A VISIT TO HAÏTI

Mrs. Marguerite Wall, a French Teacher at Roxbury High School, spent the first week of her summer vacation in Haiti doing volunteer work with the Brothers of the Missionaries of the Poor.  Mrs. Wall’s French I classes collected school supplies and wrote letters of introduction in French, Haiti’s native language, which Mrs. Wall proudly presented to the Sister in Charge at the School for the Hearing-impaired where she stayed.  This year, the students in her French II class will continue to write letters and eagerly anticipate receiving responses.

Five people from Mrs. Wall’s parish church traveled to Cap-Haitian, a city situated on the northern coast of Haiti, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida on a small plane that sat twenty people.  While there, the group worked with orphaned and abandoned children.  There are just over thirty children currently in the Brothers’ care together with over a hundred men and women who are homeless because of health problems, old age, or poverty.

Volunteer work consisted mainly of manual labor and included sweeping and mopping the floors, changing diapers, and bathing and feeding the children.  The group enjoyed playing with the children and giving them attention. Of the approximately thirty children in the orphanage, approximately six are mentally and physically unchallenged and ten are totally incapacitated and incapable of any mobility.  One two-year old girl was blind and a ten-year old boy can crawl and stand with some support, but he was not able to walk.  Mrs. Wall said all the children wanted to be held and to be communicated with and always scrambled to climb onto her knee.

In the afternoons, Mrs. Wall was able explore the surrounding neighborhoods, either on foot or by car, and described the extreme poverty in the city.  “The living conditions were often terrible with ten or twenty people in a tiny two-room house and no air-conditioning or sewers,” she said.

“The people of Haïti were very friendly and loved to have their photograph taken!”  Mrs. Wall put together a PowerPoint presentation that she plans to share with her French students from the 200 photographs taken during her short visit.