Our Sister Parish

In 1987, 85% of the parishioners of St. Francis voted to support twinning with a parish in Haiti. The parish chosen for us was St. Paul's, located in the small village of Leon, in the western part of Haiti. In 1988, four members of our parish, including our pastor at the time Father Don Worch, went to Leon to visit. In 1989, the pastor of St. Paul's came to Derwood to visit us. Since that time, numerous parishioners have traveled to Haiti with our medical missions that go five times a year. The pastor of St. Paul's usually visits us once a year. This past year, the children in Religious Education collected money for seeds to plant fruit trees around the parish and the school.

A collection is taken up four times a year to support our sister parish. The money collected is used to fund projects that will benefit the people of St. Paul's parish and the wider community. These projects are decided upon by the Haiti Committee in consultation with the pastor and pastoral counsel of St. Paul's. This past year we subsidized the teacher's salaries at the parish school, which is called Bon Pasteur (Good Shepherd), to make a quality education affordable to as many people as possible. In addition, individual parishioners sponsored 140 children who could not afford to pay even the reduced tuition at our school, through Sister Adorema, a Belgian sister, beloved by the community, who works with CRS.

This past year we also built a second school building with a computer classroom. The computers will be donated by St. Francis of Assisi parishioners. Through a generous grant by the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities, we are also in the process of distributing ceramic pot water filters to all families at our parish school and the nearby orphanage and building latrines in the village marketplace to help address the cholera epidemic which is sweeping the Leon area. We have already trained teachers at the parish school to teach the students about water and sanitation issues through Pure Water for the World.

Through our personal relationship with our sister parish, we have grown in our awareness of the hard realities of poverty in Haiti. Every year parishioners who have visited Haiti speak at the Masses to tell of their experience and the harsh realities of everyday life there. In the United States, being the richest country in the world, we take so much for granted. Haiti is approximately the same size as Maryland yet the average annual income of people in the villages is $360 US. It is a blessing to be reminded of all that we have been given and of our responsibility to those less fortunate than ourselves, our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Please remember to keep our sister parish in your prayers, as they keep us in theirs!