Letter from Haiti
Fr. Francky Valère OMI
Francky Valère is a young Oblate priest from Haiti. He completed his studies in Rome last year and was ordained at home just before Christmas. It's hardly possible to imagine more difficult circumstances in which to speak words of hope than in Haiti this past week. The following is a brief letter written by this young priest to Fr Ray Warren, his host when he was in Dublin to improve his English in Summer 2008.
The love of the Lord is not over, his compassion is renewed. When the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, I was reading a book on psychology where the author says that to be at peace with ourselves we need to remember at least one good thing that happens in our lives each day.
I don’t know if I can remember a single good thing that day when the mountains began to collapse, landslides and boulders started falling on cars, roads shook and cracked, and houses crumbled. I could only watch and pray. When the shaking stopped, the first person I saw was the pastor of our parish, whose room is next to mine, and we just thanked God for being alive.
Immediately afterwards, I began calling my loved ones to see if they were okay. I found many of them, especially those in Port-au-Prince, all telling the same story that everything around them had collapsed and that we would just have to pray.
My young cousin who works in a bank in the city told me how fortunate he had been. A woman working with him had her foot severed, and many other employees were trapped under the rubble of their collapsed building.
In Jacmel, a city 80kms from Port-au-Prince, another friend told of children screaming and the corpses of people and animals everywhere.
Later, I learned that our Oblate brothers were alive, but trapped, and one scholastic at least had died in the rubble of their house. The provincial house, too, had collapsed. After this, the whole communications system broke down and all we could do was wait.
I wasn’t able to get any news from my sister. At first I heard rumours (and then people told me directly) that she had died. They hadn’t seen her for four days. The house where she had been living had collapsed. I couldn’t get confirmation about what had happened to her, so I had to accept that she was dead.
I was trapped where I was and couldn’t get out. Finally, my mother reached me and told me that she had to go to Port-au-Prince to look for the body. I must confess that I was too weak to go with her, so my mother went alone.
After about three hours, I tried to call, and it was my sister who answered the phone. I can’t begin to describe how I felt. She had been under the rubble for five days, and she was alive thanks to the neighbours who saved her. Praise the Lord. When I met her yesterday, we prayed together.
Sorry to take so long to tell this story, but I couldn’t miss the opportunity to share my good news with you. We are among the fortunate ones, even if we have lost all our material possessions.
The pitiful sounds of crying children, the man who has lost his legs in the earthquake, the woman fleeing from Port-au-Prince to the countryside where she knows no one, are all typical examples from daily life here.
It’s a time of great uncertainty. We know that one-third of Haitians lived in Port-au-Prince before the earthquake. The people had nothing, now they have lost everything. But faith is still alive; only God remains.
On Sunday, many came to church to pray, to praise Him even in the depth of their sorrow. We are all praying to the same God. Almost everyone shares the conviction that without God it would be impossible to recover from this terrible disaster — buildings and homes in ruins, a population living and sleeping on the street, wounded people everywhere, no water or food.
The Oblate community in Port-au-Prince is relocating to our twenty parishes. The students may not be able to complete their courses this year, since both their house and their seminary have collapsed. The capital city has been demolished and is in complete chaos. The Oblates, like everyone else, have lost buildings and possessions, seminarians are homeless, some have died, people are without food, water, etc., the Archbishop is dead.
Those of us who are alive know that it will take time to understand and deal with the utter devastation that we have witnessed. We will have to live with that in the knowledge that life is nothing if it’s not the power to build and to love. It will certainly take time to rebuild, and to love more than I have been able to.
Thank you for your concern and your prayers.
Francky Valère OMI