by Jean Denton
of The Catholic Virginian
October 14, 2013 | Volume 88, Number 25
After more than 15 years in a twinning relationship, the parishes of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Salem and Sacre Coeur in Cabestor, Haiti, wanted to take steps to make their joint projects sustainable.
At the same time, they realized a need for a new program concentrating on public health in the Cabestor region.
To that end, Dr. Tom Fame, coordinator of OLPH’s twinning project, introduced a process for organizing the local community so the people themselves could begin working together to identify their most pressing needs and plan how to address them.
Sacre Coeur pastor Father Rene Blot and Dr. Fame developed a survey to help create a profile of the population’s general lifestyles to determine factors contributing to the public health in the region’s various locales.
It asked about the number of adults and children in the household and included questions regarding infant and child deaths and causes.
Also: Where do you get your water? Do you eat a meal each day? Where do you go to the bathroom? Do you have a big garden?
A few months later, when Dr. Fame and a small group of OLPH parishioners visited Cabestor, Father Blot handed them a sheaf of hundreds of completed surveys. The group spent a day tabulating the information from which a clear picture of the community’s life emerged.
At a meeting soon afterward, local representatives told Dr. Fame they believed their greatest need was a medical clinic because of widespread sickness.
“But I was able to show them the information their people had given in the surveys,” Dr. Fame said. “I could say ‘look at what is causing all the health problems. Let’s think of what you can do yourselves, besides some big expensive project, to improve the situation.’”
“The thing is,” Fame explained later, “the process is more important than the task.
“The people could see that through the process, they can determine root causes for their problems and make decisions, develop work plans, assign tasks and evaluate their effectiveness by working together.
“It’s a long process and we’re just beginning,” he said, noting that plans for local economic development also has grown out of the effort. He’s optimistic as community leaders are stepping up to educate the people and encourage their participation.
“It’s alive,” he said. “It’s not just making them a school. It’s a living process involving people making things happen.”
Meanwhile, the process has brought much more to the community, Father Blot said. For one thing, the local church is growing as people have recognized its role in lifting them up and showing them the way to build up their community.
In coming together, he added, the people learn to rise above self-interest and find the value in serving each other.
Father Blot said he takes advantage of the times people gather at church—especially for Mass—to educate them on the community development process. But he presents it in the context of faith.
He explained he continually emphasizes his “message” to live as people created in God’s image and respond to God’s call to be responsible for one another.
“I use Genesis to talk about God creating people with a free will as well as with energy and knowledge,” he said. “I remind them that God gives people the capacity to solve their problems and address their hardships.”
Father Blot noted, “The history of the Haitian people is very delicate. They’ve become accustomed to believing that if you are poor you can’t do anything.”
In the past, he said, people would spend hours standing in line to receive food donations rather than use that time to work their own fields.
“My work is to clean their brains, and we are changing the attitude,” he said.
The pastor himself, rather than accepting produce from parishioners, has planted and harvested his own garden as an example. “I want to show them if I can do it, you can do it,” he said.
Dr. Fame shook his head in admiration.
“You know sometimes we try to do things here (in Haiti) that I think are going nowhere and then they surprise me,” he said. “You plant these seeds of ideas and then the people do it and often surpass your expectations.”
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