To Haiti, With Love

[lemonbeam]

When Catholic musician and retreat speaker Sean Forrest used to play his music in New York City and the Hamptons — and Billy Joel was attending his shows along with thousands of young fans — Forrest little expected to find joy in building a dirt road. Or in holding a 4-year-old with an infectious disease.

What he did know back in the mid-1990s was that the life of a secular musician — “hanging out in pubs, being on stage, getting ready to party” — was not fulfilling to his heart.

“I just knew that wasn’t what God was calling me to do,” Forrest said.

What God was calling him to do, Forrest believes, was to convert to Roman Catholicism and found Movin’ With the Spirit, a Catholic nonprofit organization that ministers to teens and families through retreats and music.

Now his ministry, through its Mission Haiti outreach, allows him to help the poorest of the poor in Haiti’s Dandann and Duverger villages.

Mary’s House

Mission Haiti has built a state-of-the-art orphanage for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country’s many children without families. Construction began for “Kay Mari Manman Tout Timoun” (The House of Mary, Mother of All Children) in February 2009, and the first child was welcomed last December.

The efforts of Mission Haiti are especially needed following the devastating earthquake that struck there on Jan. 12. The mission’s two full-time missionaries and two Haitian staff suffered no injuries, even though the roads were impassable and many people in nearby towns died.

In the wake of the disaster, Forrest said, “Our orphanage has also turned out to be a refugee camp. We are housing and feeding about 90 refugees, mostly women and children. We are also bringing more orphans to the village.

“Our teams in Port-au-Prince are out finding people who are homeless. There were already problems there every day — it was already terrible — and now there are [so many more] orphans.”

To meet these new needs, Forrest and team staged a benefit concert in Connecticut on Feb. 20 that brought in about $20,000 for the orphanage. And a group of businessmen in Mexico donated new prefabricated shelters and a school building that can stand up to an earthquake or hurricane.

Forrest has also recorded CDs to raise funds for the orphanage. The proceeds from the sale of “Haiti: I Want to Know What You Know” go to support the building project, which is split into five separate stages.

So, how did this guitar player-turned-humanitarian get started down his new road?

“Eight years ago, when I traveled to Haiti for the first time,” Forrest said, “I went to visit an orphanage, to get a glimpse of how they lived there. It was just terrible — how many kids there were and how few people there were to care for the kids. As hard as they tried, there just were not enough resources.”

So the seed of an idea was planted. But Forrest didn’t realize it until one of the little boys, about 4 years old, walked up to him and reached out. The boy’s arms were covered with medication for a skin disease. The director of the orphanage told Forrest not to pick up the boy, to avoid catching the disease himself.

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