Leogane Track Club
The Leogane Track Club collection was a HUGE success. For those of you that didn't hear the story, let me begin with Sean Farrell and how his club developed...
As InterVol is helping to sustain the field hospital and transition the facility to Haitian administration we are also extending our efforts into the Leogane community. Our volunteers are providing support to a local orphanage destroyed by the earthquake, the Lamb Center, which housed, educated, and fed seventy children. The pastor who runs the orphanage had to send some of the children away following the earthquake, when he ran out of provisions.
[Ruins of the Lamb Center Orphanage]
Depending entirely upon the aid from volunteers at the Hopital Sainte Croix field hospital, they have survived. Donated funds have been turned into purchases of rice and beans to feed the children, but their 600 gallon water tank has been destroyed, leaving them with neither a steady source of water nor a means to store it.
[Lamb Center Children]
Through the efforts of three volunteers, and specially Sean Farrell, the Leogane Track Club was founded. It is a successful program which provides daily exercise for several hundred local children ranging from ages 7 to early teen years. Each afternoon, the club departs from the ND residence at 4:30pm for a run through the local countryside, winding its way through the farmland and sugarcane fields over to the ocean for a swim, and back. This simple group activity has become quite popular with the local children, who line up outside the residence for the University of Notre Dame's Haiti Program (which houses the volunteers for the hospital) urging the adults to come lead them, as well as the local community who routinely offer encouragement as the group comes running along the badly worn, rock and gravel strewn, dirt road.
[Leogane Track Club on a Run]
A small percentage of the children actually have running shoes, with most running in worn out plastic sandals, or some barefoot. The club has submitted a design for track club t-shirts to be produced, bearing the words that the founders would call out as they were running during the formation of the club in mid-February - "Vini...Kouri!" Creole or "Come...Run!"
