HOT SPRINGS — On Sunday, Dec. 7, parishioners at St. Mary of the Springs Church in Hot Springs heard a report that could change the lives of many people.
A team of five men gave a multi-media presentation about their recent mission trip to the island nation of Haiti. Parishioners Steve Gallimore, Wally Marroy, Pietro Tomassi and Larry Womack accompanied associate pastor Father T.J. Hart on the mission trip. The group left Little Rock Nov. 3, flying to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti.
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Father Hart said he attended St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana with seminarians from Haiti and from them he learned about the spirit of the people and of the poverty that so many of them endured.
“I knew that when I was ordained and became a priest, I knew that I wanted to do that some day, but I let the Holy Spirit be the guide,” he told Arkansas Catholic. “One of the things I wanted to do here in my first parish was to give them that experience of a third-world mission trip.”
Father Isadore Rahab, a native of Haiti and a classmate of Father Hart, is now a priest for the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri. Father Rahab provided information about a school for orphans in Thomassique that was in need of help. During Lent in 2008, St. Mary raised money for the school and orphanage. The $3,800 donation was sent to buy school books and supplies and to bolster salaries of the teachers in Thomassique. In April, Father Rahab came to St. Mary to thank the people for their generosity and to give them more information about the situation in his homeland.
After prayer and discernment, Father Hart, with the permission of pastor Father Erik Pohlmeier, gathered a group of men willing to go on a fact-finding mission.
Father Rahab met the group in Miami Nov. 3 and accompanied them to Haiti. He was able to help them rent a nine-passenger four-wheel drive sport utility vehicle that was necessary to negotiate the rutted dirt roads in the rural areas. Father Rahab acted as guide as they toured the countryside.
The team concentrated their time in the Diocese of Hinche. Hinche is a large town in the central part of the country. The team toured Haiti for eight days. The men saw much poverty but were impressed with the spirit of the people, they said. After visiting several areas and talking with many people, the team felt led by the Holy Spirit to concentrate their efforts on the village of Colladere.
In 2004, the Diocese of Richmond, Va., built a school named after retired Bishop Walter F. Sullivan for kindergarten to ninth grade. The school has 168 students and 10 teachers and staff. Colladere is a collection of huts around a town square with the church on one side of the square. The children who attend the school come from the village, but also from the surrounding area. Some of the children walk five miles to school each day.
Father Banive Peralte is pastor of St. Andrew Church in Colladere, and he also attends two chapels in outlying areas. He probably serves about 3,000 families within a 10-mile radius of Colladere, Father Hart said.
Within this area are the two additional chapels, one of which is unfinished. To get construction materials to the chapel, everything must be carried across a river. Because there is no bridge, a ferryman carries people across on his back.
The team agreed that the key to helping the people is to teach them to be self supporting: how to take care of the land, how to grow crops, how to take care of their animals. The goal is to help the people help themselves, Womack said.
For this to happen there needs to be an on-going presence, not just one trip.
“There are lots of people from churches and organizations in Haiti doing good work, but as far as I could see none were doing as good a job as Caritas and Catholic relief organizations,” Womack said.
All agreed that the aid must be on-going, and parishioners committed at the Dec. 7 meeting to send another team to the area this year.
Gallimore said, “We think an additional party from our parish should go and experience what we have experienced. Our excitement, along with their excitement, will allow the parish to grow into a lot more interest.”
The parish had prayed for the men and the success of the trip, but Dec. 7 was the first opportunity the men had to give their testimony about the trip and how they were affected by it.
“The one thing that is important to me is that this is a parish relationship. When I am transferred, this relationship will go on without me,” Father Hart said. “It is a spiritual growth for us (as individuals) and for the parish as well. We receive more than we give.”
Womack added, “If we can make this seed grow, it will make this parish, St. Mary’s, a better place and make the people within the parish better. A mission is a two-way street. In your effort to help, when you do it with God at your side, it ends up helping you more.”
All the team members agreed.
“Father Hart was the team leader, but he was not running the show,” Womack said. “The Holy Spirit was. The trick is to get out of his way. We didn’t do anything but act as instruments.”
For example, “Pere Banive,” as he is known in the French-speaking country, drives a truck to visit his parishioners.
“The roads to the missions are hardly more than donkey paths,” Father Hart said. “We realized that it was much quicker to travel them on two wheels rather than four.”
The roads are so bad in some areas; the average speed for the truck is five miles per hour. Many of the roads have “potholes” that are five feet deep. The team said they felt they were led by the Holy Spirit to buy a motorcycle for Father Peralte to use to reach his outlying areas.
The team learned a lot of lessons from the Haitians they met.
“What I learned from it is how important religion, specifically the Catholic Church is to humankind … whether you are here with your cars and all the ’stuff’ or whether you are there with your shack and no lights, the true happiness that you find is when you are closest to God,” Womack said. “I’ve listened to sermons all my life, but sometimes you don’t hear it, who Jesus really is … there I could see how much peace Jesus brings to these people.”
Tomassi added, “For the church to be Catholic, it must be universal. That is why we went to Haiti. To me it is an enrichment of us individually and as a parish. As Catholics to see our world and their world so different from ours, yet the Mass is the same, the sacraments are still the same. In the end, the joy we all experienced as we attended the Mass that Father Hart and Pere Peralte offered together was what the trip was all about.”
Gallimore called the trip “phenomenal” and “life-changing.”
“Anybody from any walk of life can make a mission trip like this,” he said. “Take the time out of your daily normal life that you think is so important and answer the request that God has made of you and listen to God while on that journey. You may find out that the mission is to listen to God. Don’t be scared to take time away from your comfort zone. It allows you to listen to your inner soul, your conscience. It allows the Holy Spirit visiting with you without the distraction of TV, cars, the worries of daily life. I am definitely a different man than I was before I went. I know I’m a better father, a better person. I see the mercy of the grace of God more so now. It continues to be a massive awakening to God’s grace.”
Father Hart commented, “It (the mission trip) does great things for all of us. We learn to listen to the Holy Spirit, to have trust, to have courage. If we open our eyes and our hearts, God will give us the guidance. In order to minister to others we must know ourselves.
Father Peralte, pastor at St. Andrew Church in Colladere, visited the Hot Springs parish Jan. 7-12.
How to help
For those interested in finding out more about St. Mary’s mission trip to Haiti, a video is posted on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06BZAp0L7jo). Photos from the trip are posted on the Picasa Web site (http://picasaweb.google.com/StMaryHaitiTeam/HaitiMissionSteveGallimore#). Anyone interested in donating to the Haiti missions should contact church secretary Kelly McCormick at St. Mary of the Springs, 100 Central Avenue, Hot Springs, AR 71901 or (501) 623-3233. The team also can be reached at stmaryhaititeam@gmail.com.
