What I do every day (updated January 15).........Fr Rick

January 15, 2025

After making too long dangerous trips to the mountains and confronting a hostile gang, we rescued the young foreign woman who I mentioned previously was missing.

I have a picture below (scroll down) of our getaway.

It is a tremendous satisfaction that this is solved and she is free, but we are totally frazzled as I write this.

On another note, I have permission of the mom to show show this picture of her and her daughter (Jeannine) with hydrocephalus. Scroll down below if you would like to meet Jeannine. It is disturbing and necessary to look with compassion. The mom has heroic love.

We have found one of the two remaining neurosurgeons in Haiti, who can try to help by placing a shunt. We are organizing the needed CT scan of her brain, and will soon schedule a surgery date.

Please thank God with us for these positive advances!

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January 8, 2025

While I don’t want to take pictures, we just received 13 refugees here from the massacre in Nazon, Port au Prince, a few days ago. These people had family killed and houses burned. They were here for some help to relocate them out of that area. So we gave each an envelope with enough money to get them to the provinces, and also small provisions for food. Most of these are old people, one is blind, some are limping from minor injuries. Life is too tough for them.

A mother also came, with a one and a half year old child with hydrocephalus. Her head is huge already. She is a very poor woman who cannot affort the surgery for her child (a shunt), and the hospital that could do that surgery was just recently burned (Bernard Mevs Hospital.)

Again, we give some provisions of food and a little but of money, and we start the hunt to see where those surgeries might be done in Port au Prince now, and we start collecting for what it will cost. The mom is truly heroic, and the little girl is just trying to be a little girl, but her head is very heavy for her.

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January 5, 2025

Dear friends,

Since many people ask what will happen to Fondation St Luc Haiti if I am out of the picture for whatever reason, I think this “news reel” will be informative to those of you who care about me, about us, about our work in Haiti.

It is important to say from the outset (1987) when I arrived in Haiti, that I set out to create Haitian institutions together with Haitian cofounders to be run by the Haitian teams.

This is achieved: I do not manage or run any of our institutions for vulnerable children, or in Education or in Healthcare. Our institutions DO NOT DEPEND ON ME for their function and future, but of course my important contribution still is fundraising for them.

My role for at least ten years has been the very necessary one of extraordinary support, from the sidelines, for our institutions because of the many dangers they face. The dangers have been natural disasters (and a pretty steady stream of them), infectious disasters (cholera and COVID being two huge ones), and the socio-political disasters like the current situation of control of Haiti by armed, non-governmental groups.

The last three years have obliged my intense involvement in the realm of release of kidnapped persons, brokering humane corridors, relocating vulnerable groups from gang infested areas, offering insights and strategies for the end to the insecurity, organizing help for gunshot and trauma victims, relocating refugees and assistance to new refugees, attempts to save street children from the crossfire between gangs and police.

Some of this work has been for victims of our own institutions, but the vast majority of my time has been in helping with requests from society at large, including people working for governments, churches, and other charitable organizations.

To give two examples from this last week, there was a barbaric massacre on Dec 30, 2024 (six days ago) in a nearby area called Duval. We have a nurse whose 89 near old father was burned alive there, whose 82 year old mother was shot in the heart, and who lost 5 other family members. It is deeply tragic and sad.

I did not learn about it until Dec 31, and so I met with our nurse on new years day, to console her, to share the traditional new year soup with her and her refugee children, and organize with Junior to try to reach Duval so we could bury her family.

We had to intensify our learning of the many actors and try to get their buy in for our humanitarian intervention. We have worked for days on this and it still has not been possible. Things are incredibly complex, and so you know the reality, it becomes soon to late to bury people eaten by dogs and pigs and rats. YES, HELL IS VERY MUCH PRESENT ON EARTH.

But so is heaven, and all human and divinely inspired attempts to intervene and change the story. Sometimes we can work good endings. Sometimes we can only keep things from being much worse.

During these same days, and this also has required networking in both the world of goodness and the world of the bad and the ugly, in order to try to locate and liberate a very young woman from another country, who is lost in an area where police cannot set foot.

I am not free to say much about it now, it is just I am trying to share with you my work. We are making some headway but it is a huge challenge on all levels.

My own work also involves small farms. Bees, tilapia, chickens, eggs, sugar cane, chocolate making, etc. This is fun, and therapeutic and restorative.

The Bible, the Catholic Sacraments, my family, my Religious Community, my treasured friends here and abroad, my colleagues as we stay tightly bonded, all keep my (our) faith, hope, vision and love vibrant.

For this first sharing please study the icon below. It is the gospel story of Jesus sound alseep during the storm.

When Jesus was asleep in the boat, What is memorable about the story was, when he woke up and calmed the storm, he also rebuked the disciples. He insisted his power is already shared with them- that they can also calm storms, or at least keep faith through them.

We have more ability than we think in the challenges that face us.