The Missionaries
Fr Rick bought the plot of ground to give the dead a Christian burial rather than allow them to rot in dumps and or be eaten by wild animals. As the convoy moves off across the city he says: “The reality of death is taken so much for granted here that you can drive all the way across the city; past countless police checkpoints, with stacks of coffins and tons of dead bodies and nobody will ever think to ask you “Why do you have a hundred dead people in your truck?”
Gena Heraty, from Carrowreevagh, Westport, has worked six days a week for the past 15 years in an orphanage run by the international charity Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs (Our Little Brothers and Sisters) on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital city. It’s home to over 450 orphaned, abandoned and disadvantaged children. Gina says the conditions people in Haiti have to live in are harrowing and heart breaking and can only be solved with the expertise and the generosity of countries like Ireland.
“I don’t see myself as a kind of latter day martyr but I am convinced that there is no other place in the world I can do more to help those who are most in need of help right now. I came to Haiti 15 years ago and if I can improve the life of just one child each day I am here then my life will have been worthwhile”.
Dr. Louise Ivers, from Whitehall in Dublin, lives with her husband in Boston but spends up to 7 months of the year in Haiti. She says “it’s a terrible part of the world to be ill but I couldn’t sleep at night if I wasn’t trying to do something about it. I feel a profound sense of injustice at the way life is here and with all of the privileges my education and my early life in Ireland has given me I feel I have to show solidarity with the people of Haiti”.
Louise, who is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, says “It is really important that the people who live in the remotest parts of Haiti know that there are people who care about them and who are willing to hold their hands and walk with them in the challenges they face”.
The documentary follows Fr Rick and the two Irish women as they go about their work in the slums, where gangland killings and kidnappings are an almost everyday occurrence, and in remote forest and mountain villages where few can afford medical treatment and where the sick and the ill have almost no chance of survival
Two hundred years ago Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic after a bloody slave revolt which ended years of French occupation and exploitation.
The country gained its freedom in 1804 but was forced to pay its French plantation owners 150 million francs – the equivalent today of 21 billion dollars – to compensate them for their loss of property and their slaves.
Today this crowded, little known country - one third the size of Ireland - finds itself still overwhelmed by foreign debt, disease, political instability and corruption. But Gena Heraty and Louise Ivers believe that the triumph of the human spirit will one day see it breaking free from the grip of hunger, terror, voodoo and want.
“We all have a deep sense of the profound injustice there is here, “says Louise, “but we feel very proud of the contribution Irish people are making to break the cycle of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Maybe it is something that comes from deep inside our own history but we are committed to walking the walk with the poorest and most despairing of Haiti’s people for as long as it takes.”
Documentary produced and directed by Caroline Bleahen, reported by Jim Fahy.
