Back to School in Haiti

“I was having my geography lesson for eleven students while the earth started to quake,” said Masséd Dimy, a teacher at Saint-Espirit School in the Darbonne neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Dimy and his students managed to run out of the school building before it collapsed. All of them survived. Except for one student, everybody returned to school. But some are still afraid of another earthquake.

“I felt very stressed afterwards, but now I’m feeling much better,” said Dimy. “My only fear is that there will be a new earthquake that is even stronger than the previous one.”

ELCA World Hunger has been on the ground in Haiti for many years, providing millions of dollars for relief and development and supporting many programs through local work of The Lutheran World Federation (LWF). It’s because of this ongoing work and relationships with the LWF and partner organizations like the ACT Alliance (ACT) that the ELCA was on the ground and able to respond immediately. Within days of the earthquake, the ELCA was able to take your gifts and provide food, water, clothing and shelter for people with great need in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

In Darbonne and other earthquake-ravaged neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, your gifts to ELCA Disaster Response support a collaborative program with the LWF and ACT that helps teachers like Dimy, his students, and schools like Saint-Espirit. Your gifts for Haiti earthquake relief helped get Saint-Espirit and four other large schools up and running within a few months.

At Saint-Espirit, seven tents were erected in the school playground and now host several hundred students from kindergarten to secondary school, with more returning to school each day. Both teachers and students have received psycho-social support to cope with the fears the earthquake caused. Discussions have helped them understand what happened and begin to cope with their trauma.

“Before the earthquake, there were approximately 600–700 students in the school,” said David Korpela from ACT member Finn Church Aid. “When school feeding programs start, we expect the amount of students to increase to over 1,000.”

Thank you for your continued support of ELCA World Hunger and ELCA Disaster Response. Together, our ongoing relief and development work coupled with long-term disaster response are providing new life for our brothers and sisters in Haiti.

—Material for this article contributed by Maria Havala, ACT International