Miami Herald - Sunday, June 24, 2001
Walter Pacheco - wpacheco@herald.com

The city recently granted her a permit to operate the Anna Pierre Health Education Center at 12402 West Dixie Hwy. At the June 12 North Miami City Council meeting, Mayor Josaphat Celestin remembered Pierre's singing days.

"Are you Anna Pierre, the singer?" Celestin asked. "I have your albums. You're a wonderful singer."

Pierre smiled but stressed that she is a nurse -- the career that guided her to open the clinic, which screens for glucose, high blood pressure and diabetes.

"I became a nurse in Miami, but I had to start over from my education in Haiti," Pierre said Friday. "I worked as a nursing assistant at Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged at Douglas Gardens." She worked there for six years and became a registered nurse in 1987.

Pierre has worked at Jackson Memorial Hospital since 1988. In 1990, she began educating fellow Haitians about AIDS and other diseases. It was her response to the early years of witnessing the disease firsthand at the hospital.

"As a center, we want to provide community services to prevent diseases," Pierre said. "If people know how to take care of themselves, they can avoid being hospitalized."

Pierre said in the Haitian community, the language barrier keeps people from getting help.

"There is fear of immigration, or that they are not legal and [they] remain sick because they are afraid that they may be turned in," Pierre said.

Pierre hopes other high-profile people in the Haitian community can help her achieve her goals for the community.

She toured with various Haitian bands or as a solo act, performing Afro-Haitian rhythms in Creole and English during the 1990s for the Miami Light Project. She often appeared at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach, on Creole-language radio station WLQY-AM 1320 and at the defunct Studio 183.

Pierre said many people attended the Father's Day Health Fair her organization sponsored on June 16 at the Notre Dame D'Haiti Church, 130 NE 62nd St., Miami.

"Out of 750 people screened, more than 350 people had high blood glucose and did not even know it," she said. "Luckily, my collaboration with Jackson Hospital allows me to provide many of these free screenings to people who may not be able to afford it."

Pierre was honored along with U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, D-Miami, in February by Jackson Memorial Hospital as outstanding community leaders.

Much of the clinic's work is paid for by Pierre and her friends.

"I salute anyone who supports raising and enhancing health education in the Haitian community," Rick Siclari, executive director of the Coral Gables AIDS organization Care Resource, said Friday. "That is a community that has a tremendous need for addressing HIV and AIDS and it makes perfect sense to start that kind of program there."

Pierre's clinic can be reached at 305-981-9010 from 4 to 8 p.m. or by e-mail at anp2k@hotmail.com.

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