On Helping Haiti - A Personal View

U.S. Coast Guard medical mission to a Haitian orphanage.

A Tampa man is home after almost two months in his native Haiti, finding members of his family and helping earthquake victims. He says aid is having a hard time getting to the people who need it most.

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he’d be writing about people like Daniel Thelusmar. Born in Haiti, his father died when he was five. He grew up on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

“You really get treated like a slave. They beat you up. They tell you, do this, and if you don’t, you get beat up or you disappear,” Thelusmar said. “You get food from the garbage. You have really no protection. You can’t go to the police if anyone is abusing you. All that, you just have to suck it up and keep moving.”

Thelusmar said he learned English and other languages from sailors in the port. He befriended a drug-addicted, mentally-ill American stranded in Haiti and helped the man get to the embassy. That in turn helped him earn a visa to come to America where he married a Haitian-American woman and had three children.

But he never forgot Haiti. Thelusmar founded Heart to Heart Caribbean Ministry in Tampa, which set up orphanages, schools, and clinics in Haiti. He was kidnapped there in 2005. His friends and family paid a $10,000 ransom to get him released, yet he kept going back.

After the earthquake in January, Thelusmar rushed to Haiti. It took several days before he found his brother in his half-demolished Port-au-Prince home.

“I was so mad at him,” Thelusmar said because his brother had not called to say he was alive. “And he said, 'Bro, I’m sorry, there were no communication, everything was destroyed.’ And he was crying.”

His brother said the true impact of the earthquake won’t be known for months.

Thelusmar stayed in Haiti and threw himself into the aid effort. He soon noticed aid trucks rumbling by a village on the road between Port-au-Prince and the Dominican Republic. He said the 2,000 people there had not gotten any help.

“There were people starving. You could see, their mouths were so dry. They could not even stand up,” Thelusmar said. “I had to get a truck of water immediately to them, and get some food to them.”

He said the scene was repeated over and over – he said the aid wasn’t reaching the people who needed it most.

Thelusmar’s solution is for the large aid organizations to partner with groups run by people with an intimate knowledge of Haiti’s people and culture.

“The American people have been so generous. Now it’s a matter of organizing ourselves to make sure we’re effective in Haiti,” Thelusmar said. “It is good to send money to those organizations. But it is better to really make sure the aid is getting to the people.

One of the hardest groups to help is the thousands of new orphans in Haiti. In his heart, he wishes he could bring them all to the United States.

“Maybe the right way is not just to bring them to the U.S., maybe the right way is donating the money you were going to pay for the airplane and all that stuff, why not build a house in Haiti, move the parents there,” Thelusmar said. “That’s one thing I’m going to be advocating, empowering the Haitian people. They’re human too. They have brains, too. You can help them in Haiti, too.”

Thelusmar plans to return there in the next few weeks. Until then, he’s trying to make sure that we don’t forget about Haiti.

To contact Thelusmar, send an e-mail to tida59@hotmail.com.