Since 2010, when a devastating earthquake hit Léogâne, Haiti, sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, ACE has sought to support and revitalize Haitian Catholic education through a number of multifaceted initiatives. In remembrance of the five-year anniversary of the disaster, members of the ACE team and their partners in Haiti sat down to reflect on their experiences surrounding the earthquake that rocked a nation just 400 miles off the coast of Florida.
Fr. Tim Scully, CSC, Hackett Family Director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives: I had two initial causes of my interest and involvement in Haiti. The first one was Fr. Tom Streit, who started the Notre Dame Haiti Program. Tom would ask me to advise him on fundraising for his efforts in Haiti and had invited me to go to Haiti with him. The second was our connection to the Congregation of Holy Cross, which has served in Haiti for over 70 years.
Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC, Provincial Superior, the Haitian Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross: The Congregation of Holy Cross was called to Haiti many times and accepted a mission devoted to education here in 1944. It has been here for 70 years. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, we focused our efforts on youth education.
T.J. D’Agostino, Associate Director of Haitian Catholic Education Initiatives: I got involved in Haiti through my best friend from Notre Dame, Don Zimmer. He volunteered in Haiti for a year after graduating from ND before going to medical school and had encouraged me to visit Haiti with him. In 2006, when I was 23 and in my second year as a teacher in the ACE program, I went to Haiti with Don. It was a life altering experience.
Gena Robinson: I first met T.J. in Haiti when I was teaching as a volunteer there. I was a recent college grad and he and a good friend of his had come down to Haiti and came to visit my school. I remember T.J. saying, “Would you be able to have a follow up phone call?” And we pointed to the phone poll, which had the wires duct-taped to it, and we pointed to the guard, and we were like, “He goes up and duct tapes them every time they fall down.”
T.J. D’Agostino: I had been to some Latin American countries, some poorer countries, but I hadn’t experienced the depth of poverty and human suffering that I witnessed in Haiti. It was difficult to wrap my head around - everything from a complete lack of infrastructure to totally dysfunctional institutions. It was hard to know how to even begin to engage.
Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC, Principal of Basile Moreau School: The situation wasn’t good in Haiti before the earthquake. The state was weak and poorly structured. There was a lot of political instability.
Fr. Tim Scully: There was the famous meeting in Notre Dame’s Main Building when I was trying to help Tom acquire support for his work in Haiti from the central administration. It was the year T.J. was graduating from ACE and he literally had his cap and gown, and I came down from that meeting and I met TJ in front of the Golden Dome.
T.J. D’Agostino: The weekend I graduated from ACE, I had a conversation with Fr. Scully in which I was expressing an interest and a desire to work in Haiti, and he had just walked out of a meeting in which he had been asked if he could do more to support Haiti.
Fr. Tim Scully: Tom had just asked me in this meeting, “What are you doing for Haiti?” I thought to myself, “We haven’t done anything for Haiti. What do you want me to do?” But then with classic Irish guilt, it was bothering me that I didn’t have a better answer. So minutes after the meeting I run into T.J. who was literally with his cap and gown on his arm, and I said to him, “T.J., what are you going to do when you graduate from ACE?” He said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but whatever it is, it has to have something to do with Haiti.” I said, “Really? You want to work on something in Haiti?” “Yeah. Haiti and education.” Here, T.J. gave me the answer.
While Notre Dame and ACE were ramping up their efforts in Haiti, others were doing the same, and had been for years.
Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: Holy Cross in Haiti also worked in informal education, most notably in the field of adult education by developing two nationally renowned training institutes: At IDEA, we began the National Literacy Project (Mission Alpha.) The project aimed, in time, to wipe out illiteracy across the country.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien, Associate Director of Haitian Catholic Education Initiatives: I grew up in the Evangelical Free Church. My parents, through a connection, went to Haiti to volunteer on a project with a gentleman named Henoc Lucien. I had known Henoc, and my parents had been going to Haiti since I was twelve years old. My mom was really involved in education through this mission in Haiti.
Gena Robinson, Marketing and Communications Specialist for Play Like a Champion Today: I actually first got involved in Haiti as a senior at Notre Dame. I took a Haitian Creole class. I just thought it would be a fun thing to learn. At the end of my senior year I found out about the Haitian Project, and I ended up teaching in Haiti for a year after I graduated from college.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: When I was in college I was in a really bad car accident. I was hurt really badly, and my mom was killed. For her memorial, we requested that all of the gifts in memory of her go toward helping to finish the school she had been working on through the Evangelical Free Church and Henoc in Cap-Haitien.
It was what they needed to finish building the school, so the board of directors of the school said that they wanted to name it after her. It’s a pre-K through twelfth grade school in Cap-Haitien, and it’s named College Susan Schuenke.
When I graduated from college, the [College Susan Schuenke] leadership asked if I would come to help them with the school and to teach English and Spanish for all the kids. I lived in Haiti from 2002 to 2003, and that is where I met my husband, Fredo.
Fr. Tim Scully: I’ve got to tell you, going to Haiti for the first time was a real revelation. It was poor. I’ve been working in Latin America for many years, probably thirty-five years, but nothing like the poverty I saw in Haiti.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: I had never been to a place where the physical needs were so great and yet the morale and the ability to put one foot in front of another for all of my students and their families was so great as well.
Gena Robinson: When I was there, it was very unstable. There were routine kidnappings and prison breaks. There was political upheaval. Despite the chaos that was outside the school walls, my students were an amazing group that were committed to making their country better.
Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: In 2009, realizing the rapid growth of our province, we decided to prioritize education over the coming years, with a special focus on teacher training.
Gena Robinson: When I was teaching in Haiti, I was on the emergency planning committee. We planned for armed invasions, we planned for hurricanes and for floods, and we planned for earthquakes. It was basically a duck, cover, hold on, and leave the building as quickly as possible plan. The students were like, “You silly Americans, you and your drills. Okay. You’re telling us we miss five minutes of class if we do this, right?”
In the late afternoon on Tuesday, January 12, 2010, a catastrophic earthquake rocked Haiti, the epicenter just sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
T.J. D’Agostino: I was planning on being at the Clinton Foundation on January 14th. President Clinton was hosting the meeting about Haiti’s long-term development and I was going to represent Notre Dame to talk about our plans to work with Holy Cross around teacher training. But the earthquake hit on January 12th and everything changed.
Gena Robinson: The day of the earthquake, I was living back in South Bend, working at the Red Cross.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: My husband had just returned a couple days before the earthquake. He had been in Port-au-Prince visiting family. I was driving and my friend called me and said, “Where is Fredo? Is he back from Haiti yet?” “I knew something really bad had happened, and we turned on the radio. I knew at that point it was something bad, but that night there still was not a lot of information coming out. I called my husband in Chicago and literally he couldn’t speak. He doesn’t cry. He couldn’t speak for crying.
T.J. D’Agostino: The earthquake happened and I - like a lot of people - was devastated by the things that I was seeing on TV—the images, the stories, the things people were going through. I was worried about my friends and colleagues in Haiti, whether they had survived.
Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC: I was in my room at the seminary on the day of the earthquake, I had just eaten and gone up to my room and turned on my computer. I heard a loud noise and I thought someone was working on top of the roof. My desk started to move and all my books from my bookshelf and my computer fell on the floor. My door closed and locked, and I was so frightened I couldn't even think to unlock it. I just kicked it down to run outside. Everything was falling down around me in the room. I heard so many loud noises because buildings were falling down all around me. The part of the seminary building I was in didn’t fall down but other parts collapsed. When I got outside there was so much dust in the air, I couldn't see. We spent 3 days sleeping on the street with all of the people from the neighborhood. My mom was so scared that I died, a friend was able to call and tell her I was ok, but my mom didn't believe it and I had to go home to see her so she would believe I was alive.
Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: I was brutally woken up by the earthquake, along with most of my fellow countrymen. I buried my dead friends and family along with the rest of Port-au-Prince and got back to work. As someone with a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, I was able to help begin an initiative to provide psychological support to the most vulnerable. There was immense trauma.
Fr. Rosemond Marcelin, CSC: For me, after the earthquake, I felt like life didn’t have any sense anymore, life was so difficult already. People had so little and then they lost what little they had. I was very discouraged. I lost my cousin. I lost my best friend from seminary who died at Quisqueya University.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: Fredo was trying to find his sisters who live in Port-au-Prince, his sisters and his brother. It was terrible because he knew that they were alive, but he didn’t know what had happened. The next day he was able to finally get through, and he found out that his sister had been in her house in Port au Prince and she felt the earthquake starting to happen, so she grabbed her two toddlers and was running out of the house. As she was running, she pushed them in front of her, but her sliding glass door broke and it pinned her down. She was stuck in the house. By the grace of God, my husband’s brother had been coming over to visit, and he got there right as everything was happening, so he ran in and he pulled the door off of her and pulled her out. Then a minute later, the entire house pancaked.
T.J. D’Agostino: Some weeks later I learned that my friend and colleague, the head of the national office for Catholic schools in Haiti, was badly injured. He was in the second floor of a building that collapsed. The woman with him, who had dedicated her life to Haitian Catholic education, died. He broke both of his hips and was hurt badly. Thank God, he recovered fully and continues to be our close partner.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: I also remember thinking, “Haiti has been through so many things, what kind of God is this?” I remember that was what my husband kept saying to me on the phone. That night he said, “Why? Why would God let this happen? Have we not been through enough?”
Fr. Michel Eugene, CSC: There were all of the emotions brought on by the earthquake and the experience of such a disaster. I realized how vulnerable and inconsequential we all are. We knew the risks of an earthquake were real, but we didn’t really believe them until the night of January 12, 2010.
Gena Robinson: The next day I went in to work and because of my experience in Haiti became the Red Cross’s person on Haiti for the region. I was handling people who wanted to go to Haiti, people who had questions about Haiti, wanted to donate to Haiti, local news organizations who wanted to get some context on Haiti.
T.J. D’Agostino: Two days after the earthquake, they ended up having the meeting at the Clinton Foundation in NYC and I went out there. It was surreal. The UN headquarters in Haiti had collapsed, and almost every ministry building had collapsed, the presidential palace had collapsed, so none of the typical infrastructure to respond to a crisis like this was left standing in Haiti. President Clinton was then the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, and decisions were literally being made in that meeting about how to get help and aid into the country and how to avoid an even greater humanitarian catastrophe due to logistical challenges and the failure of getting aid to the people who needed it.
Gena Robinson: The Friday after the earthquake, I got a call. It was the final tally of who had died from my school. We lost five people, and many of my students lost family members. We thought we lost six, but one of my former students was stuck under the rubble and she got out. She was pulled out after four days of being stuck under her school. She survived.
Kate Schuenke-Lucien: When the earthquake happened, there was no way to coordinate things. Before the earthquake Haiti had a weak central government, and then you had this huge crisis where you need a central authority and nobody was there to organize things. I think that became clear in immediately after the earthquake, food being sent to the wrong places, etc. So many people had such good intentions, but there was no way to logically funnel their good intentions into achievable outcomes.
Gena Robinson: It was a time of immense chaos. Haiti was very chaotic before the earthquake. Then, when you added in this new level of absolute natural disaster on a country that was already very, very unstable, the chaos was just unimaginable.
T.J. D’Agostino: Within the days following the earthquake, we learned that the Holy Cross community had suffered major losses—they lost the life of a seminarian, they lost their provincial administration building and one of their flagship schools, Basile Moreau, completely collapsed. It was soon after the earthquake that, Fr. Scully and Fr. Warner, in consultation with the Haitian Holy Cross Community, decided to help rebuild Basile Moreau as a top priority and to move forward with our plans for teacher training.
Fr. Tim Scully: I went down to Haiti with Fr. John Jenkins just over a month after the earthquake. I decided to spend time with our Holy Cross community to explore ways we could help support them. I was there for a couple of days. When I came back, I said, “T.J., we’ve got to do something.”
Read more with Part 2 here.
African American and Native American students experience the benefits of Catholic schools, such as 87% high school graduation rates. Latinos share in these advantages, Bishop Flores added. “We must continue this commitment for a new group of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and to the younger generations born and raised in the United States.”