Working with Miami-based Project Medishare, about a dozen students and professors from the George Washington University School of Nursing spent a week on Haiti's Central Plateau in January, 2015, learning about, and providing, rural health care in the poorest area of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Here an informed consent document, in Haitian Creole, explaining an ongoing hypertension study, sits on a table as a temporary clinic is set up.

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Caring For Haiti - A Week On The Central Plateau

B. D. Colen | Haiti

Throughout the academic year, Project Medishare, a Miami-based medical NGO that has been working in Haiti for more than a decade, brings groups of medical, nursing, and public health students and faculty from about a half-dozen U.S. universities to Haiti's Central Plateau. The students and their instructors work with Medishare's Haitian nurses, physicians, and support personal, holding clinics for underserved patients in isolated areas. For the students, these trips are a chance to both learn first hand about rural health care delivery, and to provide care to people who are in dire need of every kind of care and caring. This exhibit documents some of the work of a group of students and faculty members from the George Washington University School of Nursing, in Washington, D.C., during a recent week on the Central Plateau, the poorest region of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Thank you to Project Medishare and the George Washington University School of Nursing whose cooperation and support made this work possible.

With the lowest literacy rate in the Western Hemisphere - and one of the half-dozen lowest in the world, an estimated 80 percent of the population living in poverty and about half in what is considered to be "dire" poverty, almost 80 percent of the population unemployed or marginally employed, and clean water and health care vertiable luxuries, Haiti needs all the help it can get. And one of the groups that provides help in the health care sphere is Project Medishare, a University of Miami-based NGO that began working in the Caribbean Island nation a half-dozen years before the devastating earthquake that grabbed the world's attention.

As just one aspect of what it does throughout the academic year, Project Medishare brings groups of medical, nursing, and public health students and faculty from about a half-dozen U.S. universities to Haiti's Central Plateau. The students and their instructors work with Medishare's Haitian nurses, physicians, and support personal, holding clinics for underserved patients in isolated areas. For the students, these trips are a chance to both learn first hand about rural health care delivery, and to provide care to people who are in dire need of every kind of care and caring. This exhibit documents some of the work of a group of students and faculty members from the George Washington University School of Nursing, in Washington, D.C., during a recent week on the Central Plateau, the poorest region of the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

For more about the harsh reality that is Haiti, I would suggest reading the "Photographer's Statement with this exhibit about the work of the NGO Midwives For Haiti.

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bd@bdcolenphoto.com

617-413-1224

I am a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and editor for The Washington Post and Newsday, and started photographing as a young teenager. I covered the historic March on Washington for a weekly newspaper the week after I turned 17, and haven't stopped shooting since.

I have taught documentary photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2001, and have also taught at the Harvard University Extension School, the Maine Media Workshops, and have taught private workshops.

I am the author of 10 books on medically related subjects. My photography has appeared in, among other publications, The Boston Globe, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Christian Science Monitor, and Time Magazine. Some 30 images from my ongoing subway project are included in the permanent collection of the Boston Public Library.

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