Praying for Haiti

During my time as a Jesuit novice (spring 2007) I spent a month working at a children’s hospital run by the Missionaries of Charity in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  That month was probably the most moving of my two-years in novitiate, the time in my life when the Gospel most seemed to take on flesh before my eyes.

The Gospel coming to life is, of course, a wonderful thing, but it is not always an easy thing, and my time in Haiti was no exception to this rule.  I experienced several sustained moments of searing self-questioning regarding how I was living the religious life, and there was the heat, too, the lack of water, the sporadic electricity, the smell of sewage in the air—and all the sick kids in the hospital.  Malnutrition, HIV/AIDS, parasites, burns, abuse, and on and on.  Of all the places I had traveled in the world before then—Kazakhstan, East Africa, the Middle East—something about Haiti made it seem the most broken.