Summer 2024

At our outpatient clinic in Gatineau, we often hear stories from our patients that break our hearts and cause us to get on our knees in prayer to the Lord. A woman recently told me that she had escaped from Port-au-Prince few weeks ago as gangs attacked and burned her house.

She was at a local market at the time and, as she was making her way back home, neighbors stopped her and told her to turn around because her house was on fire. She tried to push through them because she had left her 20 year old daughter and 14 year old son at home. As they held her back, they gave her this news: Her daughter had been outside on the street at the time of the attack and she had escaped as the gangs came into the neighborhood but her son had been shot and killed as he ran from the house. The gang members were still there and it was too dangerous for her to try to retrieve his body. She never saw him again and she and her daughter fled to family outside Jérémie.

I sat and listened to this tragic story, reflecting with her back to the time of the Port-au-Prince earthquake in 2010, when many families were unable to recover the bodies of loved ones who had died. She nodded her head and said, “I lost one of my daughters in that earthquake. She was working in the home of a family when it happened and the whole building collapsed. I never saw or heard from her again.” Two tragedies in one lifetime. It seems almost too much to bear, yet the woman was stoic and strong.