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Happening ... in the Local Church
By Kevin Cullen
The
Catholic Moment
The magnitude 7 earthquake that wracked Haiti is sending spiritual aftershocks across the Lafayette diocese, especially to parishes that “twin” with rural churches in the beleaguered Caribbean nation.
Some have postponed regular mission trips. Instead, they are raising money needed to help the injured, homeless and hungry in the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince.
Each year, more than a dozen Local Church parishes send missionary teams to Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Volunteers build buildings, work in clinics, support schools and provide other aid.
“Haiti doesn’t need one more disaster,” said Jeff Newell, a Lafayette attorney who has made 12 trips from the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception.
Newell coordinates Central Indiana Churches for Haiti (CINCH). Fifteen parishes in the Lafayette diocese are CINCH members and “twin” with Haitian parishes, but none had a team in Haiti when the quake struck on Jan. 12.
Newell is working to get medical supplies, money and a medical team to Haiti.
He, his wife and seven other volunteers returned from Haiti on Jan. 3 after 15 days there.
The Newells’ son, Kyle, 26, narrowly escaped the disaster, which is believed to have killed more than 100,000 people in and near the capital of Port-au-Prince. He was staying in a private home in that city.
“I returned to the States about 12 hours or so before the earthquakes happened, primarily because I have malaria and I didn’t want to stay down there,” he said by phone from Boston, where he is in graduate school at Tufts University. “I was supposed to stay through the 18th, but I’m glad I didn’t. The place where I was staying, like most places, has been destroyed. I was pretty lucky.”
The owner of the house was downtown when the quake hit, and escaped unhurt.
Kyle Newell contracted a mild form of malaria while on his 13th trip to Haiti. He’s thankful to be alive, but he said he still thinks “I should have been there doing something (to help) … the city is built of cement with little foundations, on the side of a mountain. In an earthquake, everything sinks into the valley.”
The cathedral parish in Lafayette is twinned with St. Joseph Church in Pendus, a rural parish 120 miles northwest of the capital. The Pendus parish sustained minor damage.
“There will be severe shortages of everything — food, fuel and water,” Jeff Newell said. “I don’t want to think about what could happen when people are so desperate. There are no water or sewer lines anyway, but the roads and bridges may be gone … I have heard that parts of the ground were just swallowed up in some areas.”
He urged people to donate to Catholic Relief Services and the Red Cross. Checks earmarked for Haiti will be used on emergency services.
“You know they will deliver the goods and not waste the money,” Newell said. He is working to raise money, collect medical supplies and assemble a medical mission.
St. Thomas Aquinas Church in West Lafayette sponsored a special Mass for the people of Haiti on Jan. 13, the day after the quake hit. Parishioners from Purdue University and the community offered special prayers for retired registered nurse Sue Alexander, a parishioner who arrived in Port-au-Prince two hours before the disaster occurred. The Red Cross volunteer has been caring for Haitians since 1994.
Alexander later sent a message back with another American, saying that she was unhurt. She returned home Jan. 17.
Father Patrick Baikauskas, OP, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas, said that his parish’s “twin,” St. Francis Xavier in Baudin, sustained “extensive damage. The school has been destroyed, and other buildings around the parish have been damaged. We have a lot of work to do there.”
Tax-deducible donations may be sent to St. Thomas Aquinas Church with “Haiti Earthquake Relief” in the memo line. Every dollar will go to help Haitians, Father Baikauskas said.
John Ginda of West Lafayette is treasurer and past president of the Haiti Committee at St. Thomas Aquinas. He has made 12 trips to Haiti since 2001.
Baudin is 40 miles from Port-au-Prince. Some parish buildings there were heavily damaged, but no one was killed.
“A secondary school may have to be torn down and rebuilt,” Ginda said. “A number of masonry security walls around the convent and the medical clinic have fallen over … the rectory has some issues.”
A major factor hampering rescue efforts, he said, is a general lack of heavy equipment that could be used in recovery work. In Haiti, most construction, excavation and demolition work still is done by hand.
“There is no such thing as a first-responder in Haiti,” Ginda said. “You don’t have the government construction projects that would have the equipment that could be used for search and rescue. The poverty is almost hard to describe, and along with that goes a lack of infrastructure, sewers and trash pickup.”
To compound the problem, Haiti is mountainous, deforested, and prone to erosion. An earthquake causes landslides that block roads and shut off access by emergency vehicles.
A St. Thomas Aquinas dental mission planned for late January may be scrubbed. If roads are impassable, a medical mission planned for early February may be redirected to Port-au-Prince, Ginda said.
Students and staff at the St. Elizabeth School of Nursing in Lafayette are planning to raise money and send it to Catholic Relief Services, said Deacon John Jezierski, director of the school. A mission trip planned for March has been postponed, until possibly summer.
“Normally in March we take a group to Haiti, but because of the earthquake and because we would only go for a week, we decided to cancel,” he said. “Admittedly, we could be of assistance in some sense, but probably not from an organized perspective.”
The temblor was the strongest earthquake to strike Haiti in more than 200 years. Catholic Relief Services braced itself for “thousands and thousands” of casualties, said Karel Zelenka, the agency’s Haiti representative.
Among those killed was Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince. Thousands of buildings were destroyed, including the government buildings, the cathedral, the archbishop’s residence and many churches.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Pope Benedict XVI prayed for victims and urged the international community to be generous in assisting the stricken people of Haiti. He summoned the Church’s many charity organizations to take immediate action.
All U.S. parishes were urged to take up a second collection for Haiti.
Catholic Relief Services has worked in Haiti for 55 years. It is distributing food and water from Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes, and it expects to raise $25 million for quake relief.
“Our staff on the ground say the needs are beyond belief,” said Ken Hackett, CRS president. It has more than 300 staff members working in Haiti, and more are arriving daily.
Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based umbrella organization for Catholic charities, assembled an emergency relief team to fly in to assist Caritas members already working in more than 200 Haitian hospitals and medical centers.
Sister Ann Weller, CSJ, was director of Hospice St. Joseph in Port-au-Prince for 11½ years before retiring and returning to her community’s motherhouse in Tipton in 2001.
“I have had communication that everything where I worked is rubble,” Sister Ann said. “It’s just unbelievable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be wandering around in there.”
The Diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton opened the hospice as co-sponsors in 1989. The hospitality house began by offering free meals, lodging and transportation to the sick poor coming into the capital for medical treatment. In the mid-1990s, Sister Ann added a pharmacy and a medical clinic, which treated thousands.
News coming from Port-au-Prince is “breaking my heart,” she said. “They are good people, friendly people, hard-working people. I had 11½ good years there. I loved my time with the people down there.”
Father Ted Rothrock, pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Carmel, said that his parish had no volunteers in Haiti when the quake struck, but a mission trip is being planned for early February.
A hospital in Port-au-Prince that is supported by the parish survived.
“I’m amazed it’s still standing,” Father Rothrock said. “I have been in it a number of times. It’s still functioning, but of course they don’t have supplies.” Diesel generators are providing electricity.
As of Jan. 15, he had not heard from his parish’s “twin,” St. Genevieve Church in Duval, an hour east of the capital.
St. Mary Church in Anderson twins with the Church of Notre Dame de la Nativite in rural Petit Trou de Nippes, approximately 90 miles from Port-au-Prince. Even before the quake, it took from eight to 10 hours to travel the 90 miles.
“They have made e-mail contact; they said they were OK,” said Mary Helen Phillips, a parishioner who has made 10 trips to Haiti and helps organize medical missions to the village.
None of the five interpreters used by the mission team had been heard from. Three live in Port-au-Prince. If commercial flights are available, another medical mission is planned to start Feb. 12, Phillips said.
“Port-au-Prince is devastating poverty, but the people are pretty happy. We go to church and hear beautiful voices; they smile and laugh. They have become our friends,” Phillips said.
The group from Anderson provides the only medical mission all year.
Phillips said that recovery will be slow and painful, but she hopes that the international community will band together to “make Port-au-Prince a better place.”
Registered nurse Ann LeClerc has made 15 trips to Haiti. Her parish, St. Patrick in Kokomo, is twinned with St. Therese Church in the little village of Marfranc, about 100 miles from Port-au-Prince.
Several houses in Marfranc were destroyed, but no one was killed. “The people are very frightened and afraid to go to bed at night,” LeClerc said. “They don’t know what happened.”
Approximately 20 volunteers are interested in going to Haiti as soon as they can, she said, but she said they want to “move very cautiously” because of the uncertainty of having the food, water and transportation needed.
Mike VandenBossche, of St. Joseph Church, Rochester, has organized many medical mission trips to Notre Dame de Lourdes Parish in Belladere. Although many logistical problems remain, he hopes to send 15 volunteers to Haiti on Jan. 22.
Belladere suffered no earthquake damage or injuries. Surgeons and trauma nurses are urgently needed in Port-au-Prince, he said, but air transportation is chaotic, with recovery teams trying to fly in and Haitians trying to get out.
Rental vehicles and translators are few, so “all of a sudden it’s questionable, doubtful or impossible” to reach Belladere, VandenBossche said.
“They are even telling people to bring your own water, and that’s eight pounds per gallon,” he said, “but the biggest issue would be getting into Port-au-Prince and getting from there to Belladere.”
“They may ask us to stay in Port-au-Prince,” he said. “Next to the parish house run by Haiti Twinning is a soccer field that is serving as a campground and an outdoor hospital. Sister Mary says they are out of medicine, but they’re still functioning.”