This Friday's senior presentation came to us via Dr. Claude Noel's organization, Partners with Haiti. Dr. Noel founded Partners with Haiti over twenty years ago as a way of micro-investing in one of the most stable and local institutions in rural villages in that developing country: the church.
Although CM Theology teacher Dr. Andrew Malionek has yet to visit the country, his friend Pastor Dieuseul Estivene invites him every year to visit Haiti and see the good work organizations like Partners with Haiti are doing. "I invited Pastor Estivene here," Dr. Malionek said after his friend's talk to the senior class on April 11, "because we just read Mountains Beyond Mountains, and because the present situation of unrest in Haiti makes this timely with what we're doing in class."
Above: Magda Estivene speaks about health care in Haiti.
Pastor Estivene spoke to the seniors about Partners in Haiti after a brief slideshow displayed the work local church groups in Boston and Rhode Island (where the organization calls home) have done in past years in villages outside Port-au-Prince.
"We are helping to build schools and community centers in Haiti," Pastor Estivene said through a translator, "that will help people get out of their situation. It's a dream for them to see their lives change." One school that church groups in Massachusetts have helped build, noted Estivene, has grown in recent years from ten to over four hundred students.
One thing the churches and schools teach ordinary Haitians about is better health care. "There's a close relationship between poverty in Haiti and HIV," said Pastor Estivene's wife Magda, whose position with Partners with Haiti revolves around public health. "When the immune system is so reduced by HIV," she told the seniors, "any illness can effect them--tuberculosis, typhoid, and malnutrition."
After the event, seniors were able to offer comments and ask questions about the solutions that groups like Partners with Haiti are devising.
"It was good to get feedback from people who have lived there," said Silverio Conte '08, "rather than anything exaggerated or biased an American might bring back." Conte found the statistics he heard about Haiti remarkable. "Over 80% of the country, they said, live below the poverty line," Conte recalled.
For their summer reading and accompanying their study of liberation theology in senior religion classes, seniors study groups like Partners with Haiti. Every senior reads and discusses Paul Farmer's biography, Mountains beyond Mountains, written by Tracy Kidder.
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