About Ayiti Resurrect’s January 2012 Delegation

Ayiti Resurrect is a team of visionary artists, community builders, mental health specialists, and holistic healers with bloodlines in Haiti and the African Diaspora. We have organized ourselves as a grassroots delegation working in collaboration with local Haitian organizations to facilitate psychological and spiritual healing for Haiti’s quake-survivors based on principles of solidarity, creativity, and collective resilience.

For the January 2012, we were a team of about 13 delegates from the United States. We partnered with APMKL, an association of mango growers from Cormier, a small town outside of Léogâne, Ayiti, and co-facilitated workshops and skill shared. We had a week’s worth of workshops and events, with 3 full days of our health clinic services in the morning and workshops in the afternoons, a commerorative celebration on the day of the earthquake and a day to evaluate the work done and the next steps for sustainability.

The services offered in our morning health clinic were holistic and spiritual in nature. It was held in the community center that we converted into two areas for care and a waiting area They included co-counseling sessions with Leah Penniman and Sandrine Malary, massage therapy & reiki by yours truly, plant medicine with Dr. Robert, Madam Wilner & Pastor, Reflexology with Anoa Jean Paul, reproductive health/translation with Hyacinth and general administrative support with Angelique Nixon and Jennifer Celestin. Additionally, yoga was offered simultaneously by Majida Shariff and Pierre Samson Berlus (who we called Samson) beneath one of the trees right outside the community center. Close by, Maurice Sangodele-Ayoka taught first-aid and CPR to the community folk.

For our afternoon sessions, we had agriculture and composting with Leah and Wislerson (in which a composting toilet was created), solar ovens with Sandrine and Naima Penniman, poetry and performance with Jennifer, Gabrielle Civil and Angelique, reproductive health with Anoa, Hyacinth and I, drumming with Atiba, Nkosi and San Fleur, yoga with Majida and Samson, Haitian/Vodun dance with the womyn’s dance group led by Natascia, stone sculpture with Claremont, Wisnel and Anax, theater with Romulus Lakol and Frenel, recycled art with Sandrine, herbal medicine walk with Dr. Robert and Madam Wilner, young children activities with Madam Henry and mask making with Franz and I.