Moment for Mission Archive

Good morning. My name is Christine Gorman and the title of my Moment for Mission this morning is “Good News from Haiti.” Now that might sound a little odd. You might even be thinking to yourself, “Christine, don’t you read the papers? More than 2,000 people have just died in terrible flooding in Haiti. How can you talk of good news from Haiti?”

And of course, you are right. The floods were terrible. To talk of good news from Haiti at a time like this is to risk being labelled an ignorant North American, a hopeless optimist or someone who is willfully blind.

Yet nevertheless, I’d like to talk of good news from Haiti because I think we have become so used to hearing bad news from Haiti that we no longer even believe that good news is possible.

Fortunately for us, God does not follow human rules. God is not limited by bad news. I’m afraid, as followers of Christ, we often forget that. I often forget that. We are so used to living in that Good Friday universe, where Jesus has been crucified, where all seems lost, that we forget we’ve ever even had an Easter, a resurrection, a triumph over death to celebrate.

So, what’s the good news from Haiti? The good news, as was reported in the Miami Herald on March 29 of this year, is that the rate of new HIV infections in Haiti has been cut in half since 1993. And the rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV has been slashed from 22% to 4%. This in a time of coups and floods and social violence and in a country that is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

There is no simple explanation as to why this happened. Start with the Haitian people themselves, who respond as you might expect people anywhere would respond when offered the chance to take effective medicines to treat and control their illnesses. Add to that the involvement of many local Episcopal priests and other people of faith, who have worked hard to build schools, dig wells, provide clinics. Another interesting thing about those priests in Haiti is that they don’t preach against condoms, the way so many church leaders do here in the US and elsewhere.

And so it’s good news that the number of condoms used in Haiti has gone from almost nothing to 15 million in 2003. Add to all this the dedication of many healthcare workers, including, and here I’m going to name just two of the ones I’m aware of: Dr. Jean Pape, a native of Haiti and Dr. Paul Farmer, an American. They have shown you can treat the poorest of the poor with anti-retroviral drugs as long as you make the commitment to education and training and human infrastructure to insure that those drugs are taken at the right time and without fail. Farmer’s clinic lost four ambulances in the recent political upheaval (the ambulances were stolen), but not a single worker failed to show up at work and not a single patient missed a dose of medicine. If you want to learn more about these and other initiatives, please see me at coffee hour.

There is still a lot to be done, of course. 30,000 Haitians still lose their lives each year to HIV/AIDS. 200,000 children will not get their parents back. And HIV/AIDS is just one of the problems that afflicts that country.

What I hope I have done this morning is plant the germ of an idea in your hearts. That the drumbeat of bad news we so often hear isn’t the whole story. That God does not share our sense of helplessness or hopelessness. That in spite of everything, good news is possible. It just sometimes needs a little help, okay maybe a lot of help, in breaking forth.

Let us pray. God, you never give up on us. Teach us not to give up on each other. All this we pray in Jesus name. Amen.