Helping the heroes for Christ

While the shopping season that runs from Thanksgiving to Dec. 25, followed immediately by after-Christmas sales, defines the holiday season for many in our society, the faith-filled readers of this paper are blessed to know a deeper reality: The source of all that is so desired our fulfillment and happiness that no price was too great to pay, including the self-emptying of becoming one of us, with all the human limitations we know so well.

No sentimental TV special can remotely come close to the joy and gratitude felt in contemplating God's unfathomable love and letting those same emotions transform our relationships and decisions.

In whom does Christ invite us to see Him this Advent? Let me propose one possibility: the heroes who labor month after month, year after year in primitive and dangerous conditions far from home, to uplift our sisters and brothers living in misery. These are the courageous people who work for Catholic Relief Services.

CRS was formed by the Bishops of the United States in 1943 to resettle European refugees during World War II, and later to assist in rebuilding that shattered continent. Today, CRS works in over 100 countries, bringing economic and human development to 100 million impoverished people and/or victims of armed conflict on five continents.

Next week, you'll learn what CRS is doing in Afghanistan. Now, I invite you to consider how CRS helps the country most in need in our own neighborhood.

Bill Canny, a native of Binghamton, recently moved back to the U.S. after spending three years as the director of CRS in Haiti. Now the executive director of emergency operations for CRS worldwide, Bill described the CRS programs that are tackling Haiti's problems.

About two-thirds of the population almost never has enough to eat. CRS is assisting small farmers to get better yields from their tiny plots, to build safe storage facilities so they won't have to sell at harvest time (when the prices are most depressed, because that's when every farmer is trying to sell), and to get their crops to market - no small achievement in a place of poor or non-existent roads.

A second problem area is the need for education, since only half of Haitian children are in school. Life holds a better future for some 100,000 children because CRS is building schools, training teachers, developing curriculum, offering school lunches and giving scholarships to students whose parents are affected by HIV/AIDS. CRS also is providing anti-retroviral drugs to 4,500 AIDS patients, making the illness a manageable chronic condition rather than a death sentence.

Haitians in search of work emigrate to the Dominican Republic. Employers often confiscate their passports and have them expelled to avoid paying them once the work is finished. CRS provides shelter and food at the border and transport to the workers' hometowns.

CRS is also making life better for Haitians by providing access to clean water and latrines; child and maternal health care (one out of every 10 Haitian children dies before the age of five); homes for children, the elderly and dying; early hurricane warning systems; and reforestation. In all that CRS does, the goal is to empower people so that they do not become dependent on others. The same is true of the CRS employees themselves.

In Haiti, the CRS staff includes 313 Haitians and seven individuals from Ethiopia, Holland, Togo, the Central African Republic and the United States. The internationals have technical or management skills that they pass on to the Haitian staff that run the programs. It is the practice of CRS to have staff as a group enter into a rigorous annual evaluation so that their effectiveness will continuously improve.

They do not see their work as just jobs. When the city of Gonaives was buried in mud resulting from four consecutive hurricanes in 2008, CRS staff worked seven days a week for months. This is generally true for every hurricane season. We can be proud to have Catholic Relief Services as the eyes, hands and hearts of American Catholics.

You can learn more about CRS at www.crs.org . Donations to CRS may be sent to Catholic Charities, 40 N. Main Ave., Albany NY 12203.

(Barbara DiTommaso is director of the diocesan Commission on Peace and Justice.)

(12-03-09)