- ATD Fourth World

Greetings to All, Dear Friends,

We wanted to tell you that your words of friendship and your gestures of solidarity have been well-received. You have built a bridge between Haiti and the rest of the world; you have saved us from feelings of abandonment and despair. You were there for us, so we were not alone.

Following the initial news, we remained silent without any direct response to your numerous letters. The silence was a way, and an urgent need, to soothe our fears, to comprehend the new dimensions of everyday life for a survivor, to internalize with consideration your messages of friendship, letting them penetrate with gentleness like a soothing balm, to prolong your gestures of solidarity for contacting the most isolated families in the areas of destitution.

United in this movement, here and beyond, that molded us into a continuous search for the meaning of dignity and of fraternity, we set out in search of partnerships to combine the support efforts to those we knew were already so vulnerable before the disaster.

Today, we would like to say “Thank You”… not simply as a word of acknowledgement.

We would like to say that we will never know exactly to what degree you were affected, wherever you were, by what we were living through here, how much you trembled with fear, and how afterward with sincere compassion, you combined forces to bring your support to the people of Haiti and to all of those who lived through this incredible experience.

Today, we would like to say that our courage that you say you admire is rising in us like the vigor of our collective history, the history of the courage of humanity that has known so many wounds, and at the heart of this history, the suffering and resistance of the poorest that Father Joseph as a guide helped us to understand, respect, and love. This present courage is like the echo of our own tenacity in an everyday life where the destitution and the solitude blazon by hardships of humiliation and often moments of discouragement remain too often ignored, an everyday life that would be intolerable without the hope of justice and fraternity.

We are saying “Thank You” as a renewed sense of reciprocity.

To tell you that we are bound differently and more tightly than by the past, united in this vibrant consciousness that we must contribute toward transforming the tragedy into an allegory of humanity moving toward progress and world peace, a peace constructed on mutual knowledge, molded in the merging of equals.

Today, Haiti is the symbolic land of “We the People of United Nations” where so much effort for rethinking coexistence leading to progress and to well-being urges us to strongly unite solidarity and responsibility like the two facets of all projects of human development.

The world was shaken but this will not be in vain, if we search together to show the generous strength of a people who cannot die, the confidence entrenched in our experience that everyone, unified in this combat for the dignity of all, is indispensable. Therein lies the deep meaning of life, the ideal of coexistence expressed publicly in the universal declaration of the rights of man.

In conclusion, let’s continue to share our battles, our efforts, our thoughts, our actions, our doubts, and our successes to nourish our common hopes.

Jacqueline Plaisir and David Lockwood, volunteers – Team Haiti