In 2010, she played outside St. François de Salle Hospital in Vaudreuil, Haiti, while her mother sold lunches to staff and visitors. She could not afford school. Today she is a registered nurse in Cap-Haïtien.
When I first started working in Haiti in 2010, I worked at a hospital called St. François de Salle in Vaudreuil, just outside Cap-Haïtien.
There was a lady who sold food outside the hospital. Really nice lady. She cooked meals around lunchtime every day and sold them to people in the hospital and to the employees. But she had three daughters as well (and a son) who were always there, playing.
One of the daughters was just a real magnetic little ten- or eleven-year-old girl. Dancing in the street. Helping her mom cook.
Come to find out, mom couldn't afford school for the children.
So as we talked and got to know them better, I started helping her with the three girls' school. The boy wasn't interested in school at that time. Two of the girls kind of fell back. But one girl, Darline, really took to school.
With the help of some friends in Atlanta, I was able to continue paying her school clear through high school graduation.
She always admired the work we did there. She wanted to be a nurse as well.
Darline went on to become a nurse. We paid school all the way through nursing school. And after graduation, she went on to work as a nurse, supporting her family, and helping her sisters finish school as well.
That's my one person. The one in two hundred who actually got a job from being helped with education in Haiti. We built this Foundation to change that math.
Randy Moore Co-Founder · Registered Nurse · 16 years in Haiti
Over sixteen years of working in Haiti, Randy watched friends, churches, and well-meaning organizations send millions of dollars into Haitian education. The math was always the same. Roughly one in every two hundred children funded actually completed school and entered the workforce.
The other 199? Money disappeared into uniforms that weren't bought, tuition that didn't reach the school, families pulled apart by hunger, illnesses that ended schooling, and a brain drain that pulled the few graduates to Miami, Port-au-Prince, or the Dominican Republic.
Darline is the exception. The Foundation is built to make her the rule.
Children funded → meaningful employment in Haiti.
Paid directly to the school. Never to a middleman.
Funded by Darline, working as a nurse.
Nutrition + healthcare + English + tech.
Darline's path wasn't accidental. Looking back, the things that worked for her became the design principles for the Foundation.
Darline's family was already at the hospital every day. Her access to basic healthcare, even informally, kept her in school when illness would have pulled most children out. That's why every HCT child now has $15/year locked healthcare through Sarepta, before school even starts.
Darline's mother fed her every day. Many of her classmates went without. Attendance and learning collapse when children are hungry. That's why HCT ties a daily meal to attendance: every child, every school day, for $45 a month.
Randy paid Darline's school fees directly to the school. No cash handed to families. No "lost" receipts. No middleman. That's the discipline HCT carries forward: every $450 tuition goes to the institution, on a schedule, with documentation.
Darline became a nurse, a marketable, in-demand profession in Haiti. The HCT model extends this principle: English-first education feeds technology training feeds the Tech Center. Every graduate has a job to walk into, in Haiti.
Photos from St. François de Salle, Hôpital Sarepta, and the surrounding Cap-Haïtien community, taken by Randy across sixteen years of nursing in Haiti.
$1,500 sponsors one child through an entire year: tuition paid to the school, daily meals, healthcare through Sarepta, uniform, books. The same discipline that worked for Darline, multiplied by thirty in Year 1.
