Welcome to my blog! I've blogged a few times in the past with the intention of writing regularly, and, of course, it has never worked out. But here I am, trying again....I figure that my first blog post should be about something that I've been meaning to share with everyone for a long time: my experience of mission over Spring Break this past year in Pignon, Haiti.
The Invitation
At the beginning of my senior year I had no intention of going on a mission trip. It wasn't that I was against it; it just had never crossed my mind. I had been driving down to school in August with a friend of mine, Johnny Severson, and as we were listening to music and cruising through the boring state of Iowa, he asked me, "So, do you want to go on a mission trip to Haiti in the spring?" My response was an immediate "Sure! Why not?" It sounded like fun, it sounded like it would be a moving experience. Immediately I conjured up images of what the trip would be like, and my imagination ran wild. Eventually, the muse of alacrity departed, and I felt a doubt creep into my heart about what I had consented to. It was really frightening to think about going to a place which required that I get three different vaccines, to a place in the throes abject poverty, to a place still recovering from a devastating earthquake; and on top of all that, it would be over the last Spring Break of my life. I am recounting this part of my journey because I feel it has a certain importance even though it may not seem so significant. The point is that I was invited. The call to mission, to charity came to me through the invitation of a friend, and I followed, thinking I knew what I was getting into, but not knowing where it would lead.
Johnny was able to set up this trip with eleven other students from Benedictine College with the help of his uncle, Dr. Paul Severson. Dr. Paul opened a state of the art hospital in Pignon, Haiti, and, although he works in the United States with the Minnesota Medical School, he has been making faithful trips to Haiti for over two decades to provide for the people's surgical needs, as well as to train young Haitian doctors in surgical techniques. One of his biggest projects was pushing for the possibility of minimally invasive surgery in third world countries. Most healthcare professionals and surgeons don't see the need for such a technology to be available to these poor people. But as Dr. Paul explained to us, they are the ones who in fact need it the most. A woman trying to raise kids cannot afford to be away from her home for an extended period of time after a surgery.
Our particular goal was to raise money to build a secondary school in Pignon. After some fundraising tips from Dr. Paul and a crash course in the history and needs of Haiti, our team did a fantastic job of getting the word out and bringing money in for the mission. I am not sure what our final numbers were, but I believe that our goal was doubled; we intended to raise $15K specifically for the Haitian mission and ended up with $30K. Thank you to everyone who donated!!
The Trip
(Some of what follows is copied out of my journal, and is written in the present tense)
March 11 --- We arrived in Port-au-Prince and after going through customs we met Ramoncy, the seminarian who accompanied us throughout the trip. We piled into a van drove through the outskirts of the capital. On our left, there are colorful buildings and worn shops; the walls are the places of art and advertisement. On our right, refugee camps. Blue and grey tents stretch for several miles. The roads are crowded and rules do not exist.
We crawl through the streets and eventually reach the cathedral destroyed by the earthquake one year ago. There were 25 seminarians killed inside the cathedral, who were attending mass when the earthquake happened. The cathedral is a pile of rubble, while a few pillars and a stained glass window stand in place. There is enough structure intact to understand that this house of God must have been magnificently vast and beautiful. Now the blue and green glass shrapnel create a muted mosaic among the crumbled concrete.
After five hours of traveling on the worst roads I have ever seen we arrived in Pignon. The rector, Fr. Ronald, was so welcoming to us and had a meal prepared already. As we ate, we could hear the Church band, comprised mostly of brass and trumpets, practicing for tomorrow's funeral ceremony. It sounded like something out of the Godfather II. That afternoon we attended the Stations of the Cross at Our Lady of Notre Dame Parish. The church itself is rather dark and bare; light blue concrete walls, white concrete slits for windows, wooden rafters, and a tin roof ceiling. There a few lonesome fluorescent lights dangling from the rafters. The service itself took two hours. The singing by the congregation was so powerful--it was a primordial sound, reverberant, full, almost thunderous. The harmonies were unfamiliar yet enticing, intoned as an engulfing shout.
March 12 -- Our team happened to be at the parish at the same time as a professor of architecture from Virginia Tech named Hans. The morning of our first day, at breakfast, he gave us a wonderful lesson (and warning) about our temptation to look at Haiti according to our pre-established frameworks. We instrumentalize objects and reality. We try to understand things according to a pre-established framework, instead of first getting to know them. We hunt for symbols and uses; this is the opposite of contemplation, where we let the object in front of us speak to us. He gave us an example: if you wake up early in the morning in Haiti, you can see people sweeping the streets. "Why are they sweeping the streets?" you might ask. "It's all dirt." But, if you look closer every day, if you begin to pay attention to reality, you will see what is street and what is dirt. Our disease, he told us--the disease of the West--is to judge before looking, to allow thinking and frameworks to usurp the primacy of experience. Hans invited us to look at how the Haitians live without this pragmatic framework. This was truly a work of conversion, requiring prayer and work. As Father Giussani says, one must "feel the problem of awareness, that is, the relationship between oneself and reality," and this is difficult because we "are obtuse....we do not call upon the Spirit."
After a morning trip to the site where they would be building the secondary school, we had an afternoon Creole lesson that was very difficult but very fun for everyone involved. Much of the evening was spent with the kids who roam around the city--they loved the tennis balls that we gave them. A couple tennis balls literally provides endless hours of entertainment to these kids. We also played soccer with a few of the kids in the street. They use cinderblocks for goals; and they are quick on their feet--it was pretty hard to keep up with them.
March 13 -- Today is Sunday, which means mass at 6:30 AM followed by the traditional Sunday breakfast of pumpkin soup. Dr. Paul Severson met with us to inform us that our money would be used to build the secondary school in Pignon. There had been talk from the bishop that the money might be requested for the rebuilding of the seminary in Port-au-Prince. However, the prospect of international aid for that cause meant that our money would stay in Pignon. Dr. Paul reminded us that the important thing is to be aware of the Church as a whole in Haiti, and to see our project as a piece of that whole puzzle.
This afternoon we went to the outskirts of the village to visit an orphanage run by a guy who was sponsored by Dr. Paul. He was able to come to the United States to become an anesthesiologist, and then returned to Haiti after he was moved to do good for others just as others had been helped to move him. That's why he is back in Pignon running an orphanage. We were able to play hackisack and soccer with the kids while we were there. Later on in the evening Ramoncy took us to visit Jessia. She is now 15 months old. When she was 14 days old both her parents died in the earthquake in Port-au-Prince. She was adopted by a family here in Pignon. As we went to visit her, we had a whole posse of kids from the town following us around, just wanting to spend time with us.
March 14-18 --- We spent the week working on various projects for the parish, the biggest of which was painting a room they were attempting to convert for suitable use a large classroom. It was a frustrating job because we lacked the best painting supplies and we wanted to do a good job for them. The paint rollers would fall apart, malfunction, unravel, and the tiny brushes forced our pace to a crawl. In the end, we finished the job and the people were so grateful for our efforts; they were more excited that we were there with them, accompanying them in their circumstances. This was more valuable than any perfect paint job. Throughout the week we were also able to visit the five chapel sites that are linked with the main town parish. These were located out in the countryside, and they all had primary schools attached to them. Because of the miserable state of the roads, these people outside the town are often unable to attend Mass from May to November for the simple reason that it is the rainy season and the priest cannot get there. In many cases we drove through rivers to get where we were going.
On the first day of work we were asked to help clean up the church. This involved primarily a lot of sweeping, because the roads around the church are not paved and the dust covers almost every inch of the floor. It seemed to be an insurmountable amount of dust; no matter how many times we tried to sweep a certain area, there would be more dust to get rid of. We could have swept for days. It was great to have the kids around though, because they wanted to help us in any way that they could. It became clear to me through this experience, and throughout the rest of the week, that the only thing we could do for these people was be in relationship with them. It is almost impossible for us to make a materially significant dent in their poverty. These experiences helped me to answer for myself the question that many people had asked us before the trip.
The Question
Our team had the question posed to us in many forms, "Why are you going down to Haiti? Why don't you just send down the money instead of spending money on a plane ticket?" This question was problematic for me, in the sense that it was always in the background of my experience, it was something I had to answer to. After living there for a week I understood that the question indicates an impoverished approach to charity and mission. Fr. Giussani says, "I am able to understand the word “charity” when I remember that the Son of God, loving us did not send us His riches (as He was able to do) and revolutionize our situation; instead He became poor like one of us: He “shared” our nothingness. We do charitable work in order to live like Christ." These words became a living truth for me in Haiti. Charity was not about "giving money" but about giving of oneself. The best thing we were able to do for the people of Haiti was to go and stay with them as members of the Church. In many ways Fr. Ronald and Ramoncy treated us like kings and queens while we were there and showed us just as much charity. Fr. Ronald would always tell us, "Come and see" just as Jesus tells the people in the gospel as he invites them to follow. For Fr. Ronald, the point of our mission was not that we were able to raise enough money to build a school (even though this is a great thing for Pignon) but that we came to visit the people and began a relationship with them. I am not trying to say that the money we raised wasn't helpful; it was extremely helpful and they were extremely grateful. However, there is major gap between philanthropy and the experience of charity that conforms us to Christ. This is the ultimate reason why we went to Haiti.
Finally, something that struck me greatly on this trip was a quote from St. Francis deSales: "How many sins enter through the eyes!" He is not talking about the problem of lust, at least not directly. He is talking about the main problem for every single human being when they wake up every morning, the problem of how we look at reality, how we look at the people and circumstances in our life. Sin enters our vision when we reduce the scope of the "real" to whatever image we have in our heads. Being in Haiti for a week helped me to understand how these things are at stake in everything, in every task of work we do, in every person we have a conversation with.
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| Kids at school |
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| Playing in the streets |
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| My friend Andrew and his new friends |
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| Inside of a Chapel Church |
