Home destroyed, Haitian nuns struggle to serve
Amy Miller photos
Residents of the Asile de St. Vincent de Paul in Leogane, Haiti, have been sleeping outside or in tents since the Jan. 12 earthquake destroyed every building in the compound of 130 surviving residents, ages 8 to 109.
Amy Miller, a freelance writer in South Berwick, Maine, recently returned from a trip to Haiti with the New York-based nonprofit organization Life and Hope Haiti, which runs a school in northern Haiti.
Junie Sufrad, who says she is 109 years old, was lucid enough to know exactly how lucky she was on Jan. 12 when the earthquake shattered the world around her in Leogane, Haiti, about 5 miles from the epicenter.
“I was standing here, and if I were where my friend was I would not be alive today,” said Sufrad, walking slowly but stably down a pathway at the Asile de St. Vincent de Paul, a home for Haiti’s most destitute in a country defined by destitution.
Sufrad is one of 130 residents at the compound I was visiting who survived the earthquake. Eleven residents died, many others were injured. Now, 11 nuns and aspiring nuns, as well as dozens of employees, are caring for people who have lost the little they had, preparing meals without a kitchen, striving for personal hygiene among the rubble.
But somehow, when I visited here about a month after the 7.1-magnitude earthquake rendered every building in this 10-acre compound unusable, daily life continued in a remarkably regular fashion. Regular if you ignored the mounds and mounds of wreckage that surround the wheelchairs and benches where residents sit. Regular if you didn’t walk through the cracked convent and dormitories without walls. And regular if you didn’t dwell on the fact that the residents were sleeping either outside or 10 to a tent – shelter donated by a variety of Rotary clubs.
Dozens of staff people at the Asile lovingly braided the hair of elderly women; men in wheelchairs and with canes strolled the paths between buildings, and residents gathered on curbs for beans and rice. The handful of children who live here sang and danced, and the nuns continued their daily prayer routine.
Behind this daily routine was Sister Claudette Charles, a nun who has cried more tears in a month than she did in her 58 years before the earthquake.
“You cannot imagine how I feel,” Sister Claudette, director of the Asile de St. Vincent de Paul, told me after minutes of laden silence. “You know why I am crying,” she added. “After so many days, I’m tired. I feel tired. And I can’t sleep. I never sleep.”
Sister Claudette Joseph showed the damage done to the building where she lived at Asile de St. Vincent de Paul.
During a walk to show me the destruction of her compound, Sister Claudette took stock of the enormity of her loss. She walked past Canadian military workers who had moved rubble for three weeks but left with the job just only begun; past the demolished cafeteria paid for by the Japanese government; and through the resident halls, kitchen and nuns’ home, all built with decades of donations and all ready for the wrecking ball.
“It took me 23 years to organize this, and in a few seconds it was all destroyed,” she said.
The Catholic Church sent Sister Claudette to this location 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince in 1987. She described people living on the ground in filth without homes or family, sent here to waste away and die. Sister Claudette and Sister Soeurette Joseph, 52, created lawns and gardens, dining halls and dormitories, and most of all a home that was secure.
After the earthquake hit, Sister Claudette said she spent the night praying. The next day she assumed all of the country had been destroyed until someone from outside showed up and told her it was just the southwest, with Jacmel, Port-au-Prince, and Leogane hit hardest.
For several days after the Tuesday earthquake the people at the Asile, ranging from age 8 to the 109-year-old, were without medical care or help. Sister Claudette could point to the holes where the nuns managed to escape from the fallen buildings, but she had trouble describing the days of terror and sadness.
Lucia Anglade, her sister, waited three days in her home in Long Island, N.Y., to find out if she was dead or alive. When she finally heard that three siblings in the Port-au-Prince area had all survived, she was shocked to hear her older sister’s desperate fear through the phone lines.
“She called me saying she was scared. She said she there was no relief there to help and she had all these people to take care of,” said Anglade, who runs a nonprofit group in Long Island called Life and Hope Haiti that operates a school in Milot in the north of Haiti.
From the moment she learned of the earthquake, Anglade worked day and night to make arrangements to bring relief to her sister and the Asile St. Vincent de Paul. A school bus driver and mother of five in Long Island, she took the month off and took her third trip down to Leogane in mid February. She has brought down more than 30 people from New York, Maine, Idaho, and Canada, and sent or carried about 10,000 pounds of donated medical supplies, tents and food. Fifteen people form Maine and New York went down through the Dominican Republic last week and are at the Asile now. I was among the second group, there as a friend, as a journalist, and as an emissary for my community in Maine, which has been involved in Lucia’s school for three years and now is committed to helping Sister Claudette.
“It’s so hard,” Sister Claudette said, on greeting me back at the Asile, where I had also come with my daughter in July. “It’s just so hard,” she repeated, struggling to make herself understood in English.
When asked about the earthquake and religion, Sister Claudette talked to me about science.
“Just like us, the Earth changes. These are things that just renew themselves.”
And when I asked her what needs to happen, she did not waiver in her call for help from the international community.
“Haiti needs to rebuild,” she said, “but it needs help from the rest of the world.”
Despite all the hardship she and the residents of the Asile face, Sister Claudette joined Sufrad in professing her relative good fortune.
"I accept this,” she said. “There are a lot of poor people In Haiti, people on the streets. Now it’s time to for us to taste that life. I told that to the sisters.”
To learn how you can blog for Passport, e-mail Lydia Rebac at lrebac@globe.com
