Love Among the Ruins

Caring for orphans, ransoming hostages, burying the dead—it’s all in a day’s work for Father Rick Frechette.
BY Matt Labash
March 1, 2010

Excerpt:
Though it’s taking me a while to reach the land of newly minted loss (in 40 seconds’ time, at least 230,000 Haitians were killed on January 12, one in every 50), I’ve come to Hartford to collect a man who, no matter where he goes, can’t seem to escape the dead. Father Rick, as most call him, has lived in Haiti for 22 years. He is founder and director of the Haitian branch of the international children’s organization Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (“Our Little Brothers and Sisters”).

In the Tabarre section of Port-au-Prince, Frechette runs St. Damien Hospital, Haiti’s only free pediatric hospital. He also oversees an orphanage and the sprawling St. Luke missions, a boots-on-the-ground enterprise responsible for everything from its 18 simple street-schools in a country where fewer than 75 percent of children attend school, to running water and food to the city’s most ferocious slums. the rest

This is a very long account of Fr. Rick and his work among the Haitians, but take time to read it-it is heartbreaking and awesome all at once. -PD

Slideshow can be viewed here.