Day 2 - Thousands find shelter
at Cite Militaire
(St. Jude woman) At St. Jude parish, 85-year-old Louisa Alexon sits under a make-shift tent outside the small concrete home where she once lived with her son and several grandchildren.
A tent city with about 2,000 families fills the small field in front of Cite Militaire’s Notre Dame de Lourdes Church in the heart of Port-au-Prince.
The remains of a concrete wall by the metal entrance gate to the property is spray-painted with the words: Abri Provisional #31 (Temporary Shelter #31).
A Belgium medical team arrived at the church grounds a few days after the earthquake and was providing maternal and child health care on Sunday for all those who lined up in front of a tin shelter off to the side of the church. (In the first days after the earthquake, the team was providing emergency treatment and performing amputations, according to a member of the group. Those medical procedures are now being performed elsewhere, he said.)
In the late afternoon, a convoy of U. S. Army trucks drove toward the encampment to deliver food and water. Although tents are stake-to-stake with only small passages for people to walk along, the scene was peaceful on Sunday.
Babies had been put on torn strips of blankets or sheets that dotted the driveway to the church. Women groomed their hair, and elderly men and women sat or slept in pews taken from the church to provide a bit of comfort.
Cite Militaire is one of nine parishes in the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince that are twinned with churches and groups in Connecticut and Wisconsin through Haitian Ministries for the Diocese of Norwich. The church and adjacent rectory did not appear to be damaged. Fr. Ghetto had left the country earlier in the day, according to staff at the rectory, who are overseeing the property.
The people now living in Coleman tents, under large UNICEF tarps and inside improvised shelters (some of them squares of cardboard stitched together with string) are from the surrounding neighborhoods.
Bishop Joseph Lafontant said, “The first place that people go in a situation like this is the church. People from the slums all around Cite Militaire went there to find food and shelter. There were so many they finally had to stop them.”
Bishop Lafontant, who is the acting administrator for the Archdiocese of Port-au-Prince, met with Emily Smack on Sunday. Emily, who is Haitian Ministries’ executive director, arrived in Haiti on Friday for a five-day assessment of the needs of staff who work at the Norwich Mission House (Haitian Ministries’ mission house in Haiti for the last 23 years) and all of the people in projects and parishes supported through Haitian Ministries.
Emily is traveling with Kyn Tolson, the ministry’s development director, Dr. Tom Gorin of Storrs, CT, and a newspaper reporter and photographer with The Day of New London, CT. Dr. Gorin, a pediatrician, is member of the medical mission teams that come to Haiti twice annually. Tom also is a long-time supporter of medical school students in the ministry’s Tierney-Tobin scholarship program.
Bishop Lafontant met with the group on Sunday to relay what news he had of the twinned parishes. The bishop is also a Haitian Ministries board member.
While his duties have increased significantly since the earthquake, the bishop and others in Haiti’s Catholic Church are grieving the death of Archbishop Serge Miot, who was killed on January 12th.
In Morne Opital and the parish of St. Jude, Fr. Jean Edner Brene said that more than 6,000 people in his community are in great need of food, water and medicine. At least six people there have died, but some are still unaccounted for, he said. Hundreds of the small houses there are no longer inhabitable, and tents cobbled together with long sticks and sheets of plastic or cotton are pitched outside the tiny structures.
St. Jude’s church buckled in the quake and is unsafe for use, so Fr. Brene held Mass on Sunday in the small courtyard of the rectory. More than 100 people came for a service that lasted almost two hours. In his sermon, the priest thanked the people from Norwich Mission House for traveling to his parish. “Even though they lost their mission house,” he said in Kreyol, “they are here to help us.”
The St. Jude school was partially damaged in the earthquake, and classes are suspended. The medical clinic is unharmed. Many more people are coming to the clinic since the earthquake, and the two nurses are trying to meet dramatically increased needs.
In news about some of the other twinned parishes, Bishop Lafontant said:
- No word has arrived from Fr. Desca in Fonds Baptiste, which is north of Port-au-Prince and farther from the epicenter of the quake. “Had he had some problems, we would have heard from him,” the bishop said.
- In Saintaard, Fr. Anis reported needing food because people are arriving to the area as residents of the capital leave for safer places. “It’s not bad in the area,” the bishop said, “but the hunger is great because more mouths need food.”
- No word has arrived from Fr. Reginald Joachim in Grand Bois, nor from Fr. Emmanuel in Ganthier. Bishop Fontaine said that no news is likely an indication that the communities were not badly hit.
- In a meeting with many of the Archdiocese’s priests last week, Bishop Fontaine did not hear of any problems in Grand Boulange. “Fr. Tristant did not raise his hand,” the bishop said.
Bishop Lafontant talked of the dire needs of the people of Haiti and said that today is a time when priests should “sleep with the people” to realize firsthand how difficult their life has become. He noted that in the mountain community of Les Palmes—where almost 50 people were killed, hundreds of homes destroyed and the church and a school leveled—the earthquake was particularly cruel.
The Haitian Ministries’ group from Connecticut has been staying with Norwich Mission House staff in a house in Petionville off Rue Freres. The home belongs to a friend of Paula Thybulle, who runs an orphanage for 70 girls and an adjacent medical clinic and hospital.
A medical team from Amsterdam had set up on Sunday the second of two large tents on the street outside her clinic. They intend to start emergency medical treatments, including orthopedic surgery, for victims brought there.
At Hospice St. Joseph on Sunday, Emily discussed with Pharra Hyppolite (the hospitality director of Hospice) the new challenges that both of their ministries now face. Norwich Mission House was destroyed in the earthquake, and half of Hospice fell.
The grounds of Hospice are no longer being used to treat the wounded, though in the first days after the earthquake many came through the gates for emergency help. Today, people in the neighborhood—badly hit in the quake-- come for food, Pharra said.
Before stopping at Hospice, Emily met with Sr. Marie Yannick, who is Bishop Michael Cote’s representative to Haiti. Although she lives at a convent, she provides spiritual support to those with Norwich Mission House and Hospice St. Joseph. Hospice is another ministry of Norwich Diocese the operates in Haiti
On Saturday the Haitian Ministries group went to the site of Norwich Mission House. The grounds now have a temporary metal all, and a security guard protects the property from vandalism.
The two-story house is flattened.
Despite the destruction, staff met daily at the grounds, and mechanics are often there to make needed repairs on the Toyota Land Cruiser. The Montero, which was under the carport during the earthquake, was flattened, but friends of Dominique Georges (the mission house co-acting director) raised the roof enough so that it can be driven. The bashed vehicle has no windshield nor windows, but the visiting group has used it for transportation while the Toyota undergoes almost daily repairs.
On the streets, Haitians passing by often point at the Montero and smile or laugh.
Around the Norwich Mission House much of the neighborhood has been demolished. On Saturday, a man who lost his wife and a woman who lost four children watched as smoke rose from the rubble of their homes. Bodies that cannot be retrieved from the deep piles of concrete are burned to avoid contagion.
On Saturday, the group also visited Lanitte Belledente (the mission house cook for the last 20 years) who had her left leg amputated below the knee. Her treatment at the medical tent encampment adjacent to the tarmac of the International Airport is excellent, according to Dr. Gorin and Emily Smack.
Lanitte’s sister is by her side, and Lanitte received daily wound care and physical therapy. Teams of doctors, most from the United States, are specialists in their field.
On Monday, Emily and the others plan to revisit Paula’s orphanage and medical clinic. They will meet with Catholic Relief Services to try to coordinate medical missions with Haitian Ministries. They also expect to visit Madame Samson’s neighborhood, where she has operated a meal program for children for almost 20 years.
On Tuesday, they hope to talk or meet with the Penettes, who run L’Arc-en-Ciel, the orphanage for children affected by AIDS/HIV. They also plan to visit Lanitte again.