Volunteers Build Free Clinics While City Begins Bulldozing, New Orleans

Please Support Free Health Clinics in New Orleans
& the development of a Women's Health Center




VIDEO interview with Common Ground Free Clinic Volunteer, Nurse Midwife Ellen Catalinotto: to view VIDEO go to:
http://www.peoplesvideo.tv/video/CommonGround_160Kbps.mov




With the closing of New Orleans famous public Charity Hospital and numerous small neighborhood clinics and public health care facilities, and with the displacement of thousands of workers who made city health services run on a day to day, bedpan to bedpan basis, many of the residents who found their way back to post-Hurricane New Orleans also found themselves without access to any health care whatsoever; in particular, services for women, like battered women's shelters, birthcontrol, abortion access and prenatal care are inaccessible to many. However, Common Ground Free Clinics are growing in a local and national combined effort of volunteerism to serve the under and unserved residents whose health needs have increased while services have disappeared.




"After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the humanitarian disaster followed exacerbated by existing poverty, racism and the scandalous emergency response and relief operations. Malik Rahima and Sharon Johnson - community activists in Algiers put a call out for a progressive response and for emergency medics to run a first aid station and help develop a permanent health clinic." (commongroundrelief.org) And so began Common Ground's Free Health Clinic in the space of a donated mosque in the Algiers neighborhood of Orleans Parish, just across the river from downtown New Orleans.




This week (and ongoing), teams of volunteers from around the country converge to gut a donated house in the flood-devastated 9th Ward area of New Orleans and build another free clinic while simultaneously, the city of New Orleans responds to the devastion by claiming eminent domain over thousands of homes in the Lower 9th Ward and prepares to bulldoze these homes without proper notification or participation from residents. Hundreds of volunteers from around the country and from within the local community have come together in New Orleans to spend time gutting and building clinics from the ground up, serving patients and organizing to make these clinics happen.




Here is an update on the common ground free clinics with Ellen Catalinotto, volunteer nurse mid-wife at the Algiers Health Clinic. A special needs request to build the Women's Health Centers is included. For extensive information regarding donating resources, volunteering and credentialling, and for more about the context and history of the clinic and common ground relief, please go to: http://www.commongroundrelief.org/2005/10/info_for_volunteers_at_common.html




Women's Center Needs Request:
-gynocological exam tables
-autoclaves
-teaching and educational aids for breast exams, gyn, pregnancy, abortion etc.
-medication samples
-bcps, iuds, cervical caps, diaphragms
-lights
-basic examining room equipment
-safe place for battered and at risk women
-monetary donations
-microscope & lab equipment for testing
-pregnancy tests, pap tests, std tests
-speculums and other gyn instruments
-volunteer staff




www.commongroundrelief.org
contact: healthalgiers@yahoo.com
(504)717-6561
P.O. Box 741801
New Orleans, LA 70174-1801




more new orleans & citizen journalism at
http://www.post-katrinapopulistfunk.blogspot.com
and http://www.peoplesvideo.org