What I do everyday.....February 17, 2025

Dear friends,

This morning with the Sisters, we offered mass for the mother and child victims of the bandits in Kenscoff. It is a barbaric event involving the bandits forcing the mother to throw her baby into the fire or be killed. The young mother was forced to do so, and ran off and went crazy, and died of profound distress.

I hate to even repeat such a hateful and painful story, but it shows what terror is being inflicted on the population. Also, for those of us who are believers, our prayerful sharing in their suffering by lamenting their passion and death before God grounds us in compassion and trust in God’s final judgement and victory

There was also a massacre of 13 people, last night or this morning, in our area of Tabarre.

You can well imagine why, when we got near Kenscoff today, we had to pass through three different brigades of masked local people with machetes. They are so radicalized against the kinds of crimes I just mentioned, that they are vigilant against anyone approaching Kenscoff (and many other areas) that if they find an armed person or a person with no proof of identity, they are killed by the blade on the spot. This happens all around the country.

The roads were timid above Fort Jacques and beyond. Everyone knows the bandits are still present, in hiding. Kenson had mentioned that the police had returned in force last night, to prevent another attack. We saw them reenforcing their numbers again today about 4pm, by the time we were heading down the mountain.

We arrived at St Helen about 2pm with 20 sacks of rice, 10 sacks of beans, 4 cases of oil to help with the extras at meals (refugees). The best plan and the one being followed is when the day is free of shooting, the refugees return to the homes and gardens and come back to sleep in safety.

This works for refugees where we are (in Obleon) but not in Furcy, because many of those refugees had their simple, peasant houses burned.

We had the same quantities of food for the Furcy refugees, and they came to St Helene to get them.

We also had complete emergency kits for the refugee compounds, 10 each for St Helene and Furcy.

We also had three well prepared bullet injury kits for the police combat vehicles. They include tourniquets, injections to promote clotting where pressure banadages wont work (internal injuries), and thick compression gauze and pads, with elastic bandaging. We are also working on getting powder for blood clotting (BleedStop) and rapid Seal Wound Gel from USA.

This is especially a challenge with closed airports and borders.

We found Nirva, Kenson and all the team to be in good spirits in the face of their dangers and we are heartened by this.

There are two pictures of delivery below.

Also, as I was leaving for Kenscoff, Timario brought Jeannine and her mother to see me. Jeannine’s surgery for hydrocephalus went very well. Even though it is distressing to see such a huge head, anyone who saw the pre-surgery picture can see how relaxed and unstressed Jeannine looks now, in the third picture below, all thanks to God.

What I do every day...February 16, 2025

Dear friends,

If you reread what I wrote on Feb 7 about bandit attacks near our NPH Childrens home in Kenscoff (St Helene), today some of the concerns of that day came to pass.

At about 2am this morning, bandits started attacking the area around us, targeting some private houses, and the Teleco communication antennas vital in part to police communication.

Kenson called me early this morning as things were unfolding. He said the orphanage was flooded with some 250 refugees (neighbors running for shelter), that one was injured by a bullet, that shooting was intense all around.

He told me that he was able to send the injured down the mountain. I told him that as soon as I got Andre, Jocelynson and Fanfan we would be on our way there to help.

My goal was to be in shoulder to shoulder solidarity, help figure out how to manage the unfolding dangers, and when I returned to Tabarre to bring anyone with me who wanted to leave.

I only got as far as Petionville, because the police were forbidding any vehicles to enter the Kenscoff area except their own, and because we were warned that both vigilante groups and the bandits were radicalized on high adrenaline, and often attack approaching vehicles who the suspect are coming with bad intentions.

Even if I was in my ambulance, very often crimes are done in stolen vehicles like ambulances, and criminals often wear stolen uniforms of doctors or police to reinforce the criminal activity.

If anyone were injured on site, or if the bandits had stormed St Helene, of set fire to any part of it, I would have persisted against all danger to get there, but frequent updates from Kenson showed this was not the case. So we did not persist.

By the end of the day the police were reinforced and drove the gangs off. But the police left again, and the gangs will surely return.

Among the casualties of law enforcement officers was John Calo. John taught music in our St Helene home from 1998 to 2009. His wife, Immacula, is the cook for our guest house at St Helene. John was killed in the line of duty. We mourn his loss, we grieve with Immacula and her family, and we honor John for defending the people of the mountain.

We will find the best way to support Immacula, as well as the 250 refugees within the embrace of our walls.

Andre reminded me of the funeral at St Helene, in 1999, of the American nun. Sister Grace Jennings was from Vermont. She was a School Sister of Notre Dame, a missionary for most of her life in Puerto Rico. She came to us from there when she was very old, and was a wonderful caregiver to very sick and dying children at our original St Damien Hospital in Petionville.

Sister Grace was a poet, and I remember very well how when she was frustrated or angry about something, she turned it into a poem and promptly hung it on the main bulletin board. The poems were clever, biting, and very funny.

After some years, Sr Grace had a stroke and we burried her at St Helene. John, pictured below, as the music teacher, prepared the music for her funeral. He had taught a dozen children from St Helene to play a dirge on their flutes, and they followed me in a long procession as we led Sister Grace’s ashes from the gate to our own cemetery. The music was sweet when they played together, which is hard to do when walking and one cannot hear the other. At their off moments the music sounded like a bunch of cats trying to get out of a burlap bag.

I pictured the flutes as the musical version of one of Grace’s poems.

I tell this story because to say “there were deaths” is as cold as a number. But to say “who died” brings grateful memory and deep regret.

May John’s soul be sped to heaven by God’s mercy, and may God help each of us to light up the path to peace, from the very place each of us is standing, here and now.

What I do everyday, February 10, 2025

Lots of shooting nearby, at Tabarre bridge and Croix des Bouquets as police square off with bandits.

Also lot’s of shooting in Kenscoff mountains, especially Berlot.

Estimates of those killed in the Kenscoff mountains (Bonga, Carrefour Bet, Berlot, and many other places) is at least 150, and refugees there are estimated at 5,000. Today we will invest Gds 210,000 (US $1600) to buy bales of clothes and sheets to send to the mountain refugees.

A drop in the bucket, but at least there is still a bucket to drop into.

Part of the work with the street children yesterday was filmed by Stevenson on his phone (viedo below) . It’s not a professional clip but will show a few things: the enthusiasm of the street youth for help, how the distribution has to stop occasionally to get them respect order, and the plastic baskets the team bought for them because the distribution is of sweets and treats for them to resell on the street to make a little cash.

Also, a long awaited moment for our farm: some of our VANILLA vines have first buds. Vanilla require manual pollenation, so we are watching youtube videso to be ready. See the buds below.