[LINK] "Pastor keeping the faith - when there’s little hope in sight"

[rfmcdonald]

As part of its ongoing coverage of the reconstruction projects in the southern Haitian city of Jacmel, the Globe and Mail recently featured an article by Jessica Leeder describing how one local church, notwithstanding its large number of parishoners and long history, has found itself stymied because of its independence. No one, it seems has an interest in helping them.

It has become routine for worshippers at the Église Baptiste Stricte to stroll right past the doors of the ancient church and into the backyard.

Their pews have been set out there for months, propped up beneath a patchwork of tarps on an uneven foundation of stone, brick and cement that anchored a couple of houses before they collapsed.

The church, which stands sentry to Jacmel’s beloved heritage district, had been home to 165 years’ worth of Sunday prayers before the evening of Jan. 12. When the earthquake that night fractured half of Jacmel, a good portion of the church caved, too.

No one was killed in the crush, but it sent the church’s slight, 50-year-old pastor, Dieucin Marcelin, into a panic over how he will protect the ministry he’s been building up for 15 years.

[. . .]

Their church has more than 1,000 local members, a rich history as the first Protestant church in the region, and links with more than 100 smaller churches in Haiti. What it does not have, crucially, is a strong link with any of the big American churches that specialize in post-disaster bailouts.

Pastor Marcelin seems to be at a loss for how to get one. It keeps him awake at night, and prompts him to ask everyone he can for help – money, publicity, lists of foreign Baptist organizations. Still, he can’t seem to make the connection that will help begin to pay for the $700,000 (U.S.) his congregation needs to fix their crumbled heritage structure.

“We have no help at all,” Pastor Marcelin said, despondent during a recent interview. “We are doing what we can with what we have … but we have no type of help. We would like to take this opportunity to open many doors, for foreigners – United States or France or Canada – for other countries to come help us, so we can have the means.”

What he would also like to do is broaden the church’s reach into the community by adding health and youth programs. He would also like to fix up a school across town that is affiliated with the church, most of the buildings for which have been spray painted with the fateful red-circled dot that indicates a need for outright demolition.