Dreaming of a stronger, different church in Haiti
Episcopal News Service -- Port-au-Prince. February 2, 2011 [020211-02]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
(For a gallery of photos of Episcopal Church rebuilding efforts in Haiti, click here.)
For part of every school day trumpets, trombones, French horns and violins compete with honking horns, squealing tires and shouting people in a busy corner of the Haitian capital.
The musicians are mostly young students at the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti's earthquake-destroyed, but still functional Holy Trinity Music School in Port-au-Prince.
"I have so many dreams for Holy Trinity School," its head, the Rev. Fernande Pierre Louis, told Episcopal News Service recently.
The object of her and others' dreams for the diocese, which celebrates its 150 anniversary this year, is to continue and strengthen the work of preaching and enacting what Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin has called "a gospel of wholeness" that serves people in their bodies, minds and spirits.
That attitude of wholeness came to Haiti with the Rev. James Theodore Holly, one of the Episcopal Church's first African-American priests -- ordained in 1856 at age 27 -- who founded the Haitian diocese after he brought 100 emigrants from New Haven, Connecticut, to Haiti. Holly, who later became the diocese's first bishop, went to the countryside first, according to Duracin, and wherever he went he founded a school. Holly thought people should be able to read the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and he believed in education as a development tool.
The music school is part of the Holy Trinity Cathedral complex that also once housed Holy Trinity Professional School, primary and secondary schools, and a convent of the Sisters of St. Margaret, as well as the now-destroyed church building with its world-renowned murals depicting biblical stories in Haitian motifs, which were crafted by some of the best-known Haitian painters of the 20th century.
For Pierre Louis, the aim of educating the more than 900 students who come to the battered complex every day is the same as it has always been. "To be good citizen, to stay in Haiti to develop the country, that's why it's important for us to give them high-caliber education," she said in an interview with ENS Jan. 25 during the diocese's 114th synod.
Pierre Louis, who was injured when the Holy Trinity School collapsed during the magnitude-7 earthquake that struck late in the afternoon of Jan. 12, 2010 and spent three months recovering with family in Montreal, described the year since the quake as "difficult for every, every, everybody."
Duracin dreams of a stronger diocese and a stronger nation as well. He urged synod participants to have "the courage to continue," adding that "our communities are very strong even though we suffer because we have lost so many people, so many things, but we are still there, stronger and stronger."
"My dream is to rebuild stronger," he told ENS at the diocesan offices on Jan. 29. "We have to build ourselves differently and rebuild the things that we have lost."
The difference must come not just through the often-stated vow to rebuild physical structures in ways that will help them withstand future hurricanes and earthquakes. There must be a difference in attitude, the bishop said.
During the earthquake and in the initial hours and days afterwards, neighbors helped neighbors without waiting for officials to come to their aid. "We have to maintain that spirit of solidarity with one another," Duracin said.
"We have to be different from political people -- how there are so many divisions and hatreds. We have to live in love, which is what I mean by differently. And not just to see ourselves, but also to see others around us."
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's two special coordinators for the Haiti Long-Term Recovery Project, the Rev. Joseph Constant and the Rev. Rosemari Sullivan, spent Jan. 24-29 in Haiti and saw signs of strength, difference and remaining challenges.
"I think the church really understands its mission to proclaim the word, its mission to lift up the brokenhearted," Constant said. "There's a lot of that right now in Haiti -- people feeling that sense of brokenness and thirsting for words of hope. The church is in a unique position especially now to be a leader in terms of bringing that sense of hope amidst the challenges. So I see the church in a tension between really providing that sense of comfort, that sense of presence, and the church spending time rebuilding [its buildings], because the church has to rebuild. "
Sullivan said her visit to the diocese -- the first time she had seen the work of the Episcopal Church in what before the quake was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere -- showed her that "the capacity that needs to be built is the capacity to serve the brokenhearted."
"That's why we build capacity and capacity isn't structures," she said. "Capacity is services and systems. Structures are always needed, but the services and the systems are why the structures are needed."
One of the U.S.-based Episcopal Church's 12 overseas dioceses, Haiti is numerically the largest diocese in the church with more than 100,000 Episcopalians in 200 congregations, parishes, missions and preaching stations, who before the quake were served by just 32 active priests, nine retired priests, six deacons, three nuns and 17 seminarians.
Prior to the earthquake the diocese ran a network of 254 schools that taught more than 80,000 Haitians from preschool to university level. Other institutions included a school for handicapped children, a trade school, a music school, a two-year business school, a nursing school that granted the first baccalaureate degrees in the country in January 2009, a seminary and a university. A renowned philharmonic orchestra and children's choir were based at the cathedral and both are still performing. The diocese also provided medical clinics, development projects and micro-financing efforts.
In November a report released during a meeting of many of the diocese's current mission partners predicted that the first phase of post-earthquake reconstruction and development for the entire diocese will cost close to $197 million. The Plan for the Reconstruction and Development of the Diocese of Haiti (Phase 1) said that the $196,861,926 cost estimate includes a $24,319,400 "local contribution," thus leaving $172,542,526 to come from outside sources.
The first and major dream for this first phase of the plan is rebuilding the cathedral complex. The November report put the cost of rebuilding the church structure at $34.7 million and the cost of school complex at nearly $50 million. The wider Episcopal Church recently inaugurated a fundraising campaign for that project called Rebuild our Church in Haiti.
The diocese's plan includes the current property along with the possibility of obtaining three more adjacent blocks from the government. The additional land could be used to consolidate some of the diocese's other institutions in the capital city.
Participants at the diocese's synod Jan. 25-26 refused to approve a proposal for a rotating monthly special offering aimed at cathedral rebuilding, saying that their parishes had rebuilding needs of their own. Instead, the synod agreed to two diocese-wide collections, one on Trinity Sunday and a second on the Sunday after the Epiphany. The latter would come close to coinciding with the second anniversary of the quake.
Constant, a native Haitian, said that while some people may question why the cathedral is the diocese's first rebuilding choice, there is "thirst for stability and people have been through so much that having a structure like a cathedral to go into for a church service provides that sense of stability, provides that sense of normalcy that I think we all thirst for."
Sullivan called a cathedral the "symbol of the mysterium tremendum of God that all human beings long to enter into."
"In the Middle Ages the cathedral was the building that was built and all of the enterprise of the people -- everything took place in the shadow of the cathedral. The homes were built. The craftsmen lived there," she said. "Village, town, cities all sprang up around the cathedral and so in a way the diocese springs up around the cathedral."
The cathedral land is within a stone's throw of a major encampment filled with some of the more than 1 million Haitians who have lived in tents since the hours after the quake and Constant said that the diocesan leadership is "definitely mindful that there are great needs around us, around the cathedral."
Sullivan called on the diocese to advocate for the homeless as they minister to their other needs. "We cannot allow people to continue to live in tents," she said. "That is a recipe for utter disaster. That has to stop and the church has to say 'You must stop.' The church needs to do some things and it needs to certainly be present in a very clear way with all powers in the nation-state of Haiti."
Constant and Sullivan said that the diocese is making changes in its operations to live out its dreams.
"There's a real organization going on -- a really expansion of the diocesan system to try to build enough capacity to fully function as a diocese as large as it is," Sullivan said.
Specifically, Constant said, diocesan leaders are "being intentional about putting structures in place so that we can have accountability, we have transparency," adding that the rest of the church needs to help provide the diocese with the expertise it needs in those areas.
He said that the church needs to know that the diocese is serious about its pledge to rebuild structures with techniques to ensure that "when the next hurricane happens, when the next earthquake happens, that these buildings, by the grace of God, that will remain standing."
The wider church has some responsibilities as well in its desire to help Haiti realize its dreams, according to Sullivan. "There is an intense need to collaborate among all of the donors," she explained. "Parishes, schools, hospitals -- any organization or institution that wants to help in Haiti needs to work in coordination so that their efforts are more effective and that the energy of the diocese is not siphoned off on small projects."
Sullivan added that it's not that every gift and good intention isn't appreciated. Coordination is needed "so that we can honor both the gift and the need and match them better."
Lastly, Sullivan said, Episcopalians must understand the context within which the diocese is rebuilding. Its diocesan staff is stretched thin and its clergy and lay leaders, having suffered trauma and loss of their own, face tremendous work. Most clergy, who earn an average annual salary of $1,000, are responsible for multiple congregations to which thousands of Haitians belong. They are often running medical clinics and schools with thousands of students -- all with very little money.
She said "Haiti is a very different culture, climate and when we say we poverty we mean poverty that is almost unimaginable for an American without really seeing and that that is the situation that the church is working in."