“Right now there is nothing functioning in the country,” Brother Louima Israel, the local superior of the Missionaries of the Poor in Cap-Haitien on the north coast of Haiti, where the order operates aid centers for children and the elderly, told CNA. “Even if you have money, there’s nothing to buy. And politically there’s nobody in charge.”
A call to action
What can one Catholic parish do? A lot, it turns out.
The parish has had a close relationship with the Missionaries of the Poor and its founder, Father Richard Ho Lung, since the late 1990s. When the first group of parishioners visited the order’s base in Cap-Haitien years ago they asked how they could help. “We need food,” was the response. So St. Matthew got busy.
To date, its annual food drives have yielded more than 4.1 million pounds of food and medical supplies, including 3.4 million meals — the fruits of more than 48,000 volunteer service hours. Most of the aid goes to Haiti, but the parish also helps the poor in India, Jamaica, Venezuela, and close to home in the greater Charlotte area.
The parish also has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for educational and sustainability projects in northern Haiti, including a sewing trade school, an agricultural training center, and a K-12 school, St. Marc’s, which recently graduated its first college-bound student.
“Our parishioners truly feel the people we are helping are part of our family and understand how critical the needs are,” said Steven Favory, executive director of a nonprofit called Hands for Haiti founded by St. Matthew parishioners that coordinates charitable projects in Haiti year-round.
The most visible of these efforts is the annual meal-packing event, which has become so popular that volunteer spots get snatched up like Taylor Swift tickets when registration opens a few weeks beforehand.
An annual fund drive, named for a former pastor who got the effort underway, pays for the raw ingredients: soy protein, dried vegetables, vitamins, and rice. These components get scooped into plastic bags — in that order. Then the bags get weighed, sealed, and packed in boxes.
About the rice: It goes in last. That's because each bag must weigh between 390 and 400 grams. Any more or less and custom inspectors may get suspicious, so the workers manning the scales add or subtract grains of rice until they hit the mark.
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Sounds stressful? It’s really not. There are muscled football players from Charlotte Catholic High School on hand to do the heavy lifting, lots of friendly supervisors bouncing from table to table to offer pointers and encouragement, and a DJ blasting classic rock to keep the mood light and the assembly lines humming.
When the next milestone is reached (“Fifty-thousand meals!”) someone rings a bell and everyone cheers.
“The meal-packing event is almost like a competition because we try to pack as many as we can most efficiently as we can,” explained Ed Billick, a retired operations executive for Frito-Lay who joins the effort every year with a group of his friends.
“We challenge each other at the table and we bust each others’ chops a little bit and kid around and motivate each other and just have a good time,” he said. “So, yeah, it’s about feeding the poor in Haiti, but gosh, it’s [also] about getting together with your brothers and sisters in Christ and just having some fun.”
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August 20, 2023 at 08:00PM
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These parishioners have sent 3 million meals to Haiti. Here’s how they do it - Catholic News Agency
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