Addie Bohler says he and his peers at Fieldcrest School District have lived “a perfect day.”
In an e-mail message, the seventh-grader from the middle school in Wenona recalled the words of a woman who works with the Haitian Christian Project in South Carolina.
“One thing she said that I will never forget is: ‘You haven’t lived a perfect day until you’ve done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.’ And that’s what our district has done, so we have lived our perfect day!”
On Monday, the district sent off a check for $5,273.90 to the Haitian Christian Project to help Val’s Orphanage in Gressier that was demolished in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
“We had donations from Peoria, Rhode Island, and even the Roanoke-Benson student council presented us with a $600 check,” said Dorrene Sokn, principal of Fieldcrest Elementary School South.
“Some people just drove over to drop off a donation after they heard about it or read about it in the newspaper,” Sokn said.
Even before the earthquake hit the poverty-stricken island, the third-grade students of Liz Stack and Debbie Cargill decided to emulate their counterparts at Wenona by foregoing their usual year-end gift exchange. They decided to send gifts to the orphanage in Haiti instead.
The gifts were delivered by a group of volunteers from the project who were scheduled to conduct a medical mission to that impoverished island in January. On that day, Jan. 12 , when the children received the gifts, they were excited and asked to skip their afternoon nap and be allowed to play. As a result, they were outside the building when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake occurred.
The only building that survived was the chicken coop, which was cleaned up and is now the orphans’ temporary residence.
This month, all four buildings of the school district engaged in fundraising for Val’s Orphanage. Sokn said she does not know how much it costs to rebuild the orphanage except that it costs a dollar a brick.
To find out more about the project, go to haitianchristianprojects.org.
Catharine Schaidle can be reached at 686-3290 or [email protected].
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