The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Joy rising from rubble
Church members’ trip reveals Haiti’s optimism
GUILFORD — Libby Heller doesn’t speak Creole, but she had no trouble communicating with a young Haitian girl on the other side of a soccer field.
Heller was one of a group of 18 parishioners from St. George Roman Catholic Church who traveled to Port-au-Prince in mid-January to learn about the country and to meet the college student the parish is supporting through its outreach ministry.
The first morning they were there, Heller saw a girl, 3 or 4 years old, whose family lives on a rooftop across the field, and started playing Simon Says with her. “Every morning, it was like 6:30 and she would always be awake,” Heller said. One would make a move; the other would copy it. One would dance; so would the other.
At one point, the girl ran into her house and came out with a backpack. Heller went and got hers. “She
thought it would be so cool that I had a backpack and so did she,” Heller said. “In her mind’s eye, it was like, ‘I have the pleasure of going to school.’”
Claire Nicholls, St. George’s director of youth ministry, has brought teenagers from the parish to Haiti every summer but three since 2003. (Since the cholera epidemic following a devastating 2010 earthquake, they’ve alternated with trips to Italy, but there will be two trips with juniors and seniors this year.)
Nicholls “instantly became passionate about the cause” of Haiti after hearing a speaker in 2000, she said. “Three years ago, we decided that we should get the adults of the parish involved,” she said. “It’s lifechanging.”
This year’s group landed in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 11, the same day President Donald Trump made his scatological comment about Haiti and other poor countries. “We had children in an orphanage ask if we liked Trump,” said Eileen Jenetopulos. They asked Erin Nicholls, Claire’s daughter, who speaks Creole, to “come up with a word for ‘embarrassing.’ ” Jenetopulos said.
The Rev. Stephen Sledesky, pastor of St. George, said, “The people realize that as Americans we’re not all like what they see in the news. They see Americans coming down to Haiti and they see the compassion that we bring.”
“Despite so much trash and the lack of sanitation, there seemed to be so many bright spots there,” said Susie Kesselring. “The most shocking thing was seeing the children and being in the orphanages. The positive take was the people that I had been with and had traveled before — they could see progress.”
The orphanage the group visited was the Fondation Paula Thybulle, known as Paula’s Home for Girls.
“There are good things happening and there is change and they are empowering people to do good,” Kesselring said.
“The children were playful and bright . ... The lessons were in cursive and beautiful and the kids were so proud to show us their classroom.”
The group also met with Weesler Pierre-Louis, whom St. George has been sponsoring and who attends Quisqueya University. Pierre-Louis gets straight As and would “scrape together whatever he could to get the money to attend school,” Sledesky said. “He would tutor other kids in order to be able to use their books because he couldn’t afford books.”
Kara Heller, Libby’s mother, said it was “important to understand that we here at St. George [are] able to transform this child’s life in a way that is unimaginable is incredible. Now he is in a highly professional collegiate setting,” studying agronomy, able “to go from one extreme to another because we said yes.”
He will help his community farm the land to support his community,” Claire Nicholls said.
Another meeting was held with Amber Walsh of Wallingford, deputy country director of the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, which offers scholarships to Haitians so they can attend college.
One of the most powerful stops was to St. Damien’s Hospital for Children in Tabarre and the St. Luke Foundation for Haiti, run by the Rev. Rick Frechette, a Passionist priest from West Hartford. Besides offering care and social services, Frechette also offers Christian burials for unclaimed bodies.
“Some are from the hospital but some are brought in from the streets because they know he’ll take care of them,” Sledesky said. “When we were celebrating Mass, he got down on his knees … with such reverence and such respect,” praying over bodies “that could have ended up on a garbage heap somewhere.
“I felt compelled to do the same, kneel down and not just stand at a distance but to offer that same kind of reverence,” Sledesky said.
“What an honor it was to be at that funeral,” said Cathi Petrick.
She said she thought at the time that it would be OK “if this is one of the last things I do on Earth, to be here and celebrate that person’s life.”
Kara Heller added, “One of the greatest privileges I’ll have in my life was carrying that cardboard casket with two souls” of deceased infants. The adults didn’t even have caskets.
Jenetopulos said it was moving “to see how respectful everyone there was. The room was filled with interns from Notre Dame University.”
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with most people unemployed and living on less than $2 a day. It was devastated by a 2016 hurricane as well as by the 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera epidemic, which has claimed 8,000 victims, according to NPH USA (NPH stands for “Our Little Brothers and Sisters” in Spanish).
‘More than just a church’
Despite the poor conditions, the members of St. George who had visited before found hope in the incremental improvements in the infrastructure and the optimism of the people.
While Port-au-Prince was in poor shape before 2010, “The earthquake was bad,” Claire Nicholls said. “The total desolation was just awful, nothing but rubble all around Port-auPrince. For a long time there were tent cities everywhere you looked. Those are pretty much gone now.
“There’s been a lot of positive change, before the earthquake but since the earthquake for sure,” she said. The group met with Msgr. Pierre-André Pierre, rector of Notre Dame University of Haiti, who was partially buried for 45 minutes.
Nicholls said Pierre left the central city and “came upon a soccer field where all the people in that area were being cared for.”
“There was no church in that neighborhood. … They said to him, ‘Please help us,’” Nicholls said. “Monsignor and the people in that community have now built a church,” St. Francis de Sales, which offers social services and a mobile clinic. A well was dug to provide fresh water.
“They’re caring for an entire community. It’s more than just a church,” Nicholls said.
“In the three years (since the last trip), each and every place we’d been to, there was tangible change,” said Heller. “Three is devastation but there is also such hope within that devastation.”
Erin Nicholls, who has been to Haiti 10 times since 2009, said she started going as part of a Haitian outreach ministry of the Diocese of Norwich. One of her trips “involved going to tent cities, finding students who were part of the scholarship program . ... Creole came in handy,” she said.
The ministry’s TierneyTobin Memorial Scholarship Program served “100 students in the immediate neighborhood around the mission house,” Nicholls said. “That scholarship program really catered to the poorest of the poor” with “high standards.”
“Every time has been transformative,” Nicholls said. “It impacts the way you see the world and your place in it. It always recommits me to social justice and to helping people who are far less fortunate than we are.”
Marge O’Donnell made the point that “they’re helping themselves. They’re working on programs, a lot of grass-roots programs. They’re not getting government handouts. They take care of themselves because they have to.”
O’Donnell said it was her first trip and she “didn’t know what to expect. It was very eye-opening, to say the least.”
Petrick also was impressed by “how people really take care of themselves. I was really blown away with how kind and loving every person was. It was such a breath of fresh air.”
Offered lollipops, the children would respectfully take one and step aside, and not complain if the supply ran out, Petrick said. She appreciated “how generous to us” the people were. “It’s so different but they just give. It’s not something that you see every day here.”
Heller said the people weren’t envious. “The only thing they have is love and it shows up in so many different ways. You’re left with communicating with them on a different human level.”
For Cindy Wallace, a sign of the Haitian people’s hope was the rebuilding of Sacred Heart School, which is a one-story building but includes stairs that lead to a not-yet-built second floor. “They’re hopeful that there will be another story, so they’ll put the stairs in,” she said.
Resilience and joy
Sledesky said he had last seen the area when the school was in the planning stages, “just a building lot that they hadn’t even acquired yet … and [now] it was a really nice building.
“I’m always amazed,” Sledesky said. “You see the poverty. … It’s still the remnants of the earthquake and the destruction that’s still around and yet at the same time you see the beauty of the people, their resilience … and their joy. And I think people here have a hard time finding joy even with all the stuff we have.”
“I think the hardest part about Haiti is that’s all happening while we’re all here and living our lives,” Wallace said. “You can get lazy and forget that they’re here. Every time I close my eyes I see a face, someone I met there.”
Wallace co-owns Cilantro Specialty Foods at 85 Whitfield St. and sells Honey for Haiti, whose owners devote profits to an orphanage for children living with HIV/ AIDS in Kenscoff, Haiti.
“That was groundbreaking in Haiti because they didn’t think anybody who was infected with HIV could live near anybody else,” Wallace said.
Emily Ring, for whom the trip was “just my second time” in Haiti, said, “I think it makes you realize that not everybody grows up in a place like Guilford,” where water from the faucet, a hot shower, and throwing away food is common. “It is kind of easy to fall back and just getting here and doing what I do every single day,” she said.
Sledesky said the trips benefit St. George because they “provide an opportunity for people to have an experience of a Third World country … to realize how good we have it here and hopefully to have empathy.
When they are asked why they help Haitians when there are so many poor people close by, the St. George members have ready answers.
Nicholls said she refers to a map and says “Jesus didn’t draw those lines. You don’t just have to help people here. You can help people everywhere.
“We see ourselves first of all as sisters and brothers in one human family and to make that effort to care for our neighbors and this is a really close neighbor,” Sledesky said. He said the parish also has ministries in the New Haven area and to Appalachia.
“We do, as a parish, reach out to all those different constituents, but we can’t just stop at our border.”