By Greg Nikkel
A team of volunteers from the Weyburn Free Methodist Church came home recently from a week in Haiti tired but happy with the work they were able to do in helping Haitians build houses and repair damages from Hurricane Matthew last year.
Team co-leaders Brian Hopfe and Brad Alexander shared some of their experiences from the trip, working alongside a national Haitian organization, Haiti Arise.
The Weyburn team of 12 was joined by a team from a Medicine Hat church. Some of them went out to St. Helene, a remote rural site, where they built houses for Haitian families who lost everything to Hurricane Matthew, including a place to live and all of their possessions.
The other team members did work in and around the Haiti Arise compounds. The organization has a seven-acre parcel of land with two compounds, which includes a medical clinic, a school and a children’s village, where they take in orphaned and abandoned children and parent couples care for them in houses in the compound.
“The thing I enjoyed the most was when we went into the community and did visitations with the Haitian people, and shared our story with them. We read Scriptures and prayed with them,” said Hopfe, noting he had an injured arm before going and so wasn’t able to do as much of the physical work as he had hoped to.
The Haitian people in the area they worked in, and to the southwest where the houses were built, was heavily damaged by Hurricane Matthew, said Hopfe.
“When Hurricane Matthew went through, they lost everything,” he said, noting the epicentre of the earthquake of a few years ago was about 15 km away, and Hurricane Sandy had gone through a short time before that.
“They’ve been inundated with everything,” he said.
During Matthew, which dropped 40 inches of rain in two days along with winds reaching 160 miles an hour, a small stream near where the team was building houses had overflowed its banks and carried mud and rocks down the mountain into farmers fields, carrying away many homes and everything in them. Thus, the Haiti-based group Haiti Arise is building new 12-foot by 16-foot homes for the families who lost everything. The team built 11 homes in the week they were there.
“What a privilege it was to reach out to them and let them know there’s a God who loves them and cares for them,” said Hopfe.
Part of the work the team did around the compound was to repair the roof on the medical clinic, and the flooring in the school and some of the homes in the children’s village, where two duplexes are finished, two were almost finished while they were there, and two more will be built later on. The Weyburn team also helped with a distribution of rice to area residents during the week they were there.
“I think we helped a lot, and did all sorts of things that needed doing,” said Hopfe, noting in the two duplexes that are close to being finished, they put in electrical wiring, ceiling fans and installed cupboards, plus did patching of walls and floors where it was needed.
The eventual goal is to house 144 children in the village with parent couples in each home to care for the groups of children, some of whom were child slaves. As Hopfe explained, one in every 10 children in Haiti are “restaveks”, a Creole term that means literally “to stay with”, but who are in reality child slaves. Parents who are too poor to care for their children give them away to work as servants, in the hope they can get better care than they can afford.
“They bring children in to live in a family environment, to live in a place of safety where they are cared for in a family unit,” said Hopfe.
Brad Alexander went out to the remote site to build houses along with Norm Alexander, staying out for three days before they came back in to the compound to help out where they were needed there. The site was a three-hour drive away from the Haiti Arise compound.
“For me, it was a better trip than the previous two times I’ve been to Haiti. I felt we really accomplished a lot for people,” he said, noting for the houses they prefabricated wall sections, then put them up at the site which was located partway up a mountain.
“Eleven houses were finished in that week. We worked with a group of around 30 Haitians. They’ve built 60 to 70 of them. There were two crews of concrete guys who did the foundation for the houses, and we hardly ever saw them. We were doing the wooden part of it, and they had three foundations ready before we even got there. We caught up with them by the end of the week,” said Brad, noting that as the sites for the homes were up on the mountain, they used donkeys to carry materials up to the sites, as there are no roads in that area.
“It was a great experience. The people getting these homes were just overjoyed, because they have nothing,” said Brad, noting the cost of each home was about $1,500 US, which paid for the materials and for the labour of the Haitian crew.
The homes are small, he noted, but most of their activities as families is outside, including the cooking and working. The home is mostly a sheltered area where they can sleep and be dry when it rains. Later, as they are able, they can build onto their homes to make them bigger, added Brad.
“I got to see a beautiful part of Haiti, and got to be involved with house building. Eleven families that week got a home, and that’s making a difference,” said Brad.
Another special part of the team’s time in Haiti was some members, including Norm and Bev Alexander, sponsor Haitian children, and they were able to meet the children and share some time with them.
