Death and Resurrection in Haiti

Four NC Catholics tell of faith, hope and love in the midst of suffering

By Rich Reece

“Hell, after hell hit” is how Dr. Kurt Voos describes Port-au-Prince, Haiti, two weeks after the January 12^th earthquake which Haiti's government estimates killed some 230,000 people in eight cities and towns in this already destitute nation.

Dr. Voos, an orthopedist, was one of a team of eleven medical professionals who left Greenville, NC, on January 28^th for Saint Damien of Molokai Hospital in Port-au-Prince. The team, put together by Dr. Greg Murphy, a urologist and general surgeon in Pitt County, included Dr. Mark Dellasega, a gastroenterologist, and Mr. Gregg Tacozza, who acted as an administrative aide to the group.

The Passionist Province of St. Paul of the Cross, headquartered in South River, NJ, provided $25,000 to help with transportation and medical supplies, and the local medical community responded with a massive amount of supplies, including medicine and bandages. The group brought its own tents, sleeping bags and food. Prior to their departure, the eleven men attended a prayer service at St. Peter Church, celebrated by Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge, Bishop of Raleigh, and Reverend Justin Kerber, C.P., Pastor of the parish.

Saint Damien Hospital is operated by Passionist Father Richard “Rick” Frechette. After a few years as a parish priest in Baltimore in the ‘80s, he met Fr. William B. Wasson, founder of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), Spanish for “Our Little Brothers and Sisters.” The meeting led to work at a Mexican home for nearly 1,000 orphaned and abandoned children. Before long Fr. Frechette helped establish a second orphanage for NPH in Honduras.

Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Haiti directed Fr. Frechette to the next turning point in his life. The Sisters were caring for babies born of dying mothers, frequently sick with AIDS. Many of the babies did not survive, but those who did needed care, love and a place to live. Frs. Wasson and Frechette visited the poor country and children’s hospice and decided to begin an orphanage there. Today, Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs, French for “Our Little Brothers and Sisters,” survives amidst political chaos, economic disaster and uncontrollable crime.

In order to do more, Fr. Frechette got permission to enter medical school and earned his medical degree in 1998. In addition to building the 120-bed hospital which provides long-term care to critically ill children and outpatient services to over 30,000 children and adults a year, he oversees the management and operations of St. Helene Orphanage, which cares for over 450 children. He also founded the St. Luke Outreach Program, which employs over 300 people who help manage and operate 17 street schools, deliver water to the slums and bury the unclaimed dead from the city morgue.

Parishioners at St. Peter Church are familiar with the work of Fr. Frechette through his periodic visits to the Greenville parish, which has helped with financial support. When Dr. Greg Murphy learned that both the hospital and the orphanage had sustained extensive damage he knew he had to do something.

Dr. Murphy calls the team’s first look at Port-au-Price “a baptism in utter chaos. Amid the destruction, the streets were crowded with relief workers, with people trying to go about their daily routine, selling their wares. At the same time we saw bodies still being extracted from the rubble.”

Dr. Voos recalls seeing a mother bathing her 12-year-old son. “They were standing by a dumpster, both naked, and she was washing him in dirty water.”

“We were driving down one of the few four-lane roads in the city,” Dr. Mark Dellasega recounts, “and homeless people had brought tents, bed sheets and tarpaulins to camp on the median. Cars and trucks would whizz by a foot from the heads of some of the people.”

The team faced a variety of challenges in several locales. Dr. Voos recalls long days of diagnosing and repairing fractures, sometimes fifty patients a day. Many of the survivors had suffered amputations and required aftercare. Dr. Dellasega worked in tents tending to the overflow of patients from the hospital and from the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship sent by the U.S. Navy.

Some of the team worked in the town of Miragoane, sixty miles from Port-au-Prince. “Besides the physical injuries,” Dr. Murphy explains, “we saw a lot of traumatic stress disorders: people overwhelmed by the grief of losing a loved one, or not knowing the fate of a loved one, or who had fled the capital for fear of aftershocks.”

In the midst of suffering that might have caused many to doubt God’s existence, the four members of the team say the experience “exponentially” increased their faith. The men say there were two catalysts in this reaction: Fr. Rick and the Haitian people.

“Thursdays will never be the same for me,” Gregg Tacozza says. “On Thursdays, even before the earthquake, Fr. Rick would visit the city morgue to claim the unclaimed dead. These were people whose families could not afford to bury them. Fr. Rick would give them a decent, holy Christian burial. Otherwise they would have been dumped unceremoniously in a mass grave.”

One Thursday, Mr. Tacozza relates, “A woman presented one of the volunteers at the morgue with the body of her 18-month-old daughter, a beautiful little girl wrapped in a white blanket. The volunteer didn’t want to put the little girl in the morgue, where decaying bodies were stacked on top of each other. Fr. Rick found a casket and buried the child with other babies who had died.”

“To see a priest so upbeat, pious and strong in his belief was an incredible boost to my faith,” Dr. Murphy says.

Dr. Dellasega agrees. “I think what added to my faith was seeing this situation filtered through the eyes of Fr. Rick. He took a situation where you could easily question your faith, but his words at Mass always filled us with hope and love.

“Before we arrived,” Dr. Dellasega continues, “Greg [Murphy] told me this would be a life changing experience. And I doubted that. Not long ago I had an illness that could have been serious but turned out well. And people said that must have been a life changing experience. But it wasn’t, really. I’m a doctor and you kind of get used to illness happening.

“But to hear Fr. Rick and to see so many individuals coping with great faith and hope, that was life changing for me. It increased my faith tremendously.”

“For me,” Gregg Tacozza says, “this was a confirmation of my decision to retire to develop and pursue a life of service. We attended a 7 a.m. Mass in Miragoane, because the cathedral in Port-au-Prince had been destroyed. The chapel was full and the grounds all around it were filled with people, dressed for church. And the Mass was in Creole, but the reverence of the people, their singing – even the non-Catholics attending were deeply moved. I hope I never forget that day.”

“It was amazing that these people could be in the clinic one day and then get up the next and keep going,” Dr. Voos says, “but they did. And then they took care of others. It was miraculous. I definitely came home more faith-filled.”

Another miracle, Dr. Murphy says, was the teamwork of the relief workers. “These were, some of them, high-powered people, used to running their own show. Yet they quickly shed any ego whatsoever and came together as what I can only call the Body of Christ, to do what we had come to do, what we felt our faith obligated us to do. To me that was one of the most beautiful things. We became one. We walked away separately, but we had an amazing, unified, forever-together experience.”

At Easter, Catholics are used to thinking of suffering followed by resurrection. Perhaps, though, there is hope in what these men witnessed on their mission in Haiti: an ongoing resurrection of hope and faith even in the midst of suffering. As the people of Haiti seem to understand, even in the worst times, the love of God and neighbor are never absent. Miraculously, with death all around, they arise.