Louverture Cleary School is not Notre Dame's only connection
with Haiti. Father Thomas G. Streit, CSC, assistant research professor
of biological sciences, has been working in Haiti since 1993 to
combat lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease that can result
in elephantiasis of the limbs and genitals. Tens of thousands
of Haitians are estimated to have the mosquito-borne scourge,
and many have been crippled by it. In collaboration with the U.S.
Agency for International Development, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, Streit's
project dispenses parasite-killing drugs to eliminate filariasis.
The program attracted a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation.
Last December, Jean Joseph Dorvil, a 29-year-old Haitian student
in Notre Dame's Master of Science in administration program who
was working as an administrator in the filariasis project, was
shot by an armed gang and killed. U.N. peacekeepers have not yet
recovered his body because they won't enter the most dangerous
parts of the country. Five other people associated with the program
have been kidnapped, but all were released.
Unlike Louverture Cleary, the filariasis project is part of
a Notre Dame academic program, although the University currently
prohibits undergraduates from going to Haiti. Streit's target
date for the complete elimination of filariasis is the year 2012.
Another academic program is engineering professor's Stephen
Silliman's Haiti Seminar, through which engineering students teach
Haitians how to maintain hand pumps in an effort to prevent gastro-intestinal
diseases caused by unfiltered water in Haitian wells, many of
which are contaminated with pathogens. The clean-water project,
he says, has one additional goal: "We work with the local population
to develop local empowerment."
Like Streit's projects, Silliman's work in Haiti is currently
restricted to graduate students only. His most recent group went
there last March.
One ND-Haiti link dates even further back. In 1989 Dr. George
Katter '41 traveled with a medical team from Saint Louis University
to the Haitian town of Milot, south of Cap-Haitien in the northern
part of the country. For the next five years Katter paid three-week
visits to a missionary hospital in Milot run by the Brothers of
the Sacred Heart, caring for patients too poor to see a physician.
During his last visit in 1993 he suffered a massive coronary attack;
he survived the attack, but it ended his annual trips.
In 1992, Katter was given the John W. Cavanaugh, CSC, award
by the Notre Dame Alumni Association in recognition of his work
in Haiti and in his home community of Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
where he continues to live in retirement.
(October 2005)
