Children in one of the completed schoolhouses in a Friendship Village.

BY MARCY SHORTUSE - Imagine a world where your primary focus is your next meal or, even worse, your child’s next meal. Where the only thing over your head at night is a thin piece of fabric, and your children sleep on the ground. There is no assurance of clean water, of proper clothing or a roof over your head in Haiti, and that is where the Boca Grande branch of Food for the Poor/Hope for Haiti traveled to last month.

Food for the Poor will be giving a presentation on their travels on Thursday, Feb. 21, at 6 p.m., at the Gasparilla Inn Beach Club. The event will kick off the fundraiser for the Boca Grande Friendship Village III in Manneville, Haiti.

Colvin McCrady and his wife, Madelaine, Father Jerome Carosella, George and Lois Castrucci, Ben and Louise Scott and Lou and Corie Fusz left on January 14 for a three-night/four-day excursion to the Boca Grande Friendship Villages I and II, and got a close look at the site where Friendship Village III will be built. In that site there are now a scattering of Haitians living in bare representations of huts. While they have nothing, they are incredibly happy to just be alive, and when the travelers from Boca Grande arrived they greeted them warmly.

“We could have been Santa Claus,” said George Castrucci. “The look on the faces of those children. We had nothing to give them but our presence at that time, but when they surrounded us and sang in Creole, ‘How Great Thou Art’ ... that’s something you don’t ever forget.”

 

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