DECEMBER 16, 2016 DANVILLE, KY – As part of its Telmate Cares community outreach program, the San Francisco-based corrections company Telmate donated $1,500 to support a dozen volunteers providing relief to Haitians devastated by the effects of Hurricane Matthew.
A week after the Category 4 hurricane storm hammered Haiti in early October, Jailer Barry Harmon of Boyle County Detention Center, Kentucky, began collecting donations for the volunteer effort during the Kentucky Jailers Association (KJA) fall conference. Telmate matched KJA’s $1,500 donation and additional donations were made by local community and church groups. Harmon is a member of Christ Like Agape Ministry (CLAM), a missionary group that’s spent the last three years sponsoring the small village of Port-au-Ceil.
“We had to fly by small plane, land in goat fields, cross a swing bridge, and drive about 2 hours to travel about 7-8 miles from Pignon to the Port-au-Ceil village,” recalled Jailer Harmon, who took his dedicated team of doctors, law enforcement officials and church members on a grueling eight-day expedition to aid hurricane victims in the impoverished town.
Once they arrived and assessed that survivors needed immediate medical assistance, the team set up two clinics. Even though doctors aided nearly 200 victims, they soon realized food was in even higher demand than medical aid. So CLAM set about purchasing twenty-two, 55-pound bags of beans and sixty-six, 55-pound bags of rice to help feed families for nearly a week.
“Everywhere we went, the people were happy to get that food,” said Jailer Harmon, “because it meant life or death.” Before Hurricane Matthew hit, the village had been in a three-month drought, resulting in a loss of corn crops and dramatically shortening food supplies. The average family income in Haiti is about $400 per year and 98% of the population is poverty.
In addition to medical and food aid, the team also hosted daily bible conferences to help boost morale. “Some people walked 10 miles to come, and that’s just one way,” Harmon reported.
Group members will continue to collect and send donations to help rebuild the village. Anyone interested in participating in CLAM’s on-going outreach program can contact Phillip Yates, President of CLAM, at (859) 265-1821 or Phillipyates_1@bellsouth.net. Monetary donations to help victims of Port-au-Ceil may also be mailed to Christ Like Agape Ministries Inc., P.O. Box 638, Burgin, Ky. 40310. Checks should be payable to “Christ Like Agape Ministries Inc.” or “CLAM.”
The Telmate Cares mission to give back, honor and improve the lives of the people in the communities the company serves. For questions about the Telmate Cares program, please visit https://www.telmate.com/telmatecares/.
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About Telmate:
Telmate is a leading provider of secure corrections and community corrections solutions including phone, tablet, visitation, messaging, education and entertainment content, corrections applications, investigator tools and GPS monitoring. Telmate’s cutting-edge platforms are deployed in over 300 correctional facilities in the U.S. and Canada. Telmate is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an employee presence nationwide. To find out more about Telmate, visit www.telmate.com.
