“You give life.”
This past August, Father Joseph Constant, founder and Executive Director of the Haiti Micah Project, spoke with the Service & Outreach team via Zoom. He and Haiti Micah’s Treasurer Jim Snow and Administrative Assistant Sarah Desir provided an overview of Haiti Micah’s work with orphaned and abandoned children in Mirebalais, Haiti, Father Constant’s hometown. Father Constant will be our (virtual) guest at Have a Heart on Sunday, February 21.
Epiphany had made a special gift of $10,000 to Haiti Micah in July for emergency needs arising from the coronavirus. We were curious—and thought the parish would like to know—for what specifically that gift might have been used. His short answer was, “You give life.” He emphasized that this was no metaphor or figure of speech. Many children are alive only because Haiti Micah’s intervention saved them from unendurable poverty. Epiphany’s gift in fact had come “just in time” to cover a broken generator and skyrocketing food prices caused by the strict quarantine and ongoing political unrest.
Father Constant also impressed upon us the inextricably entwined histories of Haiti and the US. Most Americans know almost nothing about Haiti, and our government’s policies, even when well-intentioned, often have disastrous unintended consequences. Many parishioners might have gotten their first impressions about Haiti from Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Paul Farmer’s work providing medical care to Haiti’s poor through his organization Partners in Health. For those wanting to learn more about Haiti, Father Constant suggested two books by Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti and Haiti After the Earthquake, and James G. Leyburn’s The Haitian People.
You can view our Zoom meeting with Father Constant on at this link: