Mission to Haiti

By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami

Photography: COURTESY PHOTOS | Eddy Garcia

MIAMI | Bathing with buckets? Check.

Long, bruise-inducing rides on rutted roads? Check.

No working toilets for nearly half the trip? Also check.

Meeting the children and teachers you’ve been helping for over 30 years? Priceless.

For years, Eddy and Ana Garcia had been wanting to visit Haiti. It was, as he put it, “on our bucket list.”

Why? “It was one of the things we felt we needed to do,” said the principal of St. Louis Covenant School in Pinecrest. His wife, Ana, is principal of Msgr. Edward Pace High School in Miami Gardens.

As students at Pace, both had gotten to know Amor en Accion, a local lay missionary group that since 1979 has sponsored sister-school and nutrition programs in Port-de-Paix � the poorest diocese in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, and Miami’s sister diocese.

Through year-round activities organized by its campus ministry department, Pace supports three sister schools in Port-de-Paix: two of them for over three decades, Moulin and Perou; the third, Lormand, was built about two years ago.

“The kids that lived in this area had to cross two rivers to get to (another school), and little kids were drowning,” Ana Garcia explained.

Yes, it was that kind of trip for the Miami educators � even though they knew what to expect. They had heard the stories and seen the pictures brought back by Andres Novela, Pace religion teacher and campus minister, who travels to Haiti with Amor en Accion about twice a year.

Still, “it kind of changes the lens on the camera of life,” said Eddy Garcia. “We witnessed a people that maybe are resigned to where they’re at, but know that they need God to survive. And the Church is their form of everything” � food, education, community, even entertainment. “It holds those communities together through all that they’re going through.”

The Garcias traveled to Haiti accompanied by Novela and Teresita Gonzalez, director of both Amor en Accion and the archdiocesan Missions Office. Making their way by “atrocious” roads from Port-au-Prince to the far reaches of northwest Haiti, they visited 11 schools in eight days. They met with the superintendent of schools in the Diocese of Port-de-Paix. They shared a boat ride to Ile de la Tortue with Bishop Pierre-Antoine Paulo, who was scheduled to dedicate a new church building there.

The return trip (without the bishop) was a little less pleasant, Ana Garcia recalled. The boat was smaller � a dinghy, really � and they made the 45-minute trek in the midst of a driving rain and rising swells.

“We saw tremendous poverty,” said Ana. “We didn’t have a working shower the entire time we were there. We had a working toilet for three out of the eight days.”

But they also experienced tremendous joy, in schools that lacked light and electricity, where teachers hoard shards of chalk to write on blackboards, and books are a luxury.

“Children were so proud to be in those schools, so proud to wear a uniform,” Ana Garcia said.

“Because a uniform means they were getting an education,” added Eddy.

They asked the superintendent of Port-de-Paix’s schools, Marie Louise Sylvestre, what she needed. Books, she replied. But not for the students. She needs just one set of books for a teacher at each grade level, to copy and distribute to the rest of the teachers.

“It’s got to be in Creole and it’s got to be their curriculum,” Ana Garcia said.

Unlike the ongoing commitment of sister schools, this is a project with a finite end. “We’re going to work on that. I have to raise the money,” she promised.

Another thing that impressed the Garcias in Haiti was “the love that they have, the respect that they have for what Amor en Accion and the Church in Miami, through Amor en Accion, has been able to do for them,” Eddy Garcia said.

Such as: securing a now-ancient ATV so that diocesan staff can get across the rivers; procuring a set of motorcycles so that educational supervisors won’t have to walk or ride mules to far-flung schools in the mountainous diocese; sponsoring nutrition programs that provide school lunches � sometimes the only meal of the day � for 4,500 children; the sister school program that provides education for children in 28 schools and pays the salaries of 113 teachers.

Other aid organizations come and go � and most of them don’t even reach Port-de-Paix because travel there is so difficult � but “Amor en Accion has been the one faithful constant in their lives,” Ana Garcia said. “Amor en Accion, for years, in a non-bombastic way, has made such a difference in their lives.”

In addition to Pace, eight other archdiocesan schools, both elementary and secondary, sponsor sister schools in Haiti. St. Louis Parish was among the first to support Amor en Accion’s nutrition program, a project Eddy Garcia hopes to re-start.

That long-term commitment requires “people in that community who buy into it,” Ana Garcia said. And that’s why Pace has kept up its support for more than 30 years.

“There are people who work in campus ministry who have gone and bought into it so they’ve kept it alive regardless of who the principal is,” she said.

In fact, Eddy said, he told Novela that “it was a humbling experience to have shared this trip with him and Teresita. But it was more humbling and an honor that he had been the religion teacher for my children.”

FIND OUT MORE
For more information on Amor en Accion, and its programs in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, go to www.amorenaccion.com.