Mission 15 team,
February 2013
NOVA Hope for Haiti has decided to return to a tradition that was part of our early history: we are sending 2 mission trips in the next 6 months. For years NOVA sent two missions per year to Haiti until cost and volunteer burn-out made it better for us to send one mission per year. Now that the numbers of our volunteers has greatly increased we have decided to return to this practice. The cost will of course increase, but we are counting on our supporters to help us increase our presence in Haiti this way.
Two mission per year has a few benefits. First it brings us to Haiti to provide medical care more frequently which is better for the health and well being of the people we serve. It also allows us to make room for more volunteers. We are trying to reduce the size of these two upcoming teams so that each one will not be as large as the large teams of recent years. Our last mission team was over 30 people! Combined these two “smaller” missions will provide more volunteer opportunities than a single annual mission. Our hope is to keep the numbers of our teams to around 22 people. With the large number of generous, professional and talented volunteers we have interested in coming we will easily staff these missions.
A third, very important benefit to sending two missions is that members of the teams that go can provide supervision and ongoing training and professional development for our staff in the Boileau Clinic. NOVA’s clinic in Boileau, Haiti, is currently staffed by a doctor, two nurses, two lab technicians and a nurses’ aid. Our staff are professionals and they are doing an amazing job. They are seeing about 300 patients per month in our clinic. This has vastly improved the medical care that NOVA provides in the area around Cavaillion. Still, we have a responsibility to oversee their work, to make sure that the clinic is being run according to our standards, and to insure that the medicines we purchase to provide to patients is being appropriately prescribed and distributed.
NOVA is committed to sending teams to meet with our staff at least four times per year, and it cost effective for us to do this when we have a mission going down anyway. So having two missions per year helps with maintaining a quality, top notch medical facility in Haiti all year round also.
2012 has been a great year for NOVA Hope for Haiti. We have finally established a permanent medical presence in Haiti, the numbers of our volunteers continues to grow and we are moving back to bi-annual missions.
I look forward to continuing to grow on the successes of this year. In the future we hope that our clinic in Haiti allows us to send down diversified and more specialized missions in the future to treat conditions that our staff cannot: dental missions, eye and vision missions, surgical missions, etc.
This is all possible thanks to our incredible and dedicated volunteers, our hard working staff in Haiti and the generosity of donors who provide financial support.
If you can help with the cost of the November 2013 mission please click HERE. If you are interested in joining our team of volunteers please email joseph.nuzzi@novahope.org
Thank you,
Joseph Nuzzi
Vice-President
NOVA Hope for Haiti
