Dollie Ambassador Andrea Herz Payne, is the founder and chairman of a humanitarian organization called Aid Still Required (aidstillrequired.org). This effort came out of the realization that while disaster relief organizations provide much needed immediate aid when a crisis occurs, after a period of time most move on. Â Aid Still Required was founded to pick up where the disaster relief efforts end, and provide continuing service and care to those persons whose needs are still great.
Andrea and her husband Hunter Payne, recently made a humanitarian visit to Haiti on behalf of their organization, and took along 3 bags full of dollies and colorful teddy bears. Â Here is a note Andrea sent about her visit:
Dear Dollie Ladies-
We returned from our 18 days in Haiti and it has taken me a while to recuperate and to process everything we did and experienced. Â My heart was alternately filled with profound joy and inarticulated heartbreak. Â This time, in addition to our week in Port au Prince and 8 days of trauma relief programs, we traveled all the way north to Cap Haitien and then to the southwestern region of the country. Â We saw so much beauty and so much need; it was and is difficult to reconcile how people living on the same planet can inhabit such different life circumstances…and I am awed that people can maintain hope, strength, and happiness in the face of it all.
We chose two places to distribute the beautiful dollies and teddies.
The first Dollie Distribution was a weekly children’s program in Cap Haitien, a beautiful old city in northern Haiti, reminiscent of faded New Orleans.  We were treated to an hour of songs, recitations and meditation.The children’s program is organized by Lovely, our most vibrant Haitian trainer.  She is an extraordinary young woman who we were privileged enough to assist in finding and receiving heart surgery last year.  Under the most challenging circumstances, Lovely and her five colleagues – all volunteers from impoverished backgrounds themselves –  are doing a gorgeous job of providing a structure of play and character building for children in their neighborhood….on pennies a month out of their own pockets  And yes, we have asked them for a budget to help support the program…we were blown away by the energy, discipline, and joy they provided the children
We had planned for 60 children and 100 showed up , so we had to scramble for other gifts for the boys and older children.
Here are pictures from our second Dollie Distribution.  This place breaks my heart.  It is by far the neediest of the places we visited; hence our decision to distribute dollies/teddies here.  It is a complicated situation.  If the children are not complete orphans, they have been either abandoned or signed over by their parents – a common practice in Haiti – because the parents had no ability to feed them.  Over time, people kept leaving children at a neighborhood woman’s home and she became registered as an orphanage to receive assistance.
There is little help to take care of the children, so the older children pitch in with the younger children. Food is scarce. Â The children have no toys, almost no furniture.Â
Some of the kids responded to our Dollie distribution with immediate smiles…others were very quiet which at first confused me. As I reflected, it felt as if many of them had never had something of his/her own..something new…something made so lovingly….and I realized that the quiet was a kind of solemn reverence with which they were accepting the gift of dollies/teddies.
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Here are some of the kids , with happy smiles after dollie distribution.
