PRIEST-TURNED-DOCTOR HELPS THE POOR IN HAITI
(Idaho Statesman) - By Time Woodward
The column was originally published on Oct. 9, 2006. It was requested by Debbie Hamilton of the Saint Alphonsus Foundation because Father Rick is coming from Haiti to attend the Project Haiti dinner on Sept. 16 in the Saint Al’s McCleary Auditorium.Tickets are $100 per person. For more information, contact Hamilton at (208) 367-3997 or debbhami@sarmc.org.
When Father Rick Frechette decided he couldn’t do enough for the children of Haiti as a priest, he became a doctor. He did it studying by candlelight during Haiti’s nightly blackouts.
Father Rick, as he’s known to just about everyone, has devoted his life to helping the poor in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. I interviewed him five years ago when he was here to raise money through Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center’s Project Haiti. I came away wondering where they handed out the sainthood nominations.
Instead of the comfortable life he could have had as the product of a well-to-do Connecticut family, he chose to become a priest and devote his life to helping children in a country where half of them starve or die of diseases by age 5. He co-founded a hospital and helped start an orphanage and a school for them. With help from St. Al’s, he’s led an effort to build a larger, more modern hospital that will be dedicated Dec. 4 in the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince. He and his co-workers are changing the way health care is delivered in Haiti.
“When I first came (in 1987), I wanted to build Noah’s ark and put everybody in it,” he said over breakfast during a Boise fundraising trip last month. “Now we’re moving away from that. We’re raising people to higher ground.”
Father Rick and his co-workers are doing that by improving sanitation, vaccinating children, expanding outpatient facilities, providing food and medicine in homes and teaching parents ways to help keep their children healthy. The idea is to keep kids out of the hospital and families intact.
“We’re trying to change a system in which parents give up children because they can’t take care of them,” said Gena Heraty, who came from Ireland in 1993 to work with Father Rick. “And we’re seeing improvement. We see more mothers caring for their children. They have hope now.”
For those who do have to be hospitalized, care continues to improve. St. Al’s has had a lot to do with that. Its medical missions to Haiti, however, have been suspended for three years. Never a bastion of stability, the island today may be a bigger mess than ever.
Corruption, armed robberies, gang violence, mobs, murder: Haiti has it all. The newest scourge: an estimated six to 12 kidnappings a day.
No one who knows him was surprised when Father Rick added hostage negotiator to his list of titles. He goes up against some of the toughest thugs on the island and, more often than not, completely disarms them. His explanation for that is that he has credibility because the kidnappers are poor and know he has the interests of the poor at heart.
He also knows how to talk to them. Most of the official negotiators don’t even speak Creole, the dominant language.
IMPORTANT ASSETS
But I’m guessing there’s more to it than that, namely the power of consummate virtue. Father Rick is one of those rare people we instinctively recognize as being made of better stuff. He’s also smart, gutsy, almost diabolically winning. With all the guns in Haiti on my side, I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of an argument with him. Consider the following story:
Gang members had kidnapped a priest and a driver for a private charity. Scouts working for Father Rick found the car they used, the key to identifying the gang responsible. When one of his helpers, a street-smart Haitian named Raphael Lovigene (now studying in Boise to become an EMT), wasn’t able to negotiate a release, Father Rick went himself.
“I stayed in their faces from 4 in the afternoon till 11:30 at night,” he said. “And believe me, it’s not pretty being in the slums after sunset.”
The kidnappers took him to an abandoned alley to see the hostages. Unable to talk them down on the ransom, Father Rick left to get help from an unlikely ally — the most notorious gangster on the island.
“This guy is Caligula!” he said. “I got him to badger the price down to $600. He called them and said that if they didn’t come down, he’d cut them to pieces with machetes.”
Understandably reluctant to return alone, Father Rick talked Caligula into going with him. He also confessed that he didn’t have $600 and his car was out of gas. By the time it was over, he’d gotten the baddest guy on the island to lower the ransom, loan him the ransom money, fill his gas tank, drive him to the pickup point and be his bodyguard.
He laughs when he tells the story but underscores its seriousness by saying, “You have to be iron. You can’t show any weakness.”
As if serving his flock as a priest and a doctor weren’t enough, he’s risking his life to save people he sometimes doesn’t even know.
At a time when the image of priests is tainted by the transgressions of some, Father Rick is proof that at least a few are capable of transcendent goodness.
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