Haitian Mission Outreach

Since 1999, St Luke's has supported the orphanage in Haiti founded by Fr Rick Frechette, Passionist priest and doctor. Since 1987 the orphanage has cared for thousands of children through the years. Fr Rick has also built the only free pediatric hospital in Haiti, St Damien's.

Dear Family and Friends,

I remember when I was a child, I often heard my grandmother say, “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

After 39 years of priesthood, and 30 of these years as a priest and physician in Haiti, I am afraid I have seen plenty of people considerably and permanently wrecked by “what didn’t kill them.”

There seems to be a lot about life that contradicts wise proverbs, whether they come from grandmothers or from King Solomon.

The time of my mother’s death was a time I thought would surely kill me.  It’s not that she didn’t have a long and good life. She surely did. And the cancer that took her life was rather merciful to her until the last few weeks of her life. But her last agony coincided with the unbelievable earthquake in Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands of people. She sent me from her deathbed back to Haiti the very same night. It was both my absence from her agony and my presence in a catastrophic agony that acquainted me with a depth of sorrow that I have never known before or since.
 
I hesitate to write about this, because I don’t mean to write about me. I write about what life is for all of us.  I write about my experiences, because yours make them understandable.

At my mother’s funeral, my brother Steve read a beautiful image of death as a boat sailing out of sight, into the horizon.   Everyone on the shore is sadly looking on, and in mourning, saying “there she goes.”

But on the other shore, at sunrise, a whole other joyful crowd is saying “here she comes!” as the long awaited boat and it’s precious cargo grow closer.

The image of boat is an enlightened image of what life and death are like.

The boat is also an image of the very real way we make our way toward heaven, through this life. We cross a powerful sea of enormous losses and gains, in a pitifully small vessel.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

For those of us who believe in Jesus, this is profoundly true. But it DID kill him.

This is the point of the Christian message. During any kind of dying, when the right things die, something more powerful is born.

It’s not always the case. At least not immediately.

Some weeks ago, I wrote to you about Sanon. He is a very poor teenager, who saved and saved his money to be able to return to school, and was robbed by bandits and stabbed in the back. Now it seems a cement block was also thrown against his lower back.

Paralyzed from the waist down from the tragedy, he has been thankfully regaining feeling and movement in his legs and feet.

As time has passed, however, much about his language and behavior in our hospital has shown, without a doubt, that his injury does not represent the suffering of the innocent. Nor is his story the full story.

He is a boat whose captain heads for the hurricanes. He courts darkness, attracted to it like a moth to a candle.

Will this wrestling match he had with tragedy teach him to chart a course of light, guided by the north star? By God given values? Will he learn the essential lessons darkness teaches, as did Jacob after wrestling with the angel?

On the other hand, there is the story of Preservil. He is 24.

He did not court his darkness.

It’s the kind of darkness that comes without a warning.

He was brought to us three weeks ago by the Missionaries of Charity in Les Cayes. His whole left face is terrible disfigured by a tumor. For sure, expert medical opinion here is that he is terminal, with no possible hope.

Preservil looked at me patiently as I explained all this to him. He asked me not to send him back to Les Cayes to die.

Could I give him a job, until he dies? Any job?

When he could work, he was supporting his elderly mother, and would so wish to support her until the end.

What in an incredible request. And since I was feeling powerless before his fate, suddenly I had power. This was something I could easily do.

Yes, Preservil, with warm welcome come and work with us - on our farm, light duty, lighter every day as necessary.

You will have a reason to get up every morning, a way to be productive, to help your mom, and to find friends in the community - the support of friendship.

Yes, thank God for these things, but still it’s a rough road.

I had a biopsy of his tumor taken, and sent it for pathology to a friend in Connecticut, where I am from.

I got this message back from my friend,

“Dear Fr. Rick-Not that I didn’t already know you are living right! But this is a benign lesion. A dentinogenic ghost cell tumor. It can be resected without recurrence.“

   
Though his small boat almost flipped and sunk at 24, Preservil now has his whole life ahead of him. Yet his darkness wasn’t fully dark, even before this good news.  

On Good Friday, Christians are encouraged to look at and meditate on (let It really sink in) the dread darkness and suffering that was an essential experience of Jesus. We are asked to internalize the unthinkable – the suffering and death of God.

The meditation is meant to be instructive. We are asked (in fact, “Maundied” or commanded) not to run away from the darkness, not in ourselves, not in the lives of others.

Just as stars are born in the powerful darkness of empty, bottomless holes in space, the persistent revelation of Good Friday is that darkness and suffering are the womb where souls are born. Where heroism and greatness come from, as do incredible strength and longsuffering, and relentless vision.

Yes, our elders knew what they were talking about. Darkness, met with faith, hope and love, can becomes the furnace that brings the embryonic soul to its golden greatness.

Respectful of the teachings and celebrations of the world’s many religions, let us pause on Good Friday to meditate on the Christian revelation about Tenebrae, the mystery of darkness and suffering in life. Let us pray very intentionally today for people everywhere who are in it’s throws.

Thank you for your ongoing support of our mission, carried out in these depths of conviction and faith.

Happy Easter and many blessings from our gracious God.

 
Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1855)

Fr Richard Frechette CP DO
Port au Prince, Haiti
March 30, 2018

 

Dear Friends,

Christmas is the celebration of both motherhood and childhood, the double doorway through which almighty God chose to come to into our difficult human world, to try to lead us to peace.

As I write these words, 84 children in the United States, ranging in age from just a few months to teens, were just freed from a multistate network of 120 human traffickers, who have been arrested.

The plight of children in the world is fearsome: child slaves, child prostitutes, child soldiers, and child gangsters. The numbers of children living at the lowest levels of poverty, the amount of childhood hunger, the extent of infant and child illness and mortality are daunting.

Also as I write these words, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there are 65 million people in the world who are displaced from their homes, belong to no country (are stateless) or are refugees.

Roughly half of these are women, of whom millions are pregnant, or with nursing and small children.

Central to the Christmas story is that Mary, as a young pregnant girl, had to leave home and take to rough roads, under the orders of the Roman governor in Syria, so the Jews might be "counted," in the town native to the husband.

Also central to the Christmas story is that immediately after the birth of her precious baby, on a bale of hay as a displaced woman, she had to flee to Egypt and spend years as a refugee, or her son would have been killed by a jealous King in Jerusalem, city of peace.

It is not only trees beautifully lit, and sweet carols, that make Christmas familiar to us.

But in fact, Christmas is also familiar because of how similar the rough and painful experiences of the Holy Family are, to the tragic daily fare of millions of women and children today, two thousand and seventeen years later.

Very recently, as I was driving through Port-au-Prince on my way to anoint the dying and try to heal the destitute sick whose death might be delayed with proper care, at one of the clinics of Mother Teresa's Sisters, a very sick woman on the road caught my eye.

The first glance showed that she was young, she was pregnant, and she was in a lot of trouble. She could not help at all as two people as young as she was, tried to lift her and lay her down in the simple tap-tap, the public transport for the masses. I wondered why they were leaving a hospital, instead of going into it.

I asked what happened, and was told there was no room in the hospital. I learned they had been refused at another hospital already, and there would be no guarantee of a place where they would go next. Thank God for our maternity wing at our own NPH St. Damien Pediatric Hospital. The young girl was nearly in a coma, and driving any more around the city looking "for a place at the inn" would kill her. And surely a manger was no place for a woman with eclampsia, which was her fairly evident condition.

With no time to lose by calling our ambulance, I paid the tap-tap to take her to St. Damien.

Andre, who was raised from infancy in our children's home in Haiti (and is now 25 years old), works with me. I sent him with them, to be the Angel Gabriel, to guide the tap-tap the fastest way to St. Damien. I continued on, to see the sick waiting for me across town.

My vehicle is a four-wheel drive, off road, Jeep-ish kind of thing they call a "Polaris." It has no windows, makes a lot of noise, is very hot, and all street noise comes in. So I didn't hear my cell phone ring. Again, and again, and again.

When I arrived at the Sisters, my heart dropped to my feet when I saw 13 missed calls from Andre.

This could not be good news.

The tap-tap had broken down.

I raced to the scene, a good 30 minutes away, also trying at the same time by phone to send one of our ambulances from St. Damien, but they were all out on calls. I was trying to figure how I would carry the poor comatose girl in the Polaris.

Very shortly after, I saw an empty tap-tap, and I promised him a good stipend if he would follow me and finish an urgent delivery to St. Damien Hospital.

We made the transfer in the middle of the street, the poor mother nearly lifeless, as we lifted the sheet she was on, to carefully change trucks. Archangel Andre is a rookie on my team, he was sweating and in a holy panic, but brilliant and compassionate.

Once they got to the hospital, and I was at the Sisters, I got a call from St. Damien. The mother was 17 and in a coma, the family with her was even younger than she. The treatment for eclampsia is, of course, delivery of the baby, and in this case by Cesarean, because the baby is preterm. The question was, did I know the mother or father? The young girls said they were in the province. Who would give the consent?

They were all under age, and the one concerned was in a coma.

On sonogram, the baby's heart was beating but there were no other movements of the tiny body. The baby's survival was unlikely because of the gestational age. But without the Cesarean both would die.

Who would give the consent? I was the only possible choice.

I consented, and took my rosary beads from my pocket.

The first joyful mystery, the annunciation of the nativity of the Messiah - don't fail us now.

The baby survived. A tiny girl, peering curiously out of her incubator. The mother came out of her coma about four hours later. Our tender staff, who are also mothers, showed her how to nurse the baby at her breasts.

The story of Christmas is old, and yet ever new. The blessings called children, the heroism of mothers, the Archangels Gabriel and Andre who are never far off, and soar into the story at the critical moment in order to save the day.

This Christmas as we celebrate again the wonders of moms and children, let's also pledge to stand with them in their agonies and ecstasies.

When we stand for what is right and true, God blesses our ways.

When we strive to create safe havens for pregnant mothers in distress, like St. Damien Hospital, and when we create safe havens for children in our homes in nine countries, God's blessing is sure.

Thanks to all of you for your ongoing help, which make all this possible.

God's blessing at Christmas, and throughout the new year of grace.


Fr. Rick Frechette
President, Board of Directors
Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos Haiti