DAY 3…Paradise in Hell? Port-au-Prince

Today…finally…I visited the Daughters of Wisdom.  They are a Haitian order of Sisters who HAD a huge school in the city which schooled over 600 teenage girls.  They have a tent-school in Port-au-Prince as well.  What once was a 400 student orphanage and school for the deaf was totally destroyed in the city.  As a result the sisters somehow (the miracles are amazing!) were given some land on which they built such a wonderful and joyous place!  Clean, accommodating and…get this…the first open field I saw that wasn’t filled with garbage or tents!  I promised all these skids a load of athletic stuff…soccer balls, etc.  This visit was the highlight of my trip as of now!  The beautiful children, so happy and expressive!  I, not speaking the lingo or being able to sign, used the old Deasy “give’m energy and play with them”.  We had a ball!

After some much needed water….after doing over 14 presentations to 14 classes of children who couldn’t hear a word I was saying (lucky kids, huh?)…we sat down and chatted with the sisters.  So much fun…and YOUNG!

Once leaving the Sisters, we went off to the town of Santo.  About 15 miles out of the city…which takes 30 minutes no traffic; one hour with traffic…we visited the Fr Jeanne Francois who was the pastor of St. Mary Magdalene’s.  With a destroyed school on one side (it’ll take $16,000 to demolish it) and with a school construction in progress (a simple two story 7 room structure in its third year of building…ouch!…you knew that a celebration was much needed and by God they were going to make one!. The place was abuzz with preparing for their big Feast Day Celebration tomorrow, July 21, the feast day.  We sat down with some other padres and seminarians and enjoyed a simple meal of rice and beans (which I didn’t need because, again, I was still raising sweat!)  Afterwards, I travelled to the tent city and/slum area right off the parish.  The flies, smell, garbage and mud that we had to walk through just to get there was enough to make you sick.  Really.  This was the worse one I’d seen.  You can see in the people’s eyes that look of “is this all there is to life”.  Just sitting there watching time go by maybe before going to take a shift at the one of a thousand road stands selling bananas or fresh(?) fish