The Episcopal

Diocese of Lexington

A Transformational Journey

By Bungee Bynum Holy Trinity, Georgetown

“He really can't go with us,” she said.

“That’s just it. He doesn’t know where we’re going. It doesn’t matter to him. He just knows our van is going somewhere he’s never been before,” he said.

This brief exchange concerned a small Haitian boy, wearing only a torn shirt and a wide smile, who climbed up into the air-conditioned Food for the Poor van and sat just inside the doorway next to the cooler full of bottled water and soft drinks. With just his body language, he made it quite clear to the 13 Diocese of Lexington Episcopalians watching with wide eyes that he had absolutely no intention of getting out of this van.

The Kentuckians had just finished one of the visits on their Food for the Poor pilgrimage to Haiti and were in a hurry to get on their way to their next stop. They were just outside downtown Port-Au-Prince at a center used as a gathering place to minister to 250 women and their 500 children in Cite Soleil (French for “Sun City”), the largest slum in the Western Hemisphere.

It is here that 500,000 people live in an area of 27 square miles that is truly beyond editorial description. However, the facts are that everyone lives in shacks of cardboard and tin. No electricity, plumbing, and no drainage for rain or raw sewage. There is garbage piled high in the dirt streets that become un-navigable when it rains. The overwhelming majority of Cite Soleil’s residents are unemployed and illiterate. Children chased the van, running naked and, as is nearly everyone, barefoot through the garbage and sewage that flood all the homes whenever it rains.

This Food for the Poor (FFP) sponsored outpost in the middle of this slum now is an area of great joy where there used to be no people living at all. Formerly a beautiful beach of the Atlantic Ocean, the Haitian government pushed back the sea and razed the area for the city’s poorest people. Nowadays, at another FFP sponsored agency in Cite Soleil, St. Marguerite Naseau Kindergarten, things have changed and that joy abounds. The school’s bright colors and well-kept green gardens stand in a stark contrast to the immense poverty and disease surrounding the center’s high concrete walls. The school provides 1,300 children with not only a good education, but also one hot meal a day, and dry food to take home to their family. In a country where diarrhea is one of the top three killers of children, these students receive vaccinations in a clinic where a doctor visits daily. Teachers here also get a dry food supplement to their pay.

Previous articles in this very Advocate related to prior diocesan group trips to Haiti with Food for the Poor have focused on Haiti’s overwhelming realities of poverty but also the joy and fullness of Spirit that continues to arise out of that very poverty (Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere). Now the focus shifts to the magnitude of what Food for the Poor does with every donated dollar in Haiti.

Food for the Poor is the relief organization in Haiti and one of the three largest in the world. The organization began out of Ferdinand Mahfood’s Florida garage in 1982 and has since passed the milestone of one billion dollars of aid given in Central America. “Ministry” is much more accurate a term for how Food for the Poor serves its people, because they serve much more than food. Supporting everything from schools and orphanages to old people’s homes and hospitals, this organization has all systems running smoothly. As their name implies, Food for the Poor’s direct programs in Haiti feed 15,000 people daily.

Food for the Poor not only ministers to people all over Central America, but it does so extremely efficiently. Food for the Poor’s administrative costs dropped to an alarmingly small 5.6 percent in 2002. How do they do so much with so little? The 175 employees at their Florida headquarters helped facilitate the movement of over 2,400 tractor-trailers full of material donations worth over $311 million last year. Last year, $45 million of that total went to Haiti alone.

Our visit to Haiti was marked by a series of contrasts. Here we Americans were cruising around in our spacious, comfortable van while beggars rapped on our windows, local people piled 20 into VW taxi vans designed for 10, and others navigated the garbage ridden streets. Here we were staying two-to-a-room at the elegant, upscale Hotel Montana on a hillside southeast of downtown Port au Prince with its wonderful pool, internet access, hotel restaurants and bars, and in-room satellite television while Haitians just outside the hotel’s heavily-guarded gates shared tin shacks of mud floors, drainage-ditch toilets, and extremely unsanitary conditions.

We made numerous visits to different FFP-supported ministries in the Port-au-Prince area. A lengthy article could be written about each of our various experiences instead I’ll just mention four. The first place we visited, the Maison d’Amour Girls Home, was a place I will not soon forget. Food for the Poor provides uniforms and school books in addition to the clean, warm and loving environment of a “home” for the 150 girls who call it that. When I asked how many more girls were in need of a spot at the orphanage, I was told that if there were space for 1000 girls, they would have 1000 girls, as there were that many who were in need. Dressed in their plaid uniforms and singing songs of welcome, each girl was smiling at our every interest and movement. It was very easy to see that the language barrier between us did not limit them expressing their joy and thankfulness for what Food for the Poor provides them and even just for our visit to them and my futile attempts at singing one of their songs.

On our visit to the “Children of Jesus” Handicapped Home, we witnessed some of the most important ministry supported by Food for the Poor. This ministry is not on record on any accountant’s total sheet or doctor’s prescription pad. The 40 handicapped children receive what they need the most: loving care. Sure, doctors visit twice a week and they receive excellent meals and stay in a very nice facility, but these children, many of whom were either abandoned by their family or passed on to the home out of necessity, receive God’s love in a warm and open community that also happens to provide a warm bed, good meals, and appropriate medical care. Our brief visit to the home allowed not only for visiting, but time for the children to minister to us. Granted, we were the ones laying our hands on them, stroking their hair, and sitting with them when nobody else would, but they were ministering to us as well. One young girl just needed someone to sit with her, so a member of our group did. One man who seemed to be continually rocking and swaying back and forth had music turned on for him so he at least was able to move in rhythm. After being overwhelmed with the poverty and horrible circumstances in our first day in Haiti, these young people enabled us to see some of the great things being done with joy by Food for the Poor for people who so desperately needed it. With doctors visiting the children two days a week, a very high standard of good meals and tender loving care already established, I left the handicapped children’s home with the feeling that the committed and compassionate staff would soon cherish the opportunity to gladly serve 100 children when they soon expanded.

At St. Vincent’s School for the Handicapped, our group met a man named Joseph Jean Paul, but known as JoJo. [The school not only teaches several hundred students, but has dormitories in which they live.] Born without arms or legs, JoJo warmly greets all who come through the door and shows any person interested his beautiful artwork. He also serves as the interpreter for the Prosthetic Dept. and says he hopes “the education at St. Vincent’s be pushed further so these children would no longer be a drain on society but rather add to the national richness.” We also met a man, Pierrui, who had a prosthetic leg made for him when he was a young boy, and after studying for three years in Montreal, now works in the same shop serving other people by making prostheses.

Supported by Food for the Poor, the Archachon Hospital is staffed by nuns and twin Haitian doctors. The French-educated surgeon spends five hours a day in his private practices and volunteers eight hours daily at the clinic. He treats men from Cite Soleil with gunshot wounds while an “invaluable” sister runs a 20-bed pediatric ward where she cares for young mothers and their children, specifically those that are HIV+. The clinic sees 200-300 patients a day, but the number increases whenever workers at the government hospitals strike and people are forced to come to their clinic. Patients are required to pay 10 Gourdes of Haitian currency (about $.25) for their treatment, even as the hospital has running costs of $70,000 per month. Despite their desperate need for a working x-ray machine, these doctors greet all their patients with a warm smile.

Based on Matthew 25:40, and the belief that Christ is alive and can be served directly by serving those in greatest need, Food for the Poor aims to be “God’s instrument to help the materially poor and to renew the poor in spirit.” The quotation was not only posted at every place we stopped, but very visible in Food for the Poor ministries in Haiti. In early September of this year, 13 Episcopalians from the Diocese of Lexington began a short pilgrimage to Haiti, intensely focusing on the ministries of Food for the Poor in that country. Less than a week later 13 Episcopalians returned to Kentucky to their homes and families with their outlook of the overwhelming wonderful ministries happening in the rest of God’s world forever changed.

The Companion Diocese Committee of the Diocese of Lexington has established a goal for 2004 to raise funds to provide an English Immersion Summer School in the summer of 2004 for the Dean and students from the Episcopal University of Haiti. The committee intends to ask every congregation in the diocese to use the season of Lent to raise money for this project. As planning for this summer school progresses, more details will be provided in future issues of The Advocate. For additional information, please contact the Rev. Jan Dunnavant, Church of the Resurrection, Jessamine County. Jdunnavant@ aol.com.