Haiti’s color, music and pageantry belie its hard economic and social realities.

• For every 1,000 babies born, 80 will not live to see their first birthdays.
• About a third of all deaths in the country occur among children under 5.
• For every 100,000 pregnant women, 530 die from complications.
• Some 30,000 Haitians died of AIDS in 2001, and a quarter-million are believed to be living with HIV.

Families endure these hardships with resignation. But many find reason to hope and to act. In small villages along the western edge of the island, residents work alongside missionaries digging wells to provide a source of clean water for bathing, washing clothes, cooking and drinking—an alternative to streams and rivers that carry disease-causing pathogens.

In the Artibonite River Valley in central Haiti, the staff from the local hospital teaches families about birth control, parenting, sexually transmitted diseases and the importance of vaccinations.

Public health workers and volunteers from the Albert Schweitzer Hospital fan out over the rugged countryside, tracking every child and adult, immunizing them, weighing them and monitoring them for signs of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases.

Such efforts have helped reduce neonatal tetanus—a leading killer in Haiti—in parts of the Artibonite River Valley, and have helped lower the area’s infant and maternal mortality rates.

From efforts to educate parents has grown a renewed emphasis on educating the country’s children. Throughout Haiti, school enrollment is steadily increasing.

Each day, classrooms fill with wide-eyed youngsters dressed in tidy uniforms, eager to learn the alphabet, read a favorite children’s story and perhaps be the first in their families to learn how to write their names.

Alex Morel is a New York–based photographer who lived in Haiti during 2001–02. He took these photos on assignment for the Pan American Health Organization’s country office in Port-au-Prince.
 
Marisol Bello is a special projects reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in Pennsylvania, USA. She won the U.S. award in the Pan American Health Organization’s centennial journalism contest for her special report “Haiti, Mission of Hope.”