Dr. Christopher Bureshfirst visited Haiti in 2003. Today, he says he thinks about the trip every day. He’d been to India and Peru before going to Haiti but says the poverty he saw there was unique. “It really blew me away that this was a 90 minute plane flight from Miami.”
He talks about mountains of trash and plastic, and women who cut their umbilical cords with broken glass or a rock for lack of a clean blade.
It just seemed stupid that kids in this area, a 90 minute plane flight from Miami, are starving to death and dying of diarrhea... I mean it really is the kind of thing that makes it hard to sleep at night. - Dr. Chris Buresh
Since that first trip, he’s visited Haiti several times, and was in the country three days before the 2010 earthquake.
Today, he’s a co-founder of Community Health Initiative, Haiti, and visits the country every three months or so. Yesterday, Buresh was awarded the 2014 Individual Governor's Volunteer award. He talks with Charity Nebbe during this Talk of Iowa interview about his work in Haiti and why he goes back.
