Haiti Overtime

We've moved on, but one last request for Haiti from Beth:

THis is late, but just learned this last night.  Please pray for Notre Dame de 
Lourdes orphanage in Haiti.  The home for 70 girls, ages 3 to 16, was leveled 
during the Earthquake.  Three girls were killed.  The others are living in tents 
on some land that they hope will house a new orphanage.  Friends in Buffalo are 
working on the design and funding of this, so please pray for their efforts 
also.  

More on Haiti

This came from Catholic News Service: 

HAITI-PATIENCE Jul-29-2010 (660 words) With photos. xxxi

Patience of Haitians six months after earthquake impresses US bishops

A destroyed St. Gerard Church in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in early February. (CNS/Bob Roller)

By Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- With cleanup following the Jan. 12 earthquake moving at a snail's pace and life in makeshift shelters the new normal, Haitians are facing their predicament with a spirit of patience that has impressed two American bishops.

"The people are hopeful," Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn, N.Y., told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview July 28 from Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. "There's not a mass depression.

"But at the same time they need some concrete signs of a plan. That's not been developed yet," he said.

Bishop DiMarzio was part of an eight-member delegation from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that arrived in the devastated capital July 25 for a week of meetings with Haitian government officials, Haitian church leaders and Catholic agencies working on migration issues.

Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami described those with whom he spoke after celebrating Mass at one of the hundreds of tent camps that remain in Port-au-Prince as patient, but anxious.

"I asked them how they were doing. They said, 'We're here. We're surviving.' People are certainly anxious in having a sense of where they are going. But they also had a sense of understanding of what could be done under the circumstances," he told CNS between meetings July 28.

Bishop DiMarzio said that based on what he heard during his visit it appears that many people will remain in substandard housing in the camps for at least another six months.

"There's a lot to be done," he said. "We wish it could be done more quickly. I think the weakness of not having a major central government to force things to happen is a problem."

That weakness also has limited progress on recovery and reconstruction efforts. Debris removal is moving at a snail's pace because of a shortage of heavy equipment, the country's poor road system and lack of landfill space to dump material.

Although mountains of debris remain in the earthquake region, Archbishop Wenski said he has found that much of what has been accomplished has gone unnoticed.

"It's certainly a daunting task," he said. "Six months is not a long time in many ways. When you consider ... the amount of debris and rubble here is 10 or 12 times as that generated by the World Trade Center (in 2001). It took several months for that debris to be cleared."

The archbishop also said that cash-for-work programs coordinated by various aid agencies, including Catholic Relief Services, are bolstering the Haitian economy.

The archbishop discussed the recovery process and other needs with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and Eduardo Marques Almeida, representative of the Inter-American Development Bank in Haiti, July 28. A July 26 meeting with Haitian church officials further clarified priorities for rebuilding local parishes, schools and community centers. The earthquake destroyed 70 parishes.

The delegation also had a humanitarian focus to its mission. Bishop DiMarzio was accompanied by staff members of the U.S. bishops' Migration and Refugee Services in an effort to determine how best to meet the needs of children in the aftermath of the quake. Specifically, the delegation was concerned about children who remain separated from their families or orphaned.

The delegation also gathered information about Haitians seeking to immigrate to the United States to reunite with children or family members sent northward for treatment of serious injuries sustained in the disaster.

MRS staff also planned to visit officials in the Bahamas, one of the stopover points for Haitians trying to make their way to the United States.

Archbishop Wenski planned to visit the Haiti-Dominican Republic border before his return to Miami Aug. 1. The area has long been the source of tension between the two countries as Haitians attempt to flee their economically depressed homeland in search of jobs and better opportunities in the Dominican Republic. The delegation planned to meet with Jesuit Refugee Service representatives to discuss how to ease the tensions and better serve the economic refugees.

Haiti Prayers

Let's face it: there is much to pray for in Haiti.  It's easy to be overwhelmed by the depth, extent and pervasiveness of suffering that has existed there for decades and was magnified exponentially by the earthquake.  I can't cover it all, but I'll try to highlight a couple of things - ministries that people I know are connected to.  I'll also set up a list of Haiti causes on the PATW twitter feed (assuming Twitter's server ever works again).

1) From Beth: Living Hope Ministries in Haiti is a Christian mission organization near Carrefour, Haiti that operates a primary school, trade school, entrepreneurship program and church. Living Hope (LHM) is about 2 miles from the epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12. God has providentially protected LHM in the midst of the devastation so the mission will have a large role in the coming months in sharing God’s love in word and in action.

2) From Dan: He'll be traveling to Haiti next week (August 6) with the youth group from his church.  As he says: There are 48 of us making this trip to help the healing and rebuilding process that our church is committing to being a part of for as long as it takes.  While we’re there in Port-au-Prince we’ll be doing a VBS with the children, interacting with local teens, painting an orphanage, distributing food to the poor, and doing other outreach and local ministry activities. We’ll even be spending some time praying at the Presidential Palace.  You can follow his trip here.

3) I'll also mention again the ongoing ministry our church has with its sister parish in Haiti, St. Isidore on the island of La Gonave.  Partners with Haiti could always use your prayers for its medical mission trips and for those who come to St. Petersburg from Haiti for medical care.

4) Catholic Relief Services has been a giant among Haitian ministries for a long time.  Here is a recent blog post on their work, here is a summary of their report on Haiti 6 months after the earthquake, and here's a much broader overview of the history of CRS in Haiti.

5) Here, here, and here are three reports from FIDES on the state of Haiti 6 months after the earthquake as well.  Two million people living on the street.

Next week: Haiti

Next week is the Caribbean.  Lots of great ministry to pray for.  Here's one, from the Bible Dude.

And here's one from my own parish, an ongoing ministry as part of a parish twinning program:

Relatively absolute poverty

I was trying to learn about this week's countries and saw "Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America."  Wow, I thought, that must be bad, and it was, with a GDP per capita of $2,800 a year.  But what does that mean?  So I looked up Haiti - poorest in the western hemisphere at $1,300 a year.  Wow, that's really not much... I wonder what the worst of the Eatsern Hemisphere is? Turns out it's a toss-up - Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo both have a GDP per capita of $300.  So that's less than a dollar a day.  Less than $4 a day in Haiti.  Just over $7.50 a day in Nicaragua.

The US is $46,400, or more than $127 a day. (Only #11, incidentally.  All stats from the CIA fact book.)

Now, maybe GDP per capita isn't an accurate indicator.  Maybe there are dimensions that it doesn't capture that reflects a less desparate life than these figures seem to say.  But when I think about the fact that I spend more on diet coke alone than $4, I find it hard to really interalize what these numbers mean.

Remember Haiti?

Haiti comes up in the prayer cycle in a couple of weeks, and we'll post more about what they are going through then, but can you believe it's been 6 months since the earthquake there?  It seems that many Americans have long since moved on to other topics. It's striking that one of the requests from Peru was that they were still struggling to rebuild from an earthquake 3 years ago.