Synergist - October 2010

Stephan Wawzyniecki, CIH, CHMM University of Connecticut

Stefan Wawzyniecki, one of 12 volunteers from the Norwich, Conn.-based Haitian Health Foundation (HHF), flew into Port-au-Prince the last week of April. From the air he could see the tent cities that had sprung up around the Port-au-Prince airport, a sea of blue tarps. This was his fourth trip to Haiti; on his previous trips he had noted small signs of progress— some roadway improvements, fewer armed guards at the airport, better access to running water. Now, witnessing the devastation firsthand, he knew all that progress had been wiped out.

“Haiti was already so many years
backward from the rest of the
world,” Wawzyniecki says, “and I’ve
heard some public health officials
say that it’s going to take them as
much as 12 years to get to the point
where they were before the earth-
quake.”
At the HHF mission in Jérémie, a
city of 50,000 on the mountainous
western end of the island of Hispan-
iola, Wawzyniecki and the other
volunteers—including his daughter,
Rachel, and Dr. Jeremiah Lowney,
the founder and executive director
of HHF—helped tend to the Haitians’
basic needs. Jérémie was spared the
worst of the earthquake’s effects,
but well over one hundred thousand
refugees had settled there, and the
overcrowding had taken a toll on
the city’s already limited resources.
The people’s desperation was palpa-
ble. One day, someone stole a wad
of bills from Lowney.

“This was my fourth trip, and I
left Haiti sadder than any of the
previous trips,” Wawzyniecki says.
“A lot of that had to do with the
human element part of it. When I
say human element, I mean, it’s-
human-nature-to-survive-type
stuff.”
Wawzyniecki’s career and his
volunteering are both something of
a family affair. He met his wife,
Patti, an AIHA® member, at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts-Amherst,
where he worked in a school labora-
tory and Patti was taking graduate
courses in environmental health and
industrial hygiene. They currently
work at the University of Connecti-
cut, where Stefan is the manager of
chemical health and safety and Patti
is an industrial hygienist at the uni-
versity health center. They began
volunteering for HHF in 2003 and
went to Haiti together as part of an
HHF mission in 2006.

with a boy of 19 or 20 who had been trapped in his home in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake. The boy’s parents had died, and his brother had freed him from the rubble by removing part of his leg with a hammer, pummeling the bone until it broke off. Stefan Wawzyniecki says that Dr. Lowney, who learned of the boy’s predicament on a Monday, made some phone calls and arranged an appointment at a clinic; by Thursday, the boy had a prosthetic leg.

HHF volunteers who travel to Jérémie are used to doing whatever they’re asked to do. On previous trips, the Wawzynieckis had weighed babies, operated a chain-saw, assisted a dentist, and installed kitchen cabinets at the clinic. This time, for the most part, Stefan was distributing food and supplies, both in Jérémie and in the surrounding villages. Meanwhile, Rachel, who had recently graduated with a master’s degree in social work and had asked to go to Haiti as a graduation present, spent the bulk of her time at the Center for Hope, a clinic for women in the final trimester of pregnancy.

One day, Rachel rode to the clinic
“That’s the kind of story that you
walk away from saying, ‘Okay, at
least you could help one person,’”
Wawzyniecki says. “That’s the kind of
thing where you look at the human
spirit and say, ‘It can survive.’”