In 2014, when she was in 3^rd grade at the Immaculate Conception Grammar School, Margot Anderson-Song, along with her family and friends, initiated a “Cookies for Haiti” fundraiser. This now annual bake sale has raised over $55,000 for the mission of IC Haiti, and it continues to the present. Generous anonymous donors have often matched the money raised at this fundraiser, encouraging the Cookies for Haiti’s bakers and enhancing IC Haiti’s ability to meet its financial obligations to the school community in Puit Chacha. Thanks to Margot for inspiring so many people to see Haiti and its school children with the eyes of Christ.

On Mother’s Day 2015, Miriam McNabb, then President of IC Haiti, shared these words with parishioners: “I will never forget my first sight of Haitian families attending church, with all of the women and children attired in spotlessly clean and meticulously pressed dresses for the girls or slacks and shirts for the boys – and the slow realization, as I saw the same women washing clothing in the stream or heating charcoal for old box style irons, of the work that this entailed.” Miriam described the plight of women in Haitian society, but she also offered hope with these words: “The best solution is clear – according to the UN Foundation, women are more likely to marry later if they have more years of schooling; children are twice as likely to attend school if their mother has been educated. The Fr. Marc Piche school was built near to a deep water well, so that girls can attend school and still carry water for their families. By providing a meal to the children, we give families more motivation to keep all of their children in school.” The following week, Miriam appealed to the parish as we were short of our budgetary goals due to major snow storms at the time of our two previous quarterly collection dates. She emphasized the importance of continuing to fund a daily hot lunch program as part of our commitment to the school. She wrote, “Feeding the kids in Haiti is much more significant than providing a subsidy or a snack so that they concentrate better. Feeding every child in the school every school day with a nutritionally balanced meal means that none of them display the reddish tinge to their hair that indicates malnutrition, seen throughout the community of Puit Chacha. It means none of them will suffer from protein deficiencies, lack of calcium, or scurvy – diseases that we almost never see here in the US. These kids will develop normally, to their God-given potential, because they are given adequate nutrition. In most of Haiti, that’s not the case.” The parish responded generously to Miriam’s appeals, and that August we not only funded the 2015-16 school budget and hot lunch program but we were also able to fund the dental program at St. Boniface Hospital.