Waukegan pastor helps homeland
When the Rev. Jean Franco Valdemar was a boy in Haiti, the son of a single mother who worked as a maid for the equivalent of $1 a month, missionaries arrived bearing gifts.
But it is not the second-hand shoes, new notebooks or sacks of flour that Valdemar recalls with the deepest gratitude. It’s presence of the visitors and the relationships they fostered among some of the poorest people on Earth.
“They made Haiti their home,” Valdemar recalled. “They went everywhere. They played soccer with the kids. They gave us hope. When a missionary left, we cried like we were losing a brother or a sister.”
Valdemar, 52, of Waukegan, who left Port-Au-Prince for the United States in 1986, is “paying forward” that charitable zeal through his own ministry, Hope for the American and Haitian Youths and the Elderly. Valdemar, who holds two master’s degrees from Trinity International University in Deerfield, serves as pastor at a Chicago church and an adjunct faculty member for Judson College in Elgin.
He organizes shipments of supplies and medical and other mission trips to the Caribbean country, where 80 percent of the populace lives in poverty and where more than 300,000 still live in tents after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit in 2010.
On Wednesday, Valdemar jumped into the driver’s seat of a 1993 yellow school bus parked in his driveway and turned the key. It growled to life and Valdemar grinned. He got a good deal on the bus, which he plans to ship to Haiti to transport kids to and from mission programs. The bus is jam-packed with boxes of clothing, medicines, toiletries and other supplies to be distributed by his ministry..
“I serve a God of healing, and this is how he’s healing today,” said Valdemar, glancing over his shoulder at dozens of boxes of shoes and sandals stuck into every available nook and cranny. “Love is the best medicine.”
Food is an important part of the ministry.
“We need to care about the belly,” said Valdemar, who hopes to raise an additional $4,000 to ship the bus by August.
A year before the earthquake, which struck 45 minutes before Valdemar arrived in Haiti, his ministry drew hundreds of destitute children to a youth camp where they learned that they could play a role in their own country’s development.
“We tell them first to stay in school,” Valdemar said. “Second, learn a trade, have respect for human dignity and do something positive.”
Valdemar’s ministry is constructing a Leadership Training Center in the city of La Plaine, where youths and adults will learn skilled trades so they can find employment and help rebuild their country.
The project is in cooperation with the Black Chamber of Commerce of Lake County, which operates a similar program.
Valdemar also is seeking donations of time and money to help put a roof on a second-story addition to the training center — a missionary guest house that, he hopes, will be filled with a stream of new visitors who want to make friends in Haiti.
“We’re running out of funds,” Valdemar said. “That is my most pressing challenge.”