An open door to Port-au-Prince's deaf community has given Florida Baptist relief workers a vision to seek out clusters of forgotten people left stranded by the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Members of Haiti's deaf community in Port-au-Prince wait to receive food and medical treatment at the Florida Baptist Mission House.
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As they have found ways to minister to the deaf, leaders of the Confraternité Missionaire Baptiste d'Haiti convention "opened their eyes to a community of people that their eyes were blinded to," said Dennis Wilbanks, partnership missions associate director for the Florida Baptist Convention, which has had a 15-year relationship with the CMBH.
The outreach to the deaf has sparked a concern "about the other clusters of forgotten people" in Haiti, Wilbanks said.
Approximately 1,000 deaf people in the Port-au-Prince area have had little food and no medical attention since the earthquake shook the capital city region.
Schools for the deaf, a source of networking as well as education, were destroyed by the quake, giving deaf Haitians no place to meet to communicate with other deaf people.
"While there have been food distributions in their communities, they often learn of it too late due to their disability," Wilbanks said.
Wilbanks learned of the problem in a meeting with Marlene Jean Pierre, a representative of the deaf community in Haiti. He promised her a food distribution exclusively for the deaf. "Together we developed a plan," he said.
From April 28 through May 1, a Florida Baptist mission house in Port-au-Prince was set up for food distribution and a medical clinic. On May 2, a worship service was held there for members of the deaf community.
Leaders of the deaf community came to the mission house prior to the distribution to put together bags of food to be distributed, which included beans, rice, oil and canned salmon.
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SOURCE: Baptist Press
Meredith Hays is an intern with the Florida Baptist Convention
