A World of Difference
The first thing Christina Waksmunski noticed upon coming home was the waste.
“Suddenly I was so aware of habits such as letting the water run while we brush our teeth,” the junior from Portage, Pennsylvania, explains. “In Haiti, people hardly ever have running water and when they do, it's only at certain times of the day. So people only shower when it rains—which is not very frequent.”
 |
Christina Waksmunski |
Waksmunski, was in Haiti last March with about fifteen other group members of Project Haiti, an organization that formed in the mid-1990s by the Penn State Catholic Community (PSCC) and Father Fred Byrne, who was the director of the campus ministry at that time. Wanting to become more involved in Third World peace and justice issues and with the Haitian “boat people” in the news, Father Fred sought to form a relationship between PSCC and a college in Haiti. He found the sisters of Carmelite Community of the Word, an Altoona-Johnstown diocese, which had a “twin” religious community in Pandiassou, Haiti, the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Incarnation. When he traveled there in 1995, he was encouraged by the founder of the Little Sisters to bring students and stay at the sisters' retreat center. One year later, the first group of about twenty students made the trek to Haiti during the University's spring break—and it's been going strong ever since.
Although the Penn State students know beforehand the kind of poverty that exists in Haiti, Waksmunski says she still wasn't prepared.
“The moment you step outside the airport, there's a mob of people—because they all know that foreigners have arrived,” she says. “They try to carry your bags or do anything in the hope that you'll give them some money. Everywhere you go people congregate around, asking for money.”
And then there was the car ride from Port-au-Prince to Pandiassou, a small rural village in the central plateau region, that lasted six hours over unpaved roads.
“There are no traffic laws and everyone drives super fast,” she says. “There are emaciated animals everywhere—pigs, goats, dogs—just walking down the street.”
The students live in one big room at the mission and had access to an outdoor toilet, one of the few in the country.
The students worked at a local orphanage and a medical clinic. They help organize supplies, work in the kitchen, and play with the children, among other activities. The sisters stress to the community that the students are instructed not to give hand-outs, and that to receive help, Haitians who live nearby are expected to perform some type of work. Waksmunski particularly enjoyed working and playing with the children, many of whom had never seen a white person before.
“The children at the orphanages wear uniforms but the others just run around naked since they barely have any clothes,” she says. “The people live in shacks, with rooms that are no bigger than four feet by four feet.”
A psychology major, Waksmunski had always known she wanted to help people, but worried that unless she studied pre-med or nursing, if she could make much of a difference. When she visited Dr. Paul Farmer's hospital Haiti, she was quickly dispelled of that notion.
“The director there made it very clear that psychologists were very much needed,” she explains. “So many people suffer from psychological problems due to their hardships such as violence and corruption throughout the country, living in extreme poverty, and losing children to disease.”
Project Haiti raises money all year round to donate to the organizations in Haiti and each person is expected to pay their own costs for the trip. Most people do this, says Waksmunski, by speaking at their churches at home or asking relatives for money. Last year the students donated around $13,000 to the Little Brothers, Little Sisters, the orphanage, and Partners in Health, a nonprofit medical assistance organization in Latin America, the Caribbean, Russia, the United States, and rural Haiti. Waksmunski has planned and worked at special dinners, sold programs at football games, worked at flower sales in the HUB, gone canning and helped out at a bake sale. Currently, she is organizing a way to ask for donations from Project Haiti alumni, many of whom email her, asking if there is anything they can continue to do to help.
Waksmunski says that although people in Haiti desperately need this help, they have an amazingly positive outlook that undoubtedly has helped them to survive.
“If you ask how they are, they have a saying that translates to ‘I'm no worse,' or ‘We're still here,'” she says. “They never lose their hope.”