|
Categories
Latest Postings
Links
Archives
|
« Part I: Haiti beckons to Valley Efforts improve outlook for country By Cindy Corell • ccorell@newsleader.com • December 27, 2009 | Part II: Projects lead the way in efforts to connect schools »
Part I: Haiti beckons to Valley Efforts improve outlook for country By Cindy Corell • ccorell@newsleader.com • December 27, 2009
Part 1 con’t:
Haiti’s high mountains, once green and lush, are nearly bald because people cut the trees to use as charcoal. Without flora to hold the precious topsoil, rain washes it from the hillsides making agricultural endeavors nearly impossible and further polluting creeks and rivers where most people get their drinking water. It adds up to make Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Among the thousands of organizations that want to help are hundreds of people from the Shenandoah Valley. Projects range in size from a shoe drive by members of Staunton’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — 400 pairs of shoes designated for Haiti — to a collaborative effort known as Haiti Outreach Foundation Inc., which began in 2007 through St. Francis Catholic Church and continues to grow. Dr. Linda Kofeldt who was instrumental in getting the foundation started said she was amazed at how many people in the Valley have projects in Haiti. “I know there are a lot of people all over the country helping there, but I can tell you, person-for-person, head-for-head, there are more people in this Valley helping out,” she said. “If you throw a stone, you’re going to hit three people who have been to Haiti.” Patrick Eugene is not surprised so many people in the area travel to the tiny nation, only an hour’s flight from Miami. He came to the U.S. from Haiti in 2006 to study computer science, starting out at Blue Ridge Communty College and now studying as a senior at James Madison University. In early December, he began teaching Haitian Creole to more than a dozen local people who visit partner schools or communities in Haiti. “One reason so many go is because Haiti is so close,” Eugene said. “If they prefer, they can go to Haiti on a Friday and come back on Sunday or Monday.” Eugene’s parents encouraged each of their five children to take any opportunity for higher education. “They always are pushing us,” he said. “They say, ‘If you can get access, push yourself. And I want you to come back to help people here.’” He met a handful of his students before the Haitian Creole class started, and Eugene had a question for them: “I never met anybody who has been to Haiti who doesn’t say, ‘I love the people there.’” “Why?” One of his students, the Rev. Roger Bowen has been going to Haiti for 27 years, partnering Episcopal schools with schools in Haiti. The payoff, he said, is tremendous, because in spite of their poverty and need, the people in the countryside exude a spirit of resilience and deep faith, a spirit that inspires visitors. “I go sometimes for selfish reasons,” Bowen said. “But it wears off, so I have to go back.” For almost everyone who travels to Haiti, the first trip is rife with unforgettable sights, smells and sounds. Lacey Derrow’s expectations weren’t that high, but arriving in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere for the first time last spring still shocked her. She and other Blue Ridge Community College students went with Students for Free Enterprise to help people in a village on the island of La Gonave establish a rabbit cooperative. “I expected to not shower much, more or less get a wake-up call,” she said. “But when we came out of the staircase of the plane, we saw cops chasing someone down the street. There were burning piles of garbage, big holes in the streets. Going out to La Gonave, someone was bailing water out the back of the boat.” Quickly, showering moved even further down Derrow’s list of priorities. All the reading and study he could manage wasn’t enough to prepare the Rev. Rob Sherrard for Haiti. He first went in 1984 to establish a partnership with an Episcopal parish near Leogane. “When we got to the airport in Port-au-Prince — at that time it was a complete mess, chaos,” he said. “If I could have crawled back up into my mother’s arms and be rocked a little bit, I’d have appreciated that.” Dr. Dennis Hatter of Stuarts Draft describes vivid sights and sounds from the clinics he has hosted on the trip he has taken nearly every year since 2000. With a day’s notice, hundreds of Haitians flood to the small brick building he uses in Poulay. Some carry old Coke bottles with corncob stoppers in case they’re lucky enough to carry liquid medicine home with them. Old gardeners wait hours for a cortisone shot for arthritic shoulders and elbows. The medication almost immediately relieves the pain, and like veteran athletes, the patients wiggle their shoulders with joy. “They will dance around afterward, moving their arms back and forth,” Hatter said. “It will hold them for a while.” On a recent trip, two young girls brought in an infant. When he examined the child, the medical problem wasn’t evident. “I asked the translator, what do they want? What’s wrong with the baby? “She said, ‘They want you to take it. They want to give away the baby.” As Megan Samples, who will go to Haiti with the SIFE group for the first time next month, says, “Haiti is a basket case when it comes to needs.”
Permission to republish granted by Cindy Corell
Leave a Reply |