Our mission is to help the most vulnerable. To do so, sometimes we must go to the most remote and challenging places to reach out to people that have been hit the hardest by the recent earthquake and who have lost hope.
To bring care and hope to these areas we have to actually get down in the mud and look for better roads and tracks. On the way to the Barradères, after so many of these difficulties on the road, we got down into the street to remove boulders for cars to pass.
Here we met a child who sells bread.
“How are you?” He shouted to Father Rick.
“You look tired and hungry”, he continued.
“For sure, we are tired”, we replied.
He insisted to know where are we heading with the St Luke team.
When we told him that we were aiming for Barraderes, he seriously stressed how difficult it is to get there and offered us a bag of bread for our trip, and proposed to get avocado from his father’s farm.
Surprised by his generosity, we wanted to know why he was so kind to us to offer food. He then answered, “I understand how difficult it is for you to get there. The bread I sell comes from Port-au-Prince and it takes a long time to get here”.
A logical question to ask, why don’t they just bread here. He answered by explaining to us how their bakery was destroyed by the recent earthquake and left them with no choice, but to pay high prices to get the Bread from Port-au-Prince. Bread is the easiest food for them in this remote community.
Despite all the difficulties of getting bread from Port-au-Prince, we asked him why he greeted us with bread and avocados and his answer was revealing;
“The rest of the way to Barraderes you are not going to find any food.”
We ate bread and avocado to fill us up and bought several more bags of bread and we paid him 3 x the value for the gift he intended to give us.
In fact, we did not find food along the road, but we drank coconut water and ate the bread.
This story reminds the team of something Father Rick always tells us, “Forget your pain so you can go and ease someone else’s pain.”
This child forgets his pain and gives us this bread even when his family is depending on him for the bread.
This is exactly what the St Luke Foundation does every day, we forget our pain to go and help others even when the road is difficult, even when there is no gasoline. We pay elevated street prices and remove the stones in the path so that we can continue to help. We will push the trucks if we need to in order to continue the outreach support where it is most helpful.
The work consistently becomes more difficult because the needs remain so numerous – while the situation in the country worsens. We continue to count on your help. We are grateful to you and continue to send many thanks and prayers for your generous help !http://www.stlukehaiti.org/donate
Learn about Forgotten Children of Haiti, my family’s non-profit that supports, in part, the St. Luke Foundation for Haiti.
