At the end of our six-day immersion trip to the St. Boniface Hospital in Haiti, I asked the members of our group to share the ten minutes that each of them remembered the most.
"Imagine that you are bringing home a camera full of images. Which one do you hope that your editor will put on the cover of the magazine?"
Their answers speak for themselves:
"We were on a walking tour of Fond des Blanc with the ‘mayor,' said Father Dick Butler. "We came to a home in which ten people lived in two rooms. The mayor was describing that when it rains the roof leaks and no one can sleep. The mother brought her only two chairs into the yard, covered the seats with a clean t-shirt, and asked me if I would like to sit down. I can't tell you how moved I was by that gesture."
Lea Crivello has been to Fond des Blanc before, but she said, "I have never felt as deeply about poverty as I did in the fishing village of Mouliage Fouquet. The houses were made of woven sticks and thatched roofs, and the children were dressed in rags, if they were dressed at all. Many children had light colored hair, a sign of malnutrition. Some women asked the young girl who was with us if they could have her white dress. And yet we were there to see the new fishing boats that Food for the Poor had given the village. The men showed us a cooler filled with fish. They were very proud that they could sell the fish to buyers from Port au Prince. And I was struck by the beautiful symbol of bounty in a place of such poverty."
At the Mission of Charity Orphanage in Port au Prince, Kate Moynihan remembers that "the first baby I held was starving. I had never been that close to a child that was likely to die. There were twenty other babies in the room, and most seemed healthy. I held every baby in the room over the course of the next two hours. I felt something from inside each one on them flow into me. I know that they felt calmer and loved, if only for that short time." Renee Goodspeed and Katie Wisel both agreed that the orphanage made them realize how basic, and how universal, the needs of these children really are.
John Healy shared an experience late in the trip. "In Port au Prince we asked Bernard, our driver, to show us a wealthier suburb of the city. We drove up a long hill, and as we did, the first things we noticed were the new cars with no dents. Then we saw the police and the security guards and walls lined with razor wire. We turned into the gate of the Hotel Montana and there were more men guarding the luxurious lobby of the hotel. Five minutes before we had been in a neighborhood strewn with garbage, buildings covered with graffiti and miles of street vendors. In five minutes we saw the great gap between the rich and the poor in Haiti."
The image that appeared most vividly for me came as I was walking with J.P. on our way back from the beekeepers, and I saw stacks of lumber in a yard and the rough frame of a headboard leaning against the porch. The furniture maker, a young man, showed us the dining room set, the bed and the coffins he had made. He owned two planes and three chisels. Yet he was passionate about his work. I thought about what this man could do in a real workshop and what a waste of human potential this was.
I also interviewed six young men who attended St. Francis High School. Three of them wanted to study medicine. Another wanted to be an electrician. All six of them said that the St. Boniface Hospital was the reason they had hope, and all six wanted to return after university to give something back to their community.
Kate Moynihan, the Director of Development, organized this immersion tour because, "I wanted to share the Haiti that I knew. It wasn't something you could just talk about. I wanted people to understand what St. Boniface has meant to the Fond des Blanc community. It's really about the hundred patients who are lined up at the hospital at 5:00 a.m. Or the pride of that a beekeeper has for the honey he produces. Or the fishermen who now can go out to the outer reef to catch bigger fish. It's about people like Real, who started by recording the weights of all the babies in Cha Cha, and now he wants to learn how to keep his records on a computer and how to give immunization shots. That's the story of Haiti that I wanted people to experience."
