The Transfiguration of 2020
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The challenges of 2020 can open for us a brighter future…
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A floating hospital and a sinking country
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Under the circumstances, it is hard to learn how to “be the change we would like to see”, guided by the “better angels of our nature.”
As is the case in Haiti, the cause of the many of the uprisings are huge frustrations because life is ever more difficult to live.
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Taicha, Tenebrae, and Corpus Christi
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Dear Family and Friends,
I don't know if you have ever seen a child without a face.
The question is not rhetorical.
Childhood cancers have slowly disfigured and then slowly killed too many children, too often, in history.
Especially in impoverished countries where access to care is very limited, this is not ancient history, but all too recent.
Pieta - When Demonstrations Cause Babies to Die
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When I returned to St Damien Hospital at about 5pm yesterday afternoon, after spending the day buying medicines for our hospitals, there was a woman in the hallway holding a small child, and I sensed something was very wrong.
She was not crying, but her face revealed a restrained panic.
Her one year old daughter, while seemingly asleep in her arms, was, to my eye, lifeless.
The child was dead, and this poor mother could not accept it.
This is the kind of thing that happens when roads are blocked with violence, when hatred rules the streets, when mothers are afraid to risk the roads with their sick children.
Read MoreThe Fermenting of Wines and Revolutions, Fr. Rick Addresses the Political Situation in Haiti
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Social and political tensions in Haiti have reached their flash points over the past number of months, and we have been living, with more intensity these days, what seems like the dangerous and cynical unraveling of a nation.
The spiral of violence and destruction is both tragic and maddening.
The simply stated reason for all of this is that the cost of living has become impossible,
in a country where it was already hard enough to stay alive.
Read MoreFr. Rick Reflects on the 9th Anniversary of the Earthquake
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When Haiti was devastated by the infamous earthquake of 2010, the world had not seen a comparable disaster since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It was also one of the first disasters in the age of the cell phone and instant messaging. The size of the disaster, and the ease of instant communication worldwide, sparked immediate and universal awareness, concern and mobilization to help the suffering.
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