Haitian bishop recalls the earthquake of 2010

On Monday January 11, 2010, Bishop Pierre Dumas and his sister – who was visiting from Paris – attempted to make their way from the Haitian capital, Port au Prince, to Bishop Dumas’s diocese of Anse-à-Veau and Miragoâne.

But, he recalled in Mullingar this week, he looked at the sea, and noticed something wasn’t right.

“It was so agitated!” he says, adding that he decided something had happened deep under the waves.

Little did he know then that he and his sister were seeing the first signs of the 7.0Mw earthquake of January 12 that would last just 36 seconds, but claim more than 300,000 Haitian lives. Bishop Dumas came through it safely, as did his sister; not so, however, a brother-in-law, who lived in Haiti, and a young niece.

Shortly after the earthquake, the bishop made his way to a local radio station, where they asked him if he was a priest – the rubble having left him covered in dust, and the confusion having left him without his clerical collar.

He stands to mime the actions of what happened next – a remembered microphone being thrust once again into his hands: “I told them I was a bishop – and they said: ‘Oh bishop! Give a message to the people!’.”

“So I said: ‘we in the church, we live in this situation with you. We’re sure it is not a punishment from God. But we have to understand there is a message for us’,” he said.

That message, he said, is of learning how to help one another; how to co-operate; how to work together – and that’s what the people of Haiti have been doing ever since, with the help of organisations such Caritas, of which he is Haitian president, and of which the Irish charity Trócaire is part.

As part of Trócaire’s Lenten drive, Bishop Dumas spent much of last Wednesday in Mullingar, where he concelebrated Mass at the cathedral, before going on to St Finian’s Diocesan College, where he met Leaving Cert students. He also met classes from Loreto and Presentation College, and called to St Colman’s, where among the pupils he met was one youngster who was confirmed last Saturday in Mullingar – but who was born in Haiti.

He greatly enjoyed his meetings with the young people: “Kids have a special place in the world: to communicate hope for the future, and meeting them reminded me of the kids in Haiti,” he said.

“When I asked them what their hopes are for the future, they said: peace. The kids want to live in a peaceful world.”

If he posed the same question to children in his own country, he believes, they would give the same answer – but they would qualify it by explaining that for peace they need other things too: “We need food; we need clothes, and we need to go to school, and have sanitation and a little house in which to live.”

Some 200,000 people in Haiti – many of them children – are still living in tents. Says Mullingar woman, Hannah Evans, who works with Trócaire, and who accompanied the bishop on his visit to Mullingar, Caritas is working towards providing housing for 15,000 of these people in the next year.

The bishop reveals that a century prior to the earthquake of three years ago, there was another massive earthquake in Haiti – but at school, most people never learned about it. As a result, no one ever imagined such a thing could lie ahead of them.

“It was a big challenge for us to keep our faith in God, and to understand that God doesn’t want calamity for his people: he wants life,” said the bishop, adding that he took comfort from the passage in Jeremiah 29:11 – For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

The church in Haiti is delighted that the new pope comes from Latin America.

“That means a lot for us: first of all, we’re sure that the church is one, even if he’s from the northern part or the southern, he’s the pope. He cannot change things: he has to continue in the way of the church. At the same time, a man coming from the southern part can add some vitality to the church,” he says.

He is also greatly heartened by the pope’s choice of the name Francis, and believes that the new pontiff will follow the exhortation that fell on the ears of St Francis of Assisi in a vision, which were “repair my church”.