Mission Potluck and Presentation

Mark Hare, mission co-worker in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and his family are coming to St. Mark Presbyterian's Saturday night service at 5:00 on May 28, with a potluck, presentation, and fellowship after the service. Mark is serving with Farmer's Movement of Papaye (MPP), which is a grassroots movement throughout Haiti whose goal is to help small farmers improve their living conditions and increase food production to provide ade-quate nutrition for their families plus generate income by selling excess crops. The mission works in community health program in bateys, company towns where sugarcane workers live. Many of these workers are from Haiti and work long days for low wages and live in conditions that often lack clean water and sanitation services. Jenny Bent, Mark’s wife, helps the Evangelical Dominican Church with their health clinics and with the develop-ment of its program to train health care leaders.

Since 2004 Mark has worked with MPP, helping Haitians learn to grow a lot of food on a small amount of land. Mark’s work in Haiti demands resourcefulness. One of the most popular agricultural techniques he teaches in-volves making miniature garden plots inside discarded auto tires. “In the dry season, there is no rain for five to seven months and people run out of food,” Mark says. “So the tires are a way that they can produce something even during the time when they normally couldn’t.” This and other productive practices developed by MPP helped rural Haitians feed family members and friends who fled to the countryside after the 2010 earthquake devastated Port au Prince.

Mark and Jenny intentionally encourage the participants in their presentations to reflect in new ways on the mission of their church, on their witness to their local communities as well as on their international mission. In part they initiate these dialogues to create points of reference—they want the congregations that support us to understand and to know them better, and they want to know and understand the people of congregations they visit. Mark and Jenny also want participants to see how much there is to learn from the lives of the people in Haiti and the DR—from their faith, their vision and their actions.

Regional context: Haiti became an independent country in the early 19th century when a slave revolt over-threw the French colonial government. It has had a turbulent history marked by military dictatorships, corrup-tion and violence. A massive earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, killing thousands of people and ruining the infrastructure of Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding area. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) continues to help the country rebuild alongside its partner organizations. The PC(USA) has a long and continuing history of participation with Dominican Christians in their ministries of evangelism, health educa-tion and care, development of water sources, academic education and outreach to Haitian immigrants.  Click here for more information on their ministry.