MORE ABOUT HAITI
Sea Crate
Over the years, St. Mary Cathedral has shipped many items
to Pendus. Because Pendus in closer to the north shore of Haiti than to
Port-au-Prince, we found a shipping company in Miami that ships directly to
Port-de-Paix (on the north coast). This accomplishes two major benefits -- 1) it
is much closer to Port-de-Paix (about 24 miles from Pendus) than to
Port-au-Prince (about 120 miles). Therefore, it is much easier to physically get
the shipment from ship to Pendus; and 2) it is much easier to clear customs in
Port-de-Paix than Port-au-Prince and much less likely to have any portion of the
shipment turn up missing!
The two biggest shipments we sent were in the late summer or early fall of 2000
and 2002. Each of these shipments filled an entire sea container -- about the
size of a semi-trailer. The sea container is loaded at the shipping yard and
then lifted by crane onto the ship. The 2000 container had a 5,000-watt
generator, some medical equipment -- such as a pulmonary machine, an EKG machine
and an autoclave, two basketball bank boards with rims and nets, some 40 school
desks we had made and then disassembled and packed individually, many
blankets and several hundred boxes of clothes and shoes for all ages. Two of the
neatest memories of the December 2000 trip involved seeing items sent on this
sea crate once we were in Haiti. The first was seeing a frail elderly woman come
to church in her "new" blue dress that fit her perfectly!. Sister Jackie said
she rarely came because she was so poor she could not afford appropriate clothes
to wear to church! The other was seeing many of the blankets on the beds at
the newly constructed Kay Pov (a home for elderly and neglected folks that
Sister Jackie helped get started in Gros Morne.)
The 2002 shipment sent all the items we needed for our desk and pews project.
Doug Granlund led a group of parishioners that made 120 school desks and 120
church pews (complete with kneelers and a seat-back). Again each one was
individually packaged (if one package was lost, only one desk or pew was lost
instead of one part of many desks or pews). We also sent the jigs needed to help
assemble the desks and pews, some power cords and a couple rechargeable drills.
In addition to the desk and pews project, we also sent 125 gallons of paint,
a set of scaffolding, and picks so
St. Joseph Church could be renovated. Sixty gallons were blue (to match the blue
in the newly remodeled St. Mary Cathedral), 60 gallons were white and 5 gallons
were a primer. There also were several paint brushes and rollers. This shipment
also included 18 computers and a couple printers (for the secretarial school in
Gros Morne), 10 wooden crosses for the classrooms at St. Joseph School, over
5,000 yards of cloth for sewing and several more pieces of medical equipment
including two hospital gurneys and a World War
II army stretcher for the dispensary.
There was so much stuff on this shipment that it took five trips by a big truck
to get all of it from Port-de-Paix to Pendus.
In the fall of 2004, we helped Father Cha Cha purchase a vehicle for St. Louis
de Nord -- his church he got transferred to after Pendus. We filled it with
extra car parts (since it was American made and not Japanese, the parts would be
more difficult to obtain in Haiti), a computer and several smaller items. This
was much easier to get this loaded vehicle to Miami than the two prior shipments
as parishioner Marvin Ros simply drove it from Lafayette to the shipper in Miami
and then flew home.
The last item we have shipped thus far was a 5000-watt Snapper generator (to
replace a prior one that we had sent). We ordered it by phone from a Miami
Snapper dealer who then delivered it directly to the shipping company to have it
taken on its next trip to Port-de-Paix.
Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture. Use the arrows to the left and right of the thumbnails to see more pictures in the gallery.
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