Villagers in l'Artibonite, Haiti, stand in the doorway of a concrete block church where children will shortly be fed a free, supplementry meal. The recently built church was constructed at a cost of about $15,000 donated by "megachurches" in the American Southwest and southern California, and serves as a community center.

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L'Artibonite - Poverty in Paradise

B. D. Colen | Haiti

About a four-hour drive from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, the Artibonite region, with its rice paddies and background of mountains, resembles nothing so much as Vietnam. But barely beneath the surface of the natural beauty lies the hard core poverty so much a part of Haiti. Kathi Juntunen, the President of the Scottsdale, Arizonia-based Chances For Children, who runs an orphanage in Kenscoff, Haiti, has partnered with two American churches and a Haitian pastor to provide thrice-weekly supplementary meals to the children of the village of l'Artibonite, in this physically lush region of this Caribbean island nation that is more African that Caribbean.

About a four-hour drive from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, the Artibonite region, with its rice paddies and background of mountains, resembles nothing so much as Vietnam. But barely beneath the surface of the natural beauty lies the hard core poverty ubiquitous in Haiti. Kathi Juntunen, whose foundation, Chances For Children, runs an orphanage in Kenscoff, Haiti, has partnered with two American churches, a Minnesota charity, and a Haitian pastor to provide thrice-weekly supplementary meals to the children of the village of l'Artibonite, in this physically lush region of this Caribbean island nation in which about 80 percent of the people live in poverty, and more than half live in poverty described as "dire."

Juntunen says that the feeding program costs about $600 per month, and is designed to eventually be self-sustaining. It provides jobs to three Haitian women who do the cooking, and are paid between $50 and $60 per month. The children are fed a meal of a mix of rice, beans, and a vegetable protein supplement, and Juntunen says the younger children have gained about a pound, and the older children have gained about 4.5 pounds since the program was launched in February.

 

Here are links to my four other SDN exhibits of images telling parts of the story of Haiti today:

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now -  A look at the crushing poverty in Lehoy, on Haiti's Central Plateau;

A Death In Haiti - Staff in the emergency room of Hospital Bernard Mevs, in Port-au-Prince struggle to save a woman in her last half-hour of life;

These Could Be Your Children - Portraits of some of Haiti's 30,000 children living in orphanages, these in a well-run facility in Kenscoff, in the mountains outside Port-au-Prince;

Haiti and The Deception of Color - We always associate Haiti with brilliant colors and art, but this pairing of color and black and white versions of the same images asks whether, in fact, those brilliant colors simply serve to hide the crushing reality of life in Haiti.

 

 

 

Chance For Children

Feed My Starving Children

New Harvest Church

Highlands Church

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B. D. Colen is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter, editor, and columnist who spent 26 years at The Washington Post and Newsday, covering medicine, health care, and health policy for 17 of those years. A photographer for more than 50 years, Colen began his professional photography career in 1963, covering the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a weekly newspaper in Connecticut.


For the past 13 years Colen has taught documentary photography and journalism writing courses at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has taught photography at the Maine Media Workshops and the Harvard University Extension School.


His work has appeared in publications from Newsday, to the New England Journal of Medicine, from the Boston Globe, to the Christian Science Monitor, and he has photographed for numerous corporate and institutional clients.
Colen has worked in Somalia, Liberia, and Haiti, and is available for international and national documentary work for NGOs, editorial clients, and private individuals.

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