Haiti: First Port-au-Prince School Re-Opens and Back in Service Thanks to the Work of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers

For the last several weeks a team of Scientology Volunteer Ministers from Mexico have been helping the FMA school (Filles de Marie-Auxiliatrice) reestablish order and get back into action. The earthquake affected nearly every person in Port-au-Prince. So many died, and most of those who survived were injured or left homeless. Many schools collapsed killing the children and teachers who were there. Those like the FMA school that were not destroyed by the quake have been closed since January 12, with the teachers and administrators taking care of the immediate needs of their families.

The school is run by a Catholic order, the Silesian Sisters. Over the past several weeks the Volunteer Ministers have been training the sisters on basic Volunteer Ministers assist technology, which includes seminars and courses on communication, how to improve relationships, how to establish order and organize an area and Scientology assist technology.

Scientology assists are techniques developed by L. Ron Hubbard that address the spiritual and emotional factors in illness and injuries, and thus speed healing.
Once trained, the sisters started to train others. Within several days they trained some 600 volunteers from a nearby refugee camp.

They have reassembled the faculty, cleaned up the school and readied the school to reopen.

A local radio station announced the school was about to open again and on March 4, 2010, more than 3,000 kids of all ages gathered at the school campus to resume their studies.

But when the school doors opened that morning, the kids were too afraid to go inside the building. For many of them, the last time they had been inside a structure it collapsed. And everyone knows someone who died because they were inside a house, school, hospital or shopping center when the earthquake struck.

To help these children overcome their fears so they could get on with their education, the newly trained volunteers gave them Locational assists, which enable the person to put past memories of fear or loss behind them by orienting the individual to his or her current environment. By the time they were done, everyone on the campus was relaxed and extroverted and ready to go back inside to their classrooms.

That is why the FMA School has reopened—the first to do so in Port-au-Prince. The nun who runs the school was interviewed on a local radio show. She emphasized that the school, the first and only school in the city that has reopened since the earthquake on January 12, was only able to resume classes because of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers.

The schoolyard of the FMA (Filles de Marie-Auxiliatrice - Les Sœurs Salésiennes de Don Bosco) School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

A member of the Mexican Scientology Volunteer Minister team overseeing the training.

Contact Assist: There is a basic principle in Scientology, that by putting an injured body part exactly in contact with the place it was injured it has a therapeutic effect and speeds healing.

One of the easiest assists to render is Locational Processing. A Locational is done by directing a person’s attention off the painful area of his body or his difficulties and out onto the environment.

Last week’s graduation ceremony, where the school's teachers and nuns received certificates for the training they completed.

EMT makes good on promise to quake survivor

Ralph-Marie Gedeon, left, and Emergency Medical Technician Ayal Lindeman pose for a photo at General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where they met. (Photo courtesy of Randi Sidman Moore)

NEW HAVEN — Ralph-Marie Gedeon could easily have died Jan. 12 in the earthquake in Haiti when the walls of his Port-au-Prince engineering college came tumbling down on top of him.

Gedeon, 22, who on Thursday night was airlifted to Tweed New Haven Regional Airport, could easily have been left for dead had his father, Raphael Gedeon, not gone looking for him, and then spent hours frantically climbing through the rubble, calling his son’s name until he heard him cry out. It took the elder Gedeon a day and a half to dig his son out.

When he and some friends finally reached Gedeon, they found his left leg was crushed.

He might have died soon afterward, too, when he initially refused to have his mangled leg amputated because, in Haiti, those without limbs are shunned.

Instead, he met Ayal Lindeman, a licensed practical nurse, emergency medical technician and Scientology volunteer minister who was in Haiti as a volunteer emergency worker in the critical care unit of General Hospital in Port-au-Prince.

Lindeman, of Spring Valley, N.Y., convinced Gedeon to have the life-saving surgery, promising him a new leg, along with the physical and occupational therapy he would need, if he would agree.

More importantly, Lindeman happens to have a high school friend and former track teammate, Dr. David Gibson, who is an orthopedic surgeon who teaches at the Yale School of Medicine and is affiliated with the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven.

Lindeman told Gedeon about his friend the orthopedic surgeon in the United States, and promised that he would get Gedeon a prosthetic leg.

Then Lindeman called Gibson, who agreed to donate his work and time for the necessary surgeries. Gibson also arranged for St. Raphael’s to cover other medical treatment and physical and occupational therapy. Finally, working through a friend who heads a pediatric health care fund affiliated with the Foundation for Greater New Haven, Gibson got a manufacturer to donate the prosthesis.

Finally, the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading /Airlink, arranged for a private jet to bring Gedeon to the U.S.

Gedeon and Lindeman were due to arrive at Tweed late Thursday night or early today after being delayed in Florida.

“We’re going to work on his leg” in advance of attaching the prosthetic leg, Gibson said earlier Thursday, while Gedeon and Lindeman still were en route to Florida.

Gibson, 53, explained that “in Haiti, having an amputation is a horrible thing because you essentially are put at the side of the road” and ignored.

Lindeman stayed with Gedeon through the amputation surgery and one other operation on his remaining stump, Gibson said. Gideon “is coming up here with some work” that still needs to be done.

Gibson estimated that the artificial leg normally would cost between $10,000 and $15,000, and the surgery Gibson will perform normally costs “several tens of thousands of dollars” in addition.

He called Dr. Peter Lindskog, chairman of the board of a pediatric health care fund that Gibson also sits on, and asked if Gedeon’s case might qualify for assistance. Lindskog called a local vendor, New England Orthotics and Prosthetics of Branford, “and they said, ‘Fine, we’ll give it to you for free,’” Gibson said.

Gedeon will be in New Haven for “as long as it takes,” Gibson said. “I would estimate it would take a couple of months to get him tuned up and ready to rock back. The challenge is going to be to get him to the point where he’s ready to go back” and able to stay healthy even in a place where he won’t be able to get good health care.

“We pretty much need to make him bulletproof” before he returns, he said.

(New Haven Register)