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Twenty-four ConStrat personnel supported community relations for Task Force Bon Voizen (“Good Neighbor”) from April to July 2011 in Haiti’s Artibonite province, as well as in the capital city of Port-au-Prince and the city of Gonaïves. Much of the province has been battered by one natural disaster after another, including two tropical storms that caused catastrophic flooding in 2004 and 2008. Some of the resulting damage remains, and a vast lake still stands a few miles outside of Gonaïves in an area where storm water flowed down from the mountains into a previously dry savannah. It was here that US, Canadian and Colombian forces set up the 2011 Bon Voizen joint humanitarian assistance and training task force with ConStrat’s support.
Bon Voizen operates under the annual New Horizons humanitarian assistance program, which US Southern Command has conducted in Latin America and the Caribbean since the mid-1980s. ConStrat’s interpreters, hired directly from the Artibonite province, used English and Haitian Creole to assist the Louisiana National Guard and other foreign medical /dental personnel as they treated patients from Gonaïves to Saint-Marc. Aside from the provision of much-needed medical and dental care, Task Force Bon Voizen partnered with NGOs already active in the area to ensure that those who lived nearby or traveled from afar to receive consultations had access to clean drinking water. The Artibonite province is where the Haitian cholera epidemic first broke out in late 2010.
Day in and day out, all through the summer, ConStrat’s interpreters worked for up to twelve hours at a time to ensure that the foreign medical personnel could communicate with the local population. Medical Readiness Training Exercises (MEDRETEs) and Dental Readiness Training Exercises (DENTRETEs) were executed together with local dentists and physicians. Several of the interpreters also worked with the US Army at construction sites where the Bon Voizen partnersbuilt schools.
The mayor of Gonaïves appeared at the Forward Operating Base on the interpreters’ first day. He told ConStrat staff that health care and jobs were the community’s most pressing needs. Fortunately, Task Force Bon Voizen provided both health care and jobs during its activities in Haiti. Local residents with whom ConStrat spoke expressed their gratitude for the United States’ assistance, and looked forward to the US Army’s return in future years.
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