Offering help and hope to Haiti
Lifestyle - Retired teacher Michael Nolan fulfilled a dream in 2015 by volunteering at an orphanage in Haiti. The Ballygar man has now published a book of poems and stories to raise funds for this home and its special-needs facility. He tells STEPHEN GLENNON about Haiti’s troubled past, its current challenges and how this orphanage is a haven for abandoned children in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Essays that lay at the bottom of a dresser drawer for several years have finally been given a home by Ballygar author, Michael Nolan. He has published a collection of stories and poems to raise funds for an orphanage in Haiti where he volunteered in the summer of 2015.
In the book, Memories of Haiti And Other Stories, Michael recounts his time at Our Little Brothers and Sisters Orphanage in Kenscoff and some of his recollections are heart-breaking.
One story tells of a boy who died in hospital and the poignant scene when Westport woman Gena Heraty, who runs the orphanage’s special-needs programme, brought his body back there, to be laid to rest.
“I will never forget that,” says Michael. “We went out to meet them on the way in. Gena got out of the truck and you’d think she was about to collapse. He was about 13 or 14 when he died and all his mates, boys and girls, limped over to hug Gena. It was heart-breaking; it was so moving.”
The boy had suffered from various illnesses since birth and had been abandoned at the age of two. He was one of many being cared for at the orphanage and at Kay Cristine, which was the home for the children with special needs.
“That was really inspirational, that house,” says Michael. “Gena Heraty is an amazing woman who has been there about 25 years. She is part of the management now and is hands-on. She would be over the special needs and Kay Cristine is a special house for them, for those people with various ailments, physical and intellectual.
“They are from the ages of five up to 30 and I used to go there in the evenings for prayers. Gena is an inspirational woman. She would go around tucking the children into bed, hugging them, and making sure they were okay,” recalls Michael, who says that, due to Covid, fundraising for the facility has been difficult. “So, every €5 means a lot to them.”
For children who began their lives in abandonment, this care and love must be a shining beacon in a land that harbours a dark history. The size of Munster, Haiti has a population in excess of 10.5 million people.
Michael notes that the French, who colonised Haiti in the 17th Century, ran “one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies” until the population rebelled in what was the world’s first successful slave revolution, between 1791 and 1804. Haiti gained independence, although it had to pay a war debt to France that crippled the country’s economy.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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