Marc Mailloux's Blog

Dear friends,     

      It was the last day of classes at the [Haitian] Baptist mission at Fermath  (http://www.bhm.org) the cool air of the hills (4,300’)  overlooking Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  Even though our Air France flights regularly stop at Haiti’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture” airport on the way to teaching gigs in Guadeloupe and Martinique, it was Aline’s first actual visit here and my first in several years.   It was an intensive week between  preparation and four hours of lectures every day for 52 qualified students—pastors and teachers who’d come from all parts of the country—for a master’s level course on “Comparative World views.” Dr. Richard Ramsay had prepared the course in English.  I had to learn it and transmit it in French thus avoiding the students the tedium of learning through a translator.  

           They were motivated, many having travelled long hours in grueling conditions from the most distant reaches of their impoverished, Maryland-sized homeland of 8.5 million souls.  They were sharp too.  As we went over the difference between the epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle, and the implications of Immanuel Kant’s “line of despair”,    I was grateful for the analyses of the late Francis Schaeffer, and especially for the genius of R.C. Sproul’s in clarifying the arcane complexities of Kant’s thinking.  

         After a draining week of classes, Aline and I were delighted to get away from the mission compound on Friday accompanying Elsa Peterson (who heads up the mission’s child sponsorship program: bhmhati@bhm.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) for a couple of visits to sponsored children in nearby villages.  Five of us piled into a 4-wheel-drive Nissan Pathfinder for a bumpy ride over some barely navigable trails with some basic foodstuffs (rice, beans, cooking oil etc.) , for the destitute families of  couple of sponsored children:  five-year-old  Bérenice  and six-year-old Antoine.   The road along the way to their villages was littered with legions of barefoot and pregnant women of conspicuously elegant gait,  trudging up the steep muddy trails from nearby water sources with five-gallon buckets precariously balanced on their heads.  One has to walk straight and upright indeed lest his labor be for naught.  Standing out like a sore thumb amongst the hovels along the road was an opulent walled-in mansion, built with the embezzled money of a generous foreign benefactor for the construction of a badly needed road.   Alas, such corruption is all-too-common in Haiti and is manifest proof that any solution of a country’s ills—our own included—starts by the transformation of the hearts of the people.  

          The mission’s sponsorship program provides a refreshing exception to the usual graft:   100% of the $25/month sponsorship goes directly to the children’s families for food and education with no administrative deduction as the missionaries distributing the goods raise their own support.  Not only that, but the foodstuffs are purchased from local merchants stimulating the needy Haitian economy.  It’s a win-win situation that we can highly recommend.

    We finally arrived at the village of Bérenice, a five year-old waif dressed in rags and barefooted, and left to tend to her two-year-old brother as their mother was off somewhere.  When the latter arrived, Bérenice disappeared into the “house,” a one-room cinderblock shanty with a corrugated metal roof—no electricity or running water of course.  A minute later she emerged wearing a spotless white dress—no doubt her Sunday best—which she displayed proudly as we snapped a few photos.   While speaking with her mother, a thin, yet manifestly pregnant women of about 30, we penetrated slowly into the darkness of  her one-bedroom  hovel  bereft of even a window and with a muddy mattress on the middle of the floor upon which all five family members sleep.  The children all bore radiant smiles and were sincerely grateful for the aid. 

     Elsa, who’s been working in Haiti for 23 years and is clearly appreciated by the locals, expressed some frustration at the lack of response to the mission’s offer for aid in family-planning including free birth control pills for the women and vasectomies for the men. Amazingly, only a few (1%) accept the offer.  Hungry children remain Haiti’s major product.  Families of ten or more—none of them properly fed or educated—are not uncommon.  Some send their ‘surplus siblings’ to live with wealthier friends and/or relatives as “restavecs” (literally, “stay with” in Creole) or de facto slaves.  

    The deplorable situation of Haiti is all the more amazing when one considers that, at the end of the eighteenth century, this crown colony the French called “La Perle des Antilles,” out-produced the thirteen American colonies!  However as America was blessed with godly leaders like George Washington, John Adams etc., Haiti was literally consecrated to Satan worship in a notorious 1791 ceremony by a Voodoo Priest named Boukmann and since renewed by the likes of Jean-Bertrand Aristide!  Even today, voodoo remains ubiquitous and is a major obstacle to the country’s spiritual and material development.                                                                    

      We returned home more grateful than ever for the tremendous blessings the Lord has bestowed on our increasingly unworthy country, and more eager than ever to remind the half-million Haitian refugees in S. Florida of the Source of those blessings.                                         MMailloux50@comcast.net

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Praise: 1-For health and enthusiasm.

           2- For the Lord’s continued provision for our work.

           3- For the joy of returning home to a blessed country.

Praise: 1- For the spiritual welfare of our children, especially Calix (28) in Marseille, France.                                         

           2- For forthcoming mission trips including France (March 13-23); St. Martin (April 19-24); Togo (May 18-22)

         3- For wisdom for major ministry-related decisions we’ll be making soon.