Children are getting ready to return to school, both here in the United States and in Haiti. Haitian kids begin classes about two weeks later than schoolchildren in America. But no matter where a child goes to school, whether he or she is rich or poor, the excitement over a new school year is universal.
This is Weetherson Pierre, a nursing student I met on a recent mission trip. As a scholarship recipient of the Haitian Education Leadership Program (HELP), a CCO-sponsored program at the University of Notre Dame-Haiti, the country’s only Catholic university, Weetherson is not only a straight-A student, he is required to live by principals that are firmly rooted in Christian doctrines.
As I stood at the back of this humble chapel, taking in this amazing moment, one particular child attracted my attention. He had one blind and clouded eye — but the other had a gleam in it. One of his ears was missing, but the other hung on to every word the priest said. His smile was bigger than everyone else’s, and he seemed to be oblivious to the third degree burn scars that covered his head, shoulders and chest.
It was an experience no one will ever forget.
Radio personality Drew Mariani and Catholic journalists Rob Herbst, Patrick Novecosky and Peter Jesserer Smith went to Haiti with Cross Catholic Outreach President Jim Cavnar to witness the distribution of more than 2,400 gifts from the ministry’s “Boxes of Joy” program. The boxes, filled with toys, candy, school supplies and hygiene products, were for children in Les Cayes, one of the areas of Haiti devastated by Hurricane Matthew about 6 months earlier.
I had heard about hungry Haitian children eating mud cookies to fill their empty bellies but I had never actually seen mud cookies with my own eyes — until I traveled to the slums of Ouanaminthe, located on Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic.
As Cross Catholic Outreach’s Haiti Project Manager – and someone who has lived in Haiti for six years – it’s impossible for me to be objective about the impact of Hurricane Matthew. It’s been three months since the killer storm battered Haiti’s southern peninsula, and yet I feel the raw pain of the people as if it had all happened just yesterday.