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they have worth the catholic church will survive and i am sure of it but the longer i am here the less i know i really could not speak with much authority about what will happen with the government or even what would be the best way to help the people i also struggle a great deal even being here i feel strongly that we can do a great deal of harm with the best intentions when we begin to be the benefactor even with all this aid coming in we must go slowly and every step of the way we must include the haitians in the decision making during these very difficult days i find myself really loving these people these are the same people who endured the slave ships a horrible system of slavery and who would be the ones who would eventually defeat napoleon they would continue to suffer greatly but they have a strength that is remarkable i am humbled by them and privileged to be with them pray for me take care tom hagan osfs in post earthquake haiti work to feed educate j hallett 2011 august 7 2011 written by joe hallett the columbus dispatch sunday august 7 2011 cleveland clinic s diagnosis some sort of poisoning or virus from rat feces that s what drove the rev tom hagan last november from the squalor of port au prince to doug campbell s house in massachusetts and eventually to the clinic to find out why the priest was so deathly sick why it hurt so terribly to move his arms and legs they finally concluded that it was probably caused by rat feces that got into the food and water said campbell executive director of hands together the springfield mass based catholic charity started in 1986 by father tom as the hai tians call him that s what can happen when you live in a tent for a year starting a day after the jan 12 2010 earthquake that devastated haiti i got attached to my little tent father tom said it wasn t so bad the only problem was if you got up too early and it was still dark then the rats would still be with you father tom is divinely blinded to fear when gangs are acting up in cite soleil a god forsaken slum of about 400 000 in port au prince father tom marches in and lets them know he won t tolerate violence against his charity s interests he ll go up to the head guy said campbell and say take your gun out and shoot me shoot me if you want to shoot somebody they re always threatening our workers and he won t stand for it once teacher and student at lafayette college in pennsylvania father tom and doug campbell now are best friends both trans formed by their first visit to haiti in 1986 they couldn t get the country s unfathomable poverty and raw potential out of their systems they started hands together and in 1996 father tom left his comfortable chaplain s post at princeton uni versity and moved to haiti devoting his life to a place that seemed gripped by the devil in the late 90s fate crossed father tom s path with a u s senator and his wife mike and fran dewine who also had felt a humanitarian tug to haiti their friendship result ed in the becky dewine school named for the dewines daughter who had been killed in a 1993 car accident nine days ago father tom campbell and the dewines sat in a cincinnati hotel lobby excited about a fundraiser for hands to gether every year the dewines mike is now the ohio attorney gen eral raise enough money to pay all the teachers salaries and provide uniforms for the kids from three grades in three rooms at the beginning the school now includes seven campuses in six neighborhoods of cite soleil pro viding the only daily meal many of the 5 000 students get we had 7 800 kids but after the earthquake many went up into the countryside said father tom a lot of the parents were killed and families were broken up we ve had some aftershocks and the people are very terrified and they haven t come back before rebuilding his own resi dence father tom made sure that the schools were rebuilt along with hands together s facilities for feed ing thousands of haitians caring for the elderly and operating agricultu ral and jobs programs next year the becky dewine school will hold commencement for its first high school graduating class the dewines plan to be there al ready working on funding for schol arships so the best students can go to college father tom will be 70 in october knowing that thousands of haitians depend on him and campbell the dewines worry about what will happen after father tom gets his heavenly reward hence the four of them are in a rush to educate and train haitians to eventually take over hands together and assume the responsibility of rescuing their own country there is no predicting how long someone so fearless can continue to stand up to gun toting gang leaders or avoid the sickening effects of rat feces in such a place meanwhile father tom hagan treads through the haitian rubble as a saint for information about hands together visit www handstogeth erorg joe hallett is senior editor at the dispatch father tom receives honorary degree at lafayette commencement july 18 2011 be someone who cares graduates you owe the world a great deal i remember coming here from the university of pennsylvania and before i came they said lafayette is a great school a great academic school but all the students are way up on that hill they really don t know much about what s happening in the world the first day i came here i realized that was not true i met gary miller the chaplain he was and is a great person and he encouraged the students to do so much for the poor and downtrodden above all i met the students and what i found in them was an extraordinary appetite for helping others and a passion to help the world they left this hill and they would go into the city of easton and recognize hunger and do something about it they would prepare food here and bring it down and open up a soup kitchen they would go to the prison they would start a project for the elderly a project for the street kids the students had enormous good will but maybe not the best prudence they would go down into the city of easton and invite the homeless up here one fraternity house theta delt would invite them into their barroom set up cots and let them stay there overnight the men thought they had died and gone to heaven and i remember very well right over here on one of these benches sitting down with a group of students and they began to share a dream those students said we want to go to haiti and within a month we would go off to haiti to northern haiti the city of gonaives i remember the first day there seeing a long line of people young people and teenagers and adults i felt so afraid and i was ashamed of my own fear because the lafayette students were already talking to them and laughing with them they were all lepers there were 1 200 lepers in that area of gonaives those students from lafayette would come back here and say we ve got to do something they organized a party that in the history of lafayette was probably one of the biggest parties we ever had every fraternity house at that time had to give two kegs of beer we had it at the gym it was most successful we raised enough money to build a leper clinic in northern haiti those young people would go back and go back again and in a period of just three or four years over 260 lafayette students had gone to haiti they would found an organization called hands together many of those young people are still with me today doug campbell graduated from here in 1986 he devoted his life to helping the poor in haiti he now serves as our executive director many of the young people who graduated from here have stuck with us peter simon 75 and jeff kirby 84 and many fine young graduates i look out at you today and i want to say thank you the lafayette students they always wanted to go to the toughest places they went to a place in haiti called the cite soleil slum it s documented as one of the poorest and most destitute areas of the world it s where i have lived and worked for the last 14 years there are 500 000 people living on three square miles of raw sewage when you stand there your feet literally sink into it there s no sanitation very little electricity we have a rat population 10 times that of the people the oldest child stays up at night with a stick to keep the rats away but those things you ve learned to deal with what s difficult for me and i know it would be for you is to see the children because the children are dying one half 50 percent of those children will die before their fifth birthday if you could go back with me tomorrow what you would see would be thousands of children with bloated stomachs filled with worms father tom hagan at the devastated headquarters of hands together in haiti children have a certain stare in their eyes children whose hair should be black turns an ugly color of orange a sign of acute malnutrition then you look at the women the women age in front of you they age because it s unnatural for a woman a mother to watch her child die i don t know one woman in that area who has not lost a child the lafayette students began a clinic there that now serves 20 000 people it s the only free clinic in the area almost every day at that clinic i have to pull a baby away from a woman begging me to tell her that her child has not died but it has please forgive me for being so graphic but not long ago i celebrate mass every morning for mother teresa s nuns there was a terrible stench in the chapel and when the sun came up we found the body of a little girl who had been eaten by rats and dogs this is an area the new york times documented recently where women out of desperation will take mud and mix it with water or spice and let it dry in the sun and then feed it to their children they don t realize it has deadly parasites this is all they have it s in this area that we feed 10 000 hot meals a day and once a week 200 000 dry meals we ve done that for many years just four months ago shortly before 5 p m i was sitting in a house that the lafayette students had organized and founded a five story house in that house were homeless street kids i had taken in over the years i was sitting on the bottom floor with doug campbell when suddenly the earth began to shake i don t know if you ve ever been in an earthquake but it was the most terrifying moment in my life i felt the blood coming from my head and my back was in terrible pain yet i didn t know what was going on my whole body was shaking for 38 seconds i didn t even think about going out i tried to get under a table but the floor was going in a different direction you become totally disoriented finally a person ran in and grabbed me and got me out only in time for me to see the building go down i then began to hear the cries of the young people in that building one was crying out pere tom pere tom help me he was a young boy i found in the streets who had been shot and lost his eyesight now he s under that building and i could not do anything to help him for the next 24 hours i sat there in vigil and watched as they began to pull some out but when the sun came up the next day we realized that some would never come out when we found their bodies we buried them right there on that spot since then i ve been living in a small tent just a few feet away from those graves and every morning i get up and look at that and then i look at all the response that has come from all over the world i find myself praying doug campbell 86 executive director of hands together in gratitude to god and especially in gratitude to you the lafayette community you heard the cry coming from haiti and you responded i thank you from the bottom of my heart after the jan 12 earthquake the landis community outreach center raised nearly 3 000 for haiti relief through a concert quilting bee and other events the center is forging a stronger partnership with hands together see page 19 i also have to say to you today that the world owes you absolutely nothing and you owe the world a great deal i feel a sense of urgency as i look out at you we re living in a time when we no longer have the luxury of being indecisive each and every one of you has to be very decisive we re living in a time that has an orientation toward self absorption and narcissism a time when we don t value human beings what i m asking you to do is to be someone who really cares for this world martin luther king in 1968 speaking in a church in atlanta ga said that to be truly alive and truly human you must be three dimensional you must not only have a love for yourself but a love for others and a love for god i challenge you my dear graduates to always be three dimensional i challenge you to stand on your own two feet and see the world as it truly is all that s good yes but all that s evil all that s beautiful and all that s ugly and say yes i can make a difference in this world i can have the courage to share my dreams with others i thank you i want to tell you again how much i love this wonderful school when i walked through here today i saw the bench dedicated to rick thorpe 89 a student who came with me to haiti he died in the world trade center and we have evidence today that he was trying to help people from the 89th to the 80th floor i passed the memorial out there this morning i counted 89 lafayette graduates who died in the second world war almost the same number in the first world war korea and vietnam you know you are part of a great tradition graduates from this wonderful school have gone all over the world to help people and i beg you to take that mission seriously my prayer for each and every one of you is this that you will always be three dimensional and that the sight of a sunset will mean more to you than your material possessions that the sounds of children will impress you more than the voices of the powerful and political people of the world i pray that you will always be able to dance and sing for the right reasons and weep not for having lost something but for the realization that god has given you so much i believe in you i love you and i challenge you father tom hagan lafayette s catholic chaplain from 1983 to 1991 delivered these remarks may 22 at the 175th commencement where he was awarded the honorary degree of doctor of public service a priest with the oblates of st francis de sales he is president of hands together a nonprofit organization devoted to educating inspiring and encouraging people to understand the importance of responding to the needs of the poor and disadvantaged many many alumni have visited our projects in haiti through the years and have worked a great deal to make it a very successful program hagan says from 1985 to 1990 a group of students under the leadership of doug campbell 86 really were the founders of hands together jamie winebrake 89 john boozang 87 bill o shea 88 pete najarian 88 scott wild 89 rick thorpe 89 jane leveroni burns 89 ginger pancoast bove 88 and brendan gilligan 90 jeff kirby 84 was one of the early direct...