Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Port-au-Prince (Agenzia Fides) - "Dear Doctor Alvelo, Thank you for writing me an email, but especially for helping me dry the tears of helplessness before devastation of apocalyptic proportions. Your presence, along with the whole team of AMAR, filled me with joy, because you arrived where no one else had, not even the cameras of CNN. You are the first and so far the only ones to get to Nazon/Coquillot to help the injured and those who awaited death or life. Life reappeared, thanks to you.”
Thus began the letter (also sent to Fides) that Fr. Anistus Chima, CMF, Claretian missionary working in Port-au-Prince, wrote to Dr. Alvelo, which together the team of AMAR went to Nazon. AMAR (Alianza de Medicos al Rescate) brings together a group of doctors on an emergency international medical mission, who had worked in Haiti before the earthquake of January 12 and have now arrived in some areas where no one had yet come to provide first aid assistance.
According to reports from the international press "Nazon is a neighborhood located along a road with an irregular path, which holds the most notable and extensive pile of corpses in the open air of the Haitian capital. The neighborhood was inhabited by middle-class local families of workers who are distinguished from those of the poor slums, as they are able to work, albeit occasionally, and thus are not obliged to beg in order to eat."
Here, the team of AMAR doctors arrived and from there send their testimony. "We have gotten here to where we were meant to come, that is, to where Jesus takes us to meet the most needy on our path, in the sadness and in the joy of giving an embrace of solidarity, a gift of health and love to our brothers in Haiti," writes Dr. Alvelo, inviting all to view the photos posted on the Internet to illustrate the situation and to call for Christian solidarity. (CE) (Agenzia Fides 28/01/2010)
