Where God Weeps - the suffering church in focus

Haïti: New hope, despite the many problems.

---

Haïti: faith is stronger than ever and help is still needed © Valerian Mazetaud/ACN

Catholic Church starts rebuilding in Haiti. ACN continues to help – but more donations are needed, given the massive capital cost. A new initiative: PROCHE.

Just one year ago the terrible earthquake struck Haiti. Some 250,000 people died. Many organizations appealed worldwide for donations, among them the international Catholic pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN). The response was immense. And yet, one year on, hundreds of thousands of Haitians still live in tented settlements in conditions little short of catastrophic, especially in the devastated capital Port-au-Prince. The elections of November 2010 have if anything further destabilized the political situation rather than improving it, and a cholera epidemic and then Hurricane Thomas further demoralized the Haitian people.

View the country profile of Haiti.

Breaking News from Haiti

• 25/02/2011: Haiti: „The fact that I survived the earthquake shows me that God still needs me“
• 12/01/2011: Haïti: New hope, despite the many problems.
• 22/12/2010: ACN at Christmas : Tidings of comfort - for the world

And yet there is hope, for the reconstruction can at last begin. Over the next three years, the organization PROCHE (French for "close"), an initiative of the Haitian Catholic Bishops' conference, will invest roughly $100 million in aid money in a program of rebuilding and renewal of infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, kindergartens and parish centres will be repaired or rebuilt, as will the cathedral in the capital and around 70 other churches, religious houses and the national seminary in Port-au-Prince.

PROCHE is an acronym of „Proximite Catholique avec Haiti et son Église“, or "Catholics close to Haiti and its Church". The initiative will be headed by a Canadian engineer from Quebec, Yves Lacourcière. Now in his mid-60s, he has over 30 years professional experience and, according to the bishops' conference, has already directed a number of major construction projects. He speaks English and French and has known Haiti since the 1970s.

At the beginning of January he met together with five of the Haitian bishops. In three days of deliberations the first and most important projects were identified. Mr Lacourcière, who puts the total investment necessary for this rebuilding work at around $300 million, calculates that the rebuilding program will take 10 years. He emphasises that "If we want to give people hope, we must in my opinion involve the whole country".

On the first anniversary of the earthquake, Louis Kébreau, the chairman of the Haitian bishops’ conference and Archbishop of Cap-Haïtien, called for a joint effort on the part of everyone. "The Haitian people are a believing people. For them humanitarian aid and pastoral care go together", he remarked during an ecumenical service in Port-au-Prince. Then he asked the challenging question, "Did we really need an earthquake to make us understand that we cannot continue as we did before, and that we must really help the most disadvantaged in our society?"

ACN has been supporting the Church in Haiti since 1962. Between 2007 and 2010 alone the charity promoted pastoral and charitable projects to a value of 2 million US dollars. Following the earthquake on 12 January 2010, an appeal by the charity brought in a further $6.7 million which were sent to the Church in Haiti to help with the reconstruction program. Charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) was founded in 1947 by the Dutch Norbertine priest and religious Father Werenfried van Straaten in order to ease the massive need in postwar Europe. Today the charity has fundraising offices in 17 different countries and central headquarters in Königstein near Frankfurt, Germany. By the time of his death in 2003, Father Werenfried's charity had already raised and distributed some €2 billion in private donations for its work.