Ft. Rick bij de mis in Titayen

Van onze correspondent in Haïti.

Haiti is in mourning. One week ago we mourned the one month anniversary of the tragedy with three days of prayer, mass, and reflection. This week the Sisters of Charity heard that some of their fellow sisters, the Sisters of Mary, had died when their church collapsed. They recovered some of their bodies and they are now buried outside of the church at Saint Damian hospital. This week they also discovered a school with two-hundred children inside. The Sisters are recovering the dead, because the government is not present, tragedy compounding tragedy.  This morning, we had a funeral for three youths who grew up in our home, two brothers and a sister, who died instantly when the earthquake caused their home to collapse.  The funeral was held at Kenscoff, the main orphanage, and they were laid to rest surrounded by their two surviving brothers and almost 500 of their brothers and sisters, who showed solidarity through prayer, readings and song.

This is but a small glimpse, but one that is close to home for us here, happening inside our walls and to those near and dear to us.

 In one of his sermons this week, Father Rick said that we are now in phase two of the crisis, and that this phase is so much harder than the first. The first was one of action, adrenaline, of saving a child’s life by amputating a limb and rescuing people from under the rubble. But now, after more than five weeks, we can no longer find anyone alive, the amputations have been done and now need to be cared for and watched over, and we have begun to think of what we have lost.

And so now we begin to look forward, to take stock of what happened, to begin to feel our losses, and the uncertainty of the future.