By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami

Photography: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC

PORT-DE-PAIX — The teachers greet us wearing ties and long-sleeved shirts, well-pressed pants and, in the case of the principal in Nan Palan, a suit.

They, too, have walked up the muddy hillside or trudged through dusty streets in the heat and humidity to get to their schools. Yet their dress shoes are clean and their faces are not wet with sweat. Their students’ uniforms are just as clean and pressed, the girls’ hair perfectly pinned with colorful bows.

The mud of a rain-soaked hillside doesn’t seem to stick even when a Montfortian priest and a Little Sister of St. Therese get out of our four-wheel-drive vehicle to try to extricate it from a particularly deep patch of sludge.

It is an interesting contrast that matches perfectly my experiences during an Oct. 3-8 visit with the lay missionary group Amor en Accion to Miami’s sister diocese of Port-de-Paix, Haiti — a place of heartbreaking need and uplifting dignity.

It takes less than two hours by air to travel from Miami to this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere — First World to Third World in less time than it takes to travel across the U.S.

Like much of Haiti, Port-de-Paix is a place where electricity and running water are inconstant and potable water is a rarity. It is a place of organ-jostling, bone-jarring drives up and down mountains and through towns whose streets are paved with sand and rocks. It is a place where rain makes river-roads impassable and the slightest storm can wash away whole communities. It is a place of cracked walls, rusting supports, dirt floors and heat-trapping zinc roofs where cruise ships pass oblivious, lit up like stars, with their own private generators and water desalination plants onboard.

It is also a place where an explosion of color sets off a school amid the drab grey of a dusty slum; a place where the cathedral’s bells, rung by hand, call people to daily Mass at 5 a.m.; where children sing and dance in endless shows of gratitude; where priests and religious, both native and foreign, celebrate the sacraments and teach the faith while willingly sharing in the misery of their people.

That constant presence of the Church — my Church — in the most remote of places, under the most difficult of circumstances, struck me as I attended Mass in the leaky-roofed, rock-floored chapel of Moulin.

It took about an hour to get up there from Decostiere, where Montfortian Father Louis Marie Montfort has his main church and school. Because of the distances involved and the terrible condition of the roads, his parish, like most others in Port-de-Paix, encompasses a scattering of chapels and schools located throughout the mountainside.

In his case, there are three chapels with accompanying schools. Two of them, Moulin and Perou, have had a sister-school relationship with Msgr. Edward Pace High School in Miami Gardens for more than 20 years.

Andres Novela, campus ministry director at Pace, was making his second trek to Haiti in as many years, bringing with him nearly 600 individual packets of school supplies, dozens of goodie bags for the teachers, nearly 1,000 lollipops for the children and countless tubes of toothpaste and toothbrushes for everybody.

Pace raises nearly $20,000 a year for Amor en Accion, which coordinates the sister-school program that 16 archdiocesan schools and parishes participate in, and which benefits nearly 30 schools in the Port-de-Paix region. The money goes to supplement teachers’ salaries, pay for nutritional programs and help with building repairs.

Novela admits he falled in love with mission work. One of his Haitian-born students is teaching him Creole and he plans to return to Haiti to visit the sister schools as often as possible.

“Without the support of the administration we couldn’t do it,” said Novela, noting that a significant portion of Pace’s student body is of Haitian descent. “They see their responsibility as forming community with the Haitian people,” Novela told Port-de-Paix’s Bishop Pierre-Antoine Paulo, an Oblate Missionary, during a late-evening meeting in his office.

While in Haiti, the Amor en Accion group — consisting of the group’s executive director and newly appointed director of the Miami Archdiocese’s Mission Office, Teresita Gonzalez, Amor en Accion associate director Monica Lauzurique, Novela and myself:

• visited sister schools in Guichard (part of the parish in St. Louis Du Nord), Desgranges and Decostiere;
• toured Nan Palan, the community center in the city of Port-de-Paix turned school for 50 and now 300 which was the first to be built in Haiti by Amor en Accion when the sister-diocese relationship began in 1980; 
• saw a Caritas-funded terracing project in action, aimed at slowing water runoff from the hillsides in Guichard;
• learned about a project that provides Haitians with clean water in Gros Morne;
• and met with farmers who are members of the COCANO coffee-growing cooperative as well as the seven-member team that supervises the more than 50 Catholic schools in the Port-de-Paix Diocese.

“To have a new society you need to transform the schools. You need to transform the teachers. You need to transform the community,” said Marie Louise-Sylvestre, a dedicated woman who serves as superintendent of schools for the Port-de-Paix Diocese. 

With the help of Amor en Accion, her office re-opened last year after closing in 2007 for lack of funding. She and her supervisors have spent the past year visiting the far-flung schools, holding training sessions for the teachers and writing educational materials to help them do their jobs better.

Of course, if the supervisors had motorbikes, it would be easier for them to get to the schools which many of them now travel to on foot, walking for hours up and down treacherous terrain.

Another thing to add to the wish list, Lauzurique said.

That, and money to add structural supports to the chapel and school in Pewou; school benches for the 600 primary and secondary students in Desgranges who currently must bring their own chairs to class each day; repairs to the house of the priest there, who now shares his electricity-deprived room with the neighborhood mice; a new roof and a concrete floor for the chapel in Moulin; a laptop for the legendary, 88-year-old Montfortian priest, Father Boniface Fils-Aime, who nurtured and guided the relationship with Amor en Accion from the beginning and still wants to communicate with friends outside of Haiti…

The wish list grew with each meeting, meetings during which the Miami delegation, speaking broken Creole, managed to understand the Haitian natives, speaking broken English.

But along with the wish list grew the gratitude, the celebrations, the singing and the dancing, the promises to pray for the people in Miami who dole out small measures of hope to those in Haiti.

“I continue to pray to God for you because you help us. You help the community,” said Francois Lukman, a 20-year-old teacher in Guichard, speaking fairly good English. “We don’t have nothing to give you. It’s a message. You make important work for us.”

“Merci pour accompaniment (thank you for the companionship). God bless you,” said Father Emile Chepa, the priest responsible for nine chapels and 12 schools in the parish of Desgranges.

“It’s a difficult but interesting mission for me. Because there is such a big need. My presence here is very important,” added the priest, who must walk 10 hours to visit the most outlying chapel in his parish.

When Father Montfort visits the chapel in Moulin to celebrate Mass, he stays for the day. When he visits to celebrate the sacraments — such as baptism and first Communion — he stays three to four days, and sleeps in the school. When it rains, getting up or down the mountain — even in a four-wheel-drive truck — can become impossible.

It rained the afternoon we visited Moulin, so the trek back down from Decostiere to Gros Morne took over two hours in risky darkness. The truck, with seven people inside and four more hanging on in the cab, got stuck twice in the mud.

“It’s the worst you get here,” said Gonzalez, referring to the road.

But things have improved in Haiti, she said, especially in the past year.

“It used to be between four and five hours (to get from the capital, Port-au-Prince, to Gros Morne). Now it’s taking us about three, so that’s progress. There’s a lot more paved (road) than I remember from last year.”

She noted that the Catholic Church is the “single largest welfare dispenser” in Haiti, and “it does so with an enormous care for the human person.”

“The presence is incredible. There’s no other organization on the planet that can do that in such a systematic way,” Gonzalez said.

But why go to Haiti, when the money and the support can simply be wired or shipped?

“Something happens when you meet people and you look them in the eye. You understand better. You no longer assume,” Gonzalez said, in essence describing the more profound relationship at the heart of mission work. It is not about solving every problem or curing every ill. It is about sharing and relationships.

“There’s a gripping of your heart and not just because you feel sorry for people. You don’t understand how people have the incredible strength to persevere against such odds. You feel so little. You come back wanting to share,” Gonzalez said. “Something happens that hopefully isn’t the end but the beginning of a personal transformation. There’s no doubt that you meet the face of Christ.”