Port-au-Prince (Agenzia Fides) – Agenzia Fides continues receiving various personal testimonies from priests, missionaries, and relief workers working amidst the rubble in Port-au-Prince. Here we offer a selection of several testimonies sent to Fides by Sister Janet Fearns, FMDM, Communications Coordinator of the National Office of the Pontifical Mission Societies in England and Wales (Missio).
Only 20 days after their own earthquake of magnitude 6.5 on the Mexico-Guatemala border, a Mexican disaster team pulled a 69 year-old woman from the wrecked Cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Some of them wept with joy as Ena Zizi came into view, dust-covered, singing hymns and declaring that her Catholic faith had helped her through the ordeal. “I talked only to my boss – God,” she said. “And I didn't need any more humans. I'm all right... sort of,” she added as medics diagnosed severe dehydration, a dislocated hip and a broken leg.
An American Jesuit Brother, working with the Jesuit Refugee Services wrote: “Overnight I have come to love these people in a way that makes them a model for me, and clearly puts them on a higher plane than I will ever be.” Another Jesuit volunteer spoke of Haitians with suppurating wounds helping each other, ignoring their own pain to care for those in greater need.
“From day one the Church has been offering bereavement counseling,” says Clare Dixon, head of the Latin American and Caribbean desk of CAFOD, the official relief agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, which is working in partnership with Caritas. “It is extraordinary that many of the people who are working day and night to help are carrying this terrible pain inside them. When people say where was God in the earthquake, they say ‘He was here with us’.”
Fr. Valon, a missionary working in Haiti, wrote to Missio-France: “One thing is for sure, and it is obvious: God is much more present in suffering because when a child suffers, her parents pay much more attention to her. God is there with the Haitian people, loving us with the same love.” (AR) (Agenzia Fides 29/01/2010)