Timeline

Originally intending to go to Mongolia, Susie arrives in Haiti on April 14th, 1994, where she spends her first night on the streets of Cite Soleil, the most dangerous slum in the Western Hemisphere.

Susie enlists her brother Mark to organize gang members to help clean and establish a modest, but very successful, food bank in Cite Soleil.

Creation of what would be called the “Abandoned Baby Unit” on the grounds of the General Hospital in Port Au Prince. This clinic has rescued hundreds of abandoned, many disabled children from certain death.

The food canteen is expanded to include a tuition-free school for young children thanks to growing donor support. The Community Institute of Teaching and Education (C.I.T.E.) school is a lighthouse of hope and opportunity, shining brightly in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Providing education every day to 222 students in grades 1-7, C.I.T.E. School is preparing children to be productive citizens. The school recently moved to a new location to accommodate more space and a better learning environment. New programs at C.I.T.E. School include evening adult literacy classes and children's dance and basketball classes.

The Government of Haiti notifies Susie that she cannot keep so many children at the Abandoned Baby Unit. Susie and her husband Joe purchase a large home in Port Au Prince and move 56 children into it with full-time care.

Due to extremely high rates of cervical cancer and the dearth of treatment options, Susie builds a brand new hospital in Delmas 75. The hospital would later be destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.

The home in Tabarre is converted into a primary and secondary school with over 700 students attending. HaitiChildren implements a hot lunch program and a community water distribution station providing tens of thousands of gallons of fresh, clean, free drinking water for the students.

A school for K-6 grades is built on the property to provide education to the resident children and students from the community; a hot lunch program is introduced along with a water distribution center.

Susie starts a feeding program in two remote communities in the Northeast section of Haiti – a town originally built for a foreign rope manufacturer. When the company moved out hundreds of villagers were left without a means to earn a living and were suffering from starvation.

Eighteen acres were purchased 40 miles Northwest of Port Au Prince to become the new home for the resident children. Thankfully all of the children had moved in to this facility just days before the earthquake decimated Port Au Prince and our home in Tabarre.

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake strikes Port Au Prince on January 12, 2010. Over 250,000 people are believed killed with hundreds of thousands more injured. Many of our staff were injured, 32 of the children were missing and the country was in ruins.

15 of the original 32 children missing were found at the time of the earthquake. HaitiChildren initiates an action plan to rebuild the lost real estate.

Thanks to a generous donor, three state-of-the-art greenhouses were shipped in from Israel. They become home to a growing agricultural program to create sustainability for the campus.

The greenhouse project grows into a producing farm, including the planting and harvesting of fruits and vegetables as well as the keeping of honey bees, laying chickens, broiler chickens, goats, cows, and turkeys.