Kelly Smith and Jeff Sheen will be on the quad at USU to answer questions on September 1.

If you are will walk through Utah State University’s Day on the Quad—or you know somebody who is—make sure you watch for these faces from the CPD on September 1. They’ll be there from 10:30 to 2:30.

Information specialist Kelly Smith and volunteer coordinator Jeff Sheen will be handing out information about our volunteer program, our undergraduate research program and the Interdisciplinary Awareness and Service Learning Class. All three of these programs have something in common: they’re looking for committed, good students. For more information, visit Kelly and Jeff on the Quad—and visit this website.

Parent-child play is good for development. Read all about it in the CPD's April NewsFlash.

Check out April’s NewsFlash, featuring the CPD’s multifaceted approach to autism and a fundraising campaign for the CPD’s new developmental playground, which will help provide support to the families of children with disabilities. We thank all conors and volunteers who have already contributed to this project and invite others to join in the effort.

Happy reading, and happy spring.

Jeff Sheen, back row center, stands with 11 volunteers from Grand Valley State University who spent part of their spring break helping out at the CPD.

This month’s NewFlash features volunteers who came from halfway across the country to help at the CPD.

We recently wrote about George Wootton, a CPD employee and family nurse practitioner who went to Haiti to help rebuild the Healing Hands for Haiti clinic.

He went with the Utah Hospitals Task Force. The organization is keeping a blog with frequent updates. Visit the blog for a look at how the rebuilding effort is going.

George Wootton

George Wootton will take the next three weeks off work, but it will be no vacation.

Instead he will be one of 150 volunteers working to rebuild the Healing Hands for Haiti clinic in Port-au-Prince through the Utah Hospital Task Force. The trip’s organizers ended up turning many volunteers away, but Wootton was among those selected.

The aid organizers were looking for people who could provide medical, construction and translation expertise. As a family nurse practitioner and a man with construction and carpentry experience, he filled two of the three skills the group was looking for. He currently provides psychiatric evaluations and general medical care at the CPD’s Medical Clinic. His experience includes years of providing primary care.

That said, he has been told to be flexible, since the project could require him to swing a hammer as well as care for patients. “We’ll be doing whatever they ask us to do,” he said. The volunteers’ objective is to rebuild the clinic, which collapsed in the January 12 earthquake. Efforts are coordinated through the United States Agency for International Development.

Security will be provided, and the effort is well-organized, Wootton said. All the same, the situation will be unpredictable. Transportation may not be reliable, and Wootton is prepared to see some sad things. He is not completely sure that a plane will be available to fly them out at the end of the three-week period.

Still, the CPD’s management has supported his plans and accommodated his absence, he said. “Nobody has said anything but, ‘George, do this.’”

His personal plea is for people to continue giving generously, though the earthquake has begun fading from the news. The novelty of the story may have worn off, but the needs are only increasing, he said.

The United Nations reports 112,250 deaths from the quake—and that number does not take into account the bodies still trapped in rubble or buried by private means.