Adventure: Love your slice of the World
Who is the Church?
Ten students from Wesley Seminary went on an immersion experience to Haiti, led by the Revs. Malcolm Frazier and Rev. Adrienne Terry. Here are some of their reflections.
We are all familiar with the hymn that proclaims, “I am the church, you are they church, we are the church together.” Yes, we all know that the church is not the building, but is, in fact, the people.
This leaves me wondering though, which people? Is it all people? Is it the people in the pews, the people who go to church on Sundays, the people who serve God throughout the week, is it people who serve God without knowing it?
On a recent trip to Haiti, with my fellow Wesley seminarians, I saw the church in unlikely places and amid unlikely people.
We sat one morning and met with a group of women who were victims of sexual assault helping other women of sexual assault. The group was called Kofaviv.
This group was not affiliated with any church organization. This was not because they hadn’t tried, but the churches wanted nothing to do with these women.
Is a church, a church if it wants nothing to do with the outcast? Is it these women who are the church?
Everyday they wake up and risk their lives in order to help women who have suffered physical and mental violence. They are serving God and one another by revitalizing the bodies and souls of their fellow “outcasts.” Jesus is surely among them.
A few days later we met with a man who was a member of the first graduating class of Fondwa University. He was a member of a community that decided to stop relying on a government that was not meeting their needs, he said. This community formed an association that empowered the people to take the responsibility to educate their children, to care for the environment, to establish health care, and to build infrastructure.
They put aside their individual ways and began to really care for one another as a holistic family. If a family could not afford to send their children to school, the community would pay until the family could.
The Fondwa community was the church. The Holy Spirit was there, empowering people to work together for the advancement of all the people.
Then we met with a group of women that participated in a micro-lending program at a bank called Fonkoze. This bank empowered women by granting them small group loans. It allowed them to start or continue running businesses that would provide income to their families. This bank is the church working to restore families and communities through loans.
The church is where God’s children are working to restore and empower the lives of others. The church is not a group of Christians sitting in worship on Sunday morning. Those people may be the church, but only if they move from those pews into the service of God.
Contacts to support Haiti’s orphans:
Haiti Travels-DOA/BN specializes in sharing an independent and authentic Haitian perspective on history, politics, spirituality and culture with groups, visitors and volunteers -- in other words, anyone who wishes to discover and learn more. http://www.haititravels.org.
Fonkoze- http://www.fonkoze.org is “Haiti’s Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor.” It is the largest microfinance institution (MFI) in Haiti, serving more than 55,000 women borrowers, most of whom live and work in the countryside, and more than 175,000 savers. With its network of 37 branches covering every region of Haiti, it is also the only MFI that is truly national in scope.
Hearts with Haiti provides financial assistance to the children and young adults of St. Joseph’s in Port-au-Prince, Wings of Hope in Fermathe, and Trinity House in Jacmel through donations and fundraising activities. Donations can be sent to: Hearts with Haiti, 11503 Springfield Pike, Cincinnati, OH 45246.
Letting God write our life stories
Maya, a 32-year-old director of Wings of Hope, an orphanage for disabled children, tells Haiti’s story of children living in poverty and slavery the best.
He and his sister were abandoned by both parents before the age of 10, he was then picked up by nuns who his mother had previously worked for, and later he was united with an aunt. His young life was destined for unpredictable outcomes.
Maya was so relieved to live with a relative who provided for him for almost a year before he became a restevect, a child slave.
He had no school privileges and very little food, nurturing or contact with others outside of his aunt’s house. His life takes us through night-marish twists and turns about his survival, will and faith in God.
Maya didn’t hold back the telling of his story: living on the streets of Haiti after running away from his aunt, surviving detention in a children’s holding facility and finally meeting Michael Geilinfied who offered a permanent home in a new
orphanage he was about to open.
Today, Maya tells of finding his sister in the Dominican Republic and bringing her back to Haiti, finding his mother and providing support for her. He dances with the Resurrection Dance Theater of St. Joseph Home, tours the United States to raise funds for the orphanages, and shares his witness.
Unfortunately, his story is not unique to many of the children in Haiti who live in poverty on the streets or in one of the 200 orphanages that dot Haiti’s small towns and villages.
But the good news is that there are Haitian organizations with a mission to address the injustices that fall on both children and women living in poverty. We met with a number of these organizations as part of our immersion experience.
Our story begins at the end of our trip.
No rooster crowed to wake us up on the day of our debriefing.
We were back home in our debriefing session on the campus of Wesley Seminary. We ended the way we began, in a small circle talking with Marie Racine, whose Haitian heritage helped us to understand and set the context for the debriefing of the cultural immersion trip to Haiti.
Racine is a professor of Languages and Culture at UDC and a nationally known activist.
Still fresh in our minds were our remembrance of the children we saw on the streets and in the orphanages.
We remembered the beautiful mountains that provided a scenic backdrop to where the disabled orphans lived, the colorful marketplaces filled with vendors selling food, charcoal and clothing , the day we spent under a cove of trees with women who started their own business with micro-loans, and the day we took disabled orphans to lunch at a nearby cafeteria.
We recalled our meeting with the women’s self-help group for victims of rape who scoured the small villages to find others to include in their network of self-help.
It was our consensus that the proud people of Haiti loved their children. We witnessed parents cuddling their children on parents’ visitation day, and we painfully remembered the cries of the children when the visitation time ended.
Most of our time was spent learning about different aspects of how a poor country cares for orphans and very sick children.
There is reported to be about 200 registered orphanages in Haiti. Many of the children have been abandoned or given up by their parents because they cannot provide support for them. We visited five orphanages, three of which were begun by Michael Geilenfel, a former Catholic priest who worked with Mother Theresa.
These orphanages provide not just custodial care, but are intentionally rich in cultural ascetics with an emphasis on school, the arts and home responsibilities. Many of the care givers are graduates of St. Joseph’s Home.
Another goal for our immersion was to allow students who have a particular passion for the plight of children and poverty to experience theological themes in the context of Haitian culture such as ethics, pastoral care, the arts, biblical interpretation, and mission and ministry. We all agreed it was a transforming experience.
The Rev. Adrienne Terry is pastor of St.
Matthews UMC in Baltimore.
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