Haiti’s hungry children nudge thankful hearts

TRINITY/HOPE PHOTO

The Rev. Eliona Bernard, a Lutheran leader from Haiti, thanks St. Andrew Lutheran Church for helping feed Haiti’s schoolchildren.

Jean Philippe Paul describes his work in managing feeding programs at eight Lutheran elementary schools in northeastern Haiti.

St. Andrew Lutheran helps nourish 160 children at Haitian school via Trinity/HOPE partnership

By Art Toalston

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John Hall says his first visit to Haiti didn’t change his relationship with God nor make him a more compassionate person.

“But it sure changed the circumstances of my life,” he says.

A simple sentence capped Hall’s commitment to feed schoolchildren in Haiti: “Those children have no hope,” a Lutheran pastor there told him.

The pastor was referring to one of the three Lutheran elementary schools that Hall had visited that day in 1999.

At two of the schools, the children were alert, smiling and responsive to Hall and two others on a 10-day mission trip to Haiti.

But at the third school: “The children just sat. Their faces were long, nobody smiled, they didn’t interact. The teachers asked them to say their Bible memory verses; they did, but it was just by rote. They sang and there was no enthusiasm.”

The difference, Hall was told, was that the children at the school were chronically hungry.

Whereas the other schools had a noontime feeding program funded by a charitable group in the U.S. Midwest, there were no extra funds for the third school.

Hall told the pastor he would raise the money to feed the children at the school and, after returning home, he had no problem securing the donations.

“And then we found that God was just opening doors for us to continue to raise money to feed other schools,” Hall recounts. “God just never told us to stop.”

Now, more than 7,000 children at 46 Lutheran elementary schools in Haiti and at a Methodist and a Baptist school are being fed noontime meals through the ministry of Trinity/HOPE. (The organization is named for Trinity, the Lutheran church in Gallatin where Hall was a member at the time and for HOPE, the key word spoken by the Haitian pastor that stirred Hall to action).

St. Andrew Lutheran Church, at Murfreesboro Road and Mack Hatcher Parkway in Franklin, is one of 11 congregations in five states that has taken responsibility for feeding an entire school. The remaining schools are fed by gifts from various organizations and more than 600 individual donors.

During the Thanksgiving season for the third year in a row, St. Andrew has partnered with Trinity/HOPE in deepening the congregation’s compassion for Haiti’s schoolchildren.

But who said there couldn’t be a little fun in the process?

A spirited but laugh-filled auction was the much-anticipated highlight of St. Andrew’s “Thrivent’s Thanksgiving Night in the Hunger Fight” Nov. 16 with cosponsor Peace Lutheran Church in Spring Hill. The Thrivent name was central to the event in recognition of supplemental funds to be provided by Wisconsin-based Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. The nonprofit company, dating back to 1902, devotes profits from its various financial services to charitable causes nationally as well as those of local Thrivent chapters and Lutheran congregations.

Among the donations auctioned off by Jack Ficken, a Thrivent financial adviser from Fairview, were handmade quilts; tickets for Tennessee Titans football and Nashville Predators hockey games, the Nashville Symphony and a touring Broadway production of “Camelot”; and artist Kris Nethercutt’s intricate replica of a steam engine made with parts recycled from a sewing machine, a Coleman camp stove and other castaway items.

Typical of the bidding: A half-dozen members of the congregation jousted for a gallon of “Bishop Gordy’s famous gumbo,” which finally sold for $450. The gumbo, to include a variety of undisclosed ingredients, will be prepared by the Rev. H. Julian Gordy, who had served as St. Andrew’s pastor since 2005 until his election as bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Southeast Synod earlier this year.

Amid the levity among the 200 attendees, parish administrator Jolene Richardson noted that each $500 raised via the bidding and a preceding silent auction of a myriad of items atop tables placed throughout the church will provide 2,304 meals toward St. Andrew’s support of the feeding program for 160 children at the Lutheran school in Acquier (pronounced ah-KEE) in southeastern Haiti.

Before the auction, Hall and the Rev. Eliona Bernard from Haiti voiced thanks to St. Andrew members for their commitment to the schoolchildren. Bernard is pastor to 200 people in First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cap-Haitien; president of the Evangelical Church of Haiti’s North District, encompassing five congregations; and president of the 20-student Concordia Theological Seminary of Haiti.

Also on hand: Trinity/HOPE’s first Haitian team member, Jean Philippe Paul, who has worked for the ministry since 2000 and now manages eight school feeding programs in northeastern Haiti.

The three men were scheduled to visit nine fundraising events akin to St. Andrew’s in Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga and other cities in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

When Hall first went to Haiti in 1999, he had retired from a career that included 16 years in merchandising for Kroger and 18 years as a food broker and had begun working with Thrivent Financial.

“All the jobs I had, I can look back and see that they were preparing me to feed these kids,” Hall says of his volunteer service as Trinity/HOPE’s president alongside six other members of the ministry’s executive board who also serve without pay. “There is no doubt that this what God wants to me do,” he says. “The day we went to see the schools, I realized why we went to Haiti. … [A] little child who can do nothing about their circumstances or an adult who is doing the best they can in their circumstances and needs help, I immediately want to help them do something.”

Hall had often wished for a gifting in evangelism over the years and finally found it by feeding Haiti’s schoolchildren. When they’re getting at least one healthy meal each school day, he points out, they can be attentive in their classes — and to spiritual concepts.

And the feeding programs can help some Haitian families envision a life beyond voodoo, Hall notes.

While most of the children in the Lutheran schools come from families who embrace Christianity, the feeding programs attract pupils from some families who practice voodoo, which holds sway over an estimated 60 percent of Haiti’s 8 million people with such teachings that God is unapproachable and has given spirits and demons power to rule over their lives.

A pastor may never have an opportunity to visit such families to offer an alternative to voodoo but may make spiritual inroads by caring for their children.

A child who goes home from school and says, “My teacher told me that Christ died for me,” likely will be told, “That is utter nonsense. You’d be better off just to forget that because God is not going to have anything to do with you. He is certainly not going to die for you,” Hall says.

“But when we start feeding them, even the parents can’t deny it anymore. They see that God does want to be a part of their child’s life,” in part through the witness of Christians who demonstrate God’s love by providing a meal at school each day.

Recounting a conversation with one Haitian pastor, Hall quotes him as saying, “If I go to someone’s house and they practice voodoo … I can say, ‘Your child goes to my school and I want to talk to you about your child and how he’s doing in our school’ … [rather than] ‘I want to tell you about Jesus and that your voodoo system is wrong and I’m going to tell you the right way.’”

The pastor noted, “Then it’s very easy to witness to them, because I came about something that they’re very interested in, which is their child. … And the parents are open and willing to listen.”

Trinity/HOPE’s operation, both in Haiti and stateside, is a testament to the accumulated skills of Hall, the other executive board members and the Haitian co-workers they have enlisted.

In Haiti, the Trinity/HOPE team encompasses nine paid feeding program directors responsible for supervising a half-dozen or more meal operations in their region — each of which serves a hot meal regarded by the children as one of their favorite Haitian dishes: a mixture of beans, rice and a sauce of oil, tomato paste, bouillion cubes, water and pulverized dried fish.

The feeding program directors purchase the food supplies (which must not require refrigeration); deliver the supplies to the schools; make sure they are in a secure place; check that the meals are properly cooked and the correct portions are served to each child according to his/her weight; and report to the office in Tennessee on the funds needed to buy the food, currently averaging 21.2 cents per meal.

At each school, meanwhile, parents and others in the community are responsible for providing the water for preparing the food; the wood and kettles for cooking; and bowls and spoons for serving the children.

Hall, on two occasions, has been assisted by individuals at Vanderbilt University’s nutrition department in studying the proper nutritional value and portions for the children according to their size.

And, with a special Excel spreadsheet operation, the ministry can input a range of information to make a monthly calculation of the amount of food (pounds of rice, for example, or gallons of oil) needed at each school according to each student’s nutritional needs and the number of class days in a month.

“Even though we work hard,” Hall defers, “we want God to get the glory for his great providence in blessing these efforts to feed the children.” Trinity/HOPE leaders are trusting for more of that providence in the days ahead because there are a total of 135 Lutheran schools among three different Lutheran bodies in the country and the ministry is open to extending its help to schools of other denominations.

Hall remains stirred by the words of one pastor who told him to look out across his church in Port-au-Prince one Sunday. Hall saw plenty of children and young couples and a few older people.

“The kids are the ones that go to our schools,” the pastor said. “The young couples are their parents. And the older ones, many times, are their grandparents. Our school is our connection to the community.”

The Rev. Eric C. Pearson, who founded St. Andrew in 1974 and is serving in an interim pastoral role while the congregation seeks a replacement for Gordy, described Trinity/HOPE as “a good fit for our love of outreach ministry.” The congregation, with about 460 baptized members, has a long track record of ministry in the community versus “being self-contained, worrying solely about ourselves,” Pearson said. “That community to us means not just our neighbor next door but our neighbor across the world.

“The school in Haiti fits that model so comfortably. This allows us to reach that neighbor across the world in a meaningful way,” Pearson said. “Jesus admonished us to ‘feed my sheep,’ and the ministry in Haiti feeds the little ones who are part of the school there both physically and spiritually, reminding them that they have someone a long way off who cares about them and loves them.”

{CP}