Episcopal Press and News
'In Haiti God Works Overtime'
Episcopal News Service. May 10, 1990 [90031_Z]
Linda M. Logan, Editor of The East Tennessee Episcopalian
It's not easy to get a good night's sleep in Haiti. In the capital city of Port-au-Prince traffic comes alive at five A.M. with horns honking in concert with the city's roosters. School children begin arriving at six in the close of the Episcopal cathedral. By eight their chanted homework has become a roar.
High above the city the sound of pickaxes takes over from the crack of billiard balls that punctuates the long sticky night in the Hotel Montana. And in Leogane, an hour's drive down the coast, the hospital generator comes lurching to life as the city's electricity goes off for the day. Morning in Haiti, as the country shifts into gear, is an attack on the ears, but it's still a comfort from the threatening sounds -- or silence -- of the night.
Twenty-one people were killed in Port-au-Prince in the four days preceding March 22, the day four East Tennessee women arrived for a visit in their companion diocese. The 10 P.M. English broadcast of Radio Luminiere gave few details -- a military attache burned to death, another beaten but saved by the police, a woman shot in her home and taken to the hospital, and in the Matesan area the road completely blocked as vigilantes searched for a Tonton Macoute -- a member of Jean-Claude Duvalier's militia -- who had killed seven persons.
Haiti is a country in anarchy, with Duvalierists, Macoutes, and vigilantes targeting each other.
The economy is collapsed. The landfill on the edge of Port-au-Prince is populated with people staking claims. The poles that mark the hoped-for dimensions of their homes form a toothpick checkerboard across a landscape in which decomposing diapers and other refuse are still visible.
In Port-au-Prince one must have a male escort to walk safely at midday the two blocks between St. Vincent's School for Handicapped Children and Holy Trinity Cathedral.
What does the Incarnation really mean in Haiti? How do the instability and terrorism affect an incarnational understanding of life?
"Haitians have tried and tried to believe that oppression is going to be over and tomorrow is going to be better -- and we're getting there," replies Sister Marjorie Raphael. "But it's very hard at this moment. A lot of Haitians are very depressed over the present situation because they don't see how to get out of this.
"I think basically they know that God is in this -- they keep going back to the Old Testament themes. God did lead the Jews through the Red Sea, and they did get out of their difficulty. But they just can't see where it's going and they can't see a solution."
Democratic elections, the first since 1957, are the primary task facing the provisional government. Yet in the present climate of insecurity, many people in Haiti don't see how the elections -- legislative this summer and presidential next fall -- can be carried out.
Sister Marjorie Raphael is the current head of St. Margaret's Convent in Port-au-Prince. The 69-year-old sister first came to Haiti in 1955, two years before Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier came to power. She is a fast-paced woman who navigates the hills and curves in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, keeping an ear tuned to the crackle of an intercom that connects her with 11 other persons in the church. She is one of seven sisters who administer the complex of schools at Holy Trinity Cathedral and St. Vincent's School for Handicapped Children.
Sister Marjorie says that the situation in Haiti is very tense. "The Tonton Macoute people are desperate because they know that the masses have no use for them, and the masses don't trust that they'll be brought to judgment properly in a court so they're taking things into their own hands. And this mixture of army, police, and self-appointed policemen is very difficult."
The real problem, she says, is how deeply the Tonton Macoutes have penetrated the army and the society at large. She estimates their number at 33,000. She points out that there are different kinds of Macoutes -- that some just join to make a living, that not all are murderers. But they are an armed and outlawed force against which common citizens have finally risen up.
The Episcopal Church in Haiti sees its role as servant to the poorest of society, and that principle governs the operations of the schools within the cathedral close. Holy Trinity School comprises an elementary school for 1,200 students, a music school, a trade school where 800 to 900 students are trained, a craft shop operated by parents as a self-help program, and a medical clinic. These schools, and the 84 primary and secondary schools attached to the other churches of the diocese, serve persons who couldn't otherwise afford an education. In Haiti only 20 percent of school-aged children attend school, and 70 percent of the schools are run by the various churches. Holy Trinity's trade school has the highest rating of the seven vocational schools in Port-auPrince. The music school has produced the country's only philharmonic orchestra, which has toured the United States several times and performed and studied at Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Holy Trinity and St. Vincent's are administered by the Sisters of St. Margaret. St. Vincent's currently provides education and medical care for 277 children, deaf, blind, handicapped, or malnourished. The school is directed by its founder, Sister Joan Margaret. Though she is now in her 80s, she still screens and refers all prospective patients. St. Vincent's has a roster of medical specialists who visit the school once a week. And the school has its own laboratory, eye and dental clinics, and the only brace shop for prosthetic devices in Haiti. It also has the country's only school for brain-damaged children.
The teaching staff of all four of these schools is Haitian, and at some point the sisters will bow out of the administration of the schools also.
The church in Haiti is deeply committed to the Haitian cause "over a long period of time," Sister Marjorie says. What Haiti needs, she adds, is a mixture of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "You know, if we had that kind of leadership, we could end this violence and terrorism." Such a giant hasn't arrived on the scene, she says, but she says even this without despair, just hope.
In Haiti, Sister Marjorie says, God works overtime.
David McNeeley swerved the hospital jeep off onto the gravel shoulder. "There," he said, nodding toward a range of mountains rising up out of what seemed an endless field of sugarcane. "That's all our working area there. See where the clouds are sitting on that top mountain? We have a mission up there called St. Bartholomew's. That's my favorite place, but it's a very long trip. By foot from the river it takes me about five hours."
He grinned. David McNeeley comes alive in Haiti. The Tennessee native speaks English with a Haitian lilt and seems more at home in Creole and French.
McNeeley can use either "Doctor" or "the Reverend" in front of his name -- both apply. The director of Holy Cross Hospital since 1982, McNeeley was ordained to the diaconate in the Diocese of Haiti in 1988 and to the priesthood in 1989. His stethoscope hangs from a clerical collar.
The mountains he was pointing out in the Massif de la Selle are part of the Leogane district he serves as both doctor and priest. Holy Cross Hospital is a major healthcare center -- one of only two in the country to offer such comprehensive care. The hospital serves the 100,000 people of the Leogane district, but its doors are open to anyone and patients come from a wider population base of 250,000 that stretches far into the mountains. The diocese McNeeley serves covers all of Haiti. He is one of 28 clergy in a diocese that numbers 93,000 baptized members.
The medical operations McNeeley directs are mushrooming. At the base of it all is an 81-bed hospital run jointly by the Presbyterian Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti. The white stucco hospital employs a staff of 150, most of whom are Haitian. The hospital, which is in the city of Leogane, has a large outpatient clinic, two operating rooms, a delivery room, an emergency room, a blood bank, and a pediatric unit. It also has an x-ray room, laboratories, a pharmacy, administrative offices, and a chapel.
A new $800,000 wing will double the hospital's beds, free up space for operations, and -- to accommodate the Haitian practice of family members coming to cook and otherwise care for their hospitalized loved ones -- add new family quarters. The expansion will also provide a child/maternal facility complete with play therapy room supported by the Episcopal Church Women of East Tennessee.
The hospital's operations, however, are just one part of the medical services Holy Cross Hospital provides to the surrounding community. There is also a community health program that extends into remote mountainous areas. Health workers trained by the hospital offer prenatal care, family-planning information, nutrition surveillance, and immunizations. The health workers also provide some simple medications, using a pharmacy that they carry with them in a satchel.
Villages that are not accessible by four-wheel-drive vehicles are visited monthly by horseback. A caravan of horses carries McNeeley, his supplies, and possibly another doctor into these remote areas for threeto four-day trips. It was largely to serve the people in these areas that McNeeley studied for the priesthood. His saddle bags now are packed with Communion supplies as well as medical gear.
McNeeley says he sees no difference, in one sense, between his priestly and medical duties. "All Christians are asked to live their vocation," he points out. But he adds that he tries not to be the primary pastoral resource for the hospital employees he administers. "It's a little tricky, maybe, keeping that balance.... Part of me would like to be doing more of the priestly work than I can do because I have the day-to-day reality of running a large hospital and the program."
McNeeley is just 39, but he's been coming to Haiti since he was 17, when he came to do volunteer work. He's had a Haitian pen pal since he was six. He now has a Haitian wife, Dr. Marise McNeeley, the hospital pathologist.
McNeeley told a Knoxville reporter last winter that his going to Haiti was "just one of those things." It's like falling in love, he said then. "I like the people -- very bright, very talented, very positive, very clever. And when you live among people whose starting point is not your own, it makes you stop and look at your own starting point."
"I suspected the first time I was there that it was what God wanted me to do -- what I was being called for," McNeeley says of his medical vocation. The decision to become a priest came some time later. Why do both? "I guess I like total ministry." The church is concerned with the total person, he points out, and some of the areas he visits on horseback wouldn't see a priest except once or twice a year if it weren't for his double-duty visits.