Last night at Milk Studios in New York City, models Coco Rocha and Behati Prinsloo screened this film about their post-earthquake humanitarian trip to Haiti. It’s 23 minutes long, but well worth a look. As is Lakay Pam, the charity Prinsloo and Rocha opted to work with, which runs orphanages, schools, and extra-curricular sports clubs for some of Haiti’s poorest children. Haiti had an estimated 380,000 orphans before last January’s devastating earthquake; since the disaster, that number has more than doubled, to nearly 1 million. Watch as Rocha and Prinsloo, along with Cedric Roche of Lakay Pam, and Rocha’s husband, James Conran, and agency booker, Micki Schneider, organize a drive to collect letters from children in the West, have them translated, and match them as pen-pals with the Haitian kids. They visit schools and orphanages, play soccer, and venture into one of Port-au-Prince’s notorious tent cities. The part where a little girl gets a coloring book, and her entire face changes, is heart-breaking. As Rocha pointed out last night, all of these children are eligible for adoption. (John Seabrook wrote movingly of his and his wife’s years-long effort to adopt an orphan from Haiti in the New Yorker last year.) If you can’t do that, surely you can kick Lakay Pam, or another organization doing good work in Haiti, some cash.
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