Hello! My name is Jamie Schumacher, and I started traveling to Haiti in 2009. On my first trip there in November of 2009, I met Gertrude and the children she cares for at Notre Maison/St. Joe's orphanages. I fell in love with the people and the country and began looking for ways to return as soon as possible. I have been blessed to have been able to return many times and develop relationships not only with Gertrude and the children, but also with many of the people who stay at Providence Guesthouse. Over the years Gertrude and I discussed the need for educational opportunities for special-needs kids in Haiti, and from those conversations came the idea for us to build a school to educate special-needs students. So, I decided to take a leave of absence from my job from January 2013-June 2013 and spend those months in Haiti working to make that school a reality.
Fast forward seven years to 2016. At that time I decided to quit my teaching job in Illinois and move to Haiti to focus on opening the school that Gertrude and I had dreamed of. For the first year I lived and worked at Morning Star Christian Academy in Port-au-Prince, and in January of 2017 Gertrude was able to rent us school space from the Catholic Church so that we could finally open our school!
We opened our doors to students in the Fall of 2017 and had a very successful year! In order to focus my time and energy on the Haiti Center for Inclusive Education (HCIE), I quit my paying job at Morning Star and started full-time at HCIE in September 2018.
The Center grew quickly, and in 2019-2020 the school was a full-fledged primary school with 1ere Année kindergarten through 6eme Année fundamentale.
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