June 14, 2010 issue
Seminary professor sees Haiti's hope in its people
Group aims to help quake victims deal with grief, despair
By Tom Mitchell Harrisonburg Daily News-RecordPage:
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HARRISONBURG, Va. — Lonnie Yoder will long remember the story told him by a young woman from Haiti who survived the country’s horrific earthquake.
Yoder
“She was a nursing student in [Haiti’s capital city of] Port-au-Prince, who survived when her school building collapsed,” Yoder said. “She talked about holding the 1-year-old baby of her best friend as the baby died.”
Yoder, 59, professor of pastoral care and counseling and the new associate dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, has an avalanche of accounts he could share from his recent visit to Haiti.
Yoder traveled as part of a group on a mission run by Mennonite Central Committee and Virginia Mennonite Missions.
The group also included Joe Arbaugh, a building contractor from Verona; Elizabeth Showalter, a cheese-shop worker from Stuarts Draft; and Shelly-Ann Peart James, a graduate school grad and lecturer at a seminary in Jamaica.
The group stayed at an MCC home in Port-au-Prince.
Yoder’s group spent May 17-24 in Haiti, a visit that included three days of meetings with quake victims in Port-au-Prince. The sessions were designed to help Haitians deal with grief and despair brought on by the Jan. 12 disaster by sharing their stories of the catastrophe, which claimed an estimated 230,000 lives.
The tales, Yoder said, were “incredible stories of pain, suffering and death.”
The mission of 90 participants took place at Quisqueya Chapel, an interdenominational church in the city’s northeast section. Still reeling from the quake, residents opted to gath-er on a lawn outside the building.
In a setting where tents serve as houses and rubble rules the landscape, Yoder and his party marveled at the locals’ unnatural grit.
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