based Haiti Nursing Foundation, she’s led it through hurricanes, earthquakes, Covid, and the country’s descent into political chaos since its president was assassinated three years ago. In that power vacuum, heavily armed gangs have kidnapped thousands of people and held them for ransom.
Chaddic-Hess is a development associate at the nursing foundation. While Alcindor is safe inside FSIL’s walled campus, she emails, the dean is at risk whenever she leaves it. That hasn’t deterred her from traveling to Ann Arbor this month for the foundation’s annual gala at the Kensington Hotel on October 18.
According to HNF executive director Thom Bales, the connection goes back to the late 1990s. At the time, Ann Arbor’s First Presbyterian Church was sending medical volunteers to Hôpital Sainte Croix in Léogâne, about twenty miles outside Port-au-Prince. The hospital’s director, Jack Guy Lafontant, had approached the Medical Benevolence Fund (now Foundation) to help establish a nursing school at the hospital. The fund had secured a $1.2 million U.S. Agency for International Development grant to build it. Lafontant asked the Ann Arbor medical volunteers if they could find experienced educators to help launch it.
An elder at First Presbyterian, Ruth Barnard, had just retired as a professor at the U-M School of Nursing. She was looking for a new way to serve, and when her pastor asked her to lead the effort, she agreed. According to the HNF website, “Dr. Barnard recruited other volunteers to form a governing board to oversee school operations and programs.” The board recruited Alcindor as dean.
A native of Haiti, Alcindor had served in the U.S. Air Force and worked for decades in Miami as an ER nurse and teacher. “One Sunday I was at church,” Alcindor told the magazine Diverse: Issues in Higher Education in 2015. “For some reason I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to find my purpose in life.’ … Even though I was working, I said to myself, ‘I can do better than that.’” A visit to Léogâne convinced her to take the job, and FSIL welcomed its first class of thirty-six students in 2005.
HNF was founded the same year. “We were appealing to the country that is 90 percent Roman Catholic,” Barnard recalled in a 2013 Observer interview. “The University is Episcopalian, and we’re Presbyterians.” The foundation made it easier for everyone to work together.
The need is enormous: Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, and the deadliest for women and children. Though maternal and infant mortality are falling, for every 100,000 women who become pregnant, 350 still die while pregnant or within forty-two days of termination of pregnancy. The U.S. figure is twenty-three. For every 1,000 live births, five children die before their first birthday in the U.S. In Haiti, forty-seven do.
In 2010, a devastating earthquake killed 220,000 Haitians and displaced 1.5 million more. Léogâne was at the epicenter of the quake, and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 residents died. “Almost 85 percent of the buildings … were collapsed or in bad shape, so they weren’t safe,” Barnard recalled.
The school buildings, however, were constructed to U.S. standards. They “held up fine,” Barnard said, “except for some shifting as the earth shook, which made it impossible for the kids and staff to open the door or climb out windows” until the earthquake stopped. However, two students who had gone home that afternoon died. “That was very difficult,” Barnard said. “But the dean, after they settled down a little bit, said, ‘Now you’re going to learn what it is to be a nurse.’”
Chaddic-Hess writes that the school “became ground zero for the relief efforts. Some students, even those in their first year, had hands-on emergency training, which a lot of them still credit for helping make them the nurses they are today.”
Then came Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the assassination of president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and, a month later, another earthquake that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced tens of thousands more. “I should have been to Haiti by now,” writes Chaddic-Hess, “but it’s been unsafe to travel to Haiti since I started because of the president’s assassination and gangs [that] have controlled over 60 percent of Port-au-Prince,”
“To this point, there have been no direct impacts to the school, i.e. no violence, or threat of violence, but there’s been lots of secondary impacts,” Bales emails. A 30 percent inflation rate makes supplies more expensive, and it’s “virtually impossible to ship equipment and supplies through the [Port-au-Prince] port. (We shipped a generator to FSIL last year that is sitting in Miami, unable to reach Haiti.)”
The school has adapted to everything. “As the security issues increased and Covid hit in 2020, we immediately had to go to remote teaching via Zoom,” writes Joanne Pohl, a retired U-M nursing prof and past HNF board president. “The University of Michigan was most helpful in providing IT support.”
“Most of the other institutions in Haiti have shut down at some point, but not FSIL,” Chaddic-Hess writes. “It helps that they raise turkeys on campus and have fruit trees. They also have a gated and secure campus, with guards, and they have solar power and generators. When the gang violence struck a nearby town, FSIL took in many families who were fleeing, who were related to the students.”
Through it all, the school has kept graduating nurses—279 of them since 2009. That includes 250 bachelor’s of science in nursing degrees, sixteen family nurse practitioners, and thirteen family nurse practitioner/midwives. Next year, FSIL will award Haiti’s first master’s degrees in nursing education.
“If you get a master’s in nursing ed you can still perform as a nurse but you can also teach,” explains Chaddic-Hess. “This is very important to the sustainability of FSIL to have educated nurses who can actually teach effectively.”
“We are very focused on the development of our Haitian faculty,” Pohl writes. “We really want this to be Haitian run and Haitian led.”
That starts at the top, with Alcindor. She is both FSIL’s leader and its greatest advocate—which is why she’ll risk the trip to speak at HNF’s fundraiser, “From Haiti with Love.”
“Because Haiti’s challenges are much more in the news,” emails Bales, “there is definitely ‘donor fatigue’ among HNF contributors who have previously supported Haiti.” But they’re hoping to raise $50,000 at what Chaddic-Hess calls “a celebration of culture, community, [and] compassion.”
