Dr. Karen Weissman, who is by training a research scientist in acoustics, first began working with HEART while her daughter attended the Corlears School. The organization collaborated with us to create a service learning project that compared local farming in New York with that of the Croix de Bouquet area in Haiti. At that time, Dr. Weissman served as a liaison between both organizations in order to foster communication and collaboration. After the successful completion of that project, she brought the school to the attention of the Parents’ Community Service Network (PCSN), where parents and students from all over the NYC area could become acquainted with HEART’s mission. PCSN aims to alleviate many crucial problems, such as global hunger, unsustainability, and homelessness, while upholding their guiding principle: “Nothing about us, without us.” This idea respects the self-governance of the recipient organization, supporting its efforts to make its own future plans and implement those goals it deems most important for its own community.
More recently, Dr. Weissman served as the liaison between UNIS (see above) and HEART to contribute to the creation of the school’s new English textbook. She brought the project to the director of the community service office at UNIS, Zakaria Baja, who recruited their students to help. Then Dr. Weissman helped to organize the procedure for assigning and collecting the huge amount of images and audio recordings required by the textbook. She assigned the pictures to the students, gave them instructions, and organized the materials once they were returned. Also, because of her guidance and hard work, HEART now has a procedure for how to complete similar collaborative projects in the future.
Without Dr. Weissman’s help, we would not have been able to complete such a large project in such a short amount of time, and we would not have been able to recruit the help of the UNIS students. Because of their help, we were able to print and distribute part of the new English teaching materials for the current school year. Mr. James Loreus and HEART want to express our sincere gratitude for everyone’s help. As the saying goes, “Many hands make light work,” and we welcome any contributions to this project. If you might be willing to collect and scan documents such as train tickets, ads, etc., or help to record or transcribe authentic teaching materials, please write to us at buddyprogam@heartinhaiti.org. Small donations of printing materials or burning CDs would be tremendously helpful, as well. We also welcome ideas to help with other programs besides foreign language learning. There are many ways to help, and we would be delighted to talk with you or your organization about it!
