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Ken and Sue Gross hold paintings from Haiti that they display in their Briny Breezes home.

Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Sue Gross looks at the water found in one community in Haiti.

Gross and her husband, Ken, say most people cannot afford

the $30 ceramic filters that would make water safe to drink.

Photo provided

Briny couple makes mission of aiding island

By Janis Fontaine

    Sue and Ken Gross first saw Port-au-Prince on their honeymoon in 1972. They were told not to leave the airport.
    Almost 30 years later, the Briny Breezes couple returned to Haiti on what turned out to be a life-changing mission trip with friends.
    “We were never the same again,” Sue Gross recalls.
    The couple founded the Haiti Lutheran Mission Project and have been working on projects in Haiti for 15 years, making nearly 50 trips over that time. They’ve taken medical and dental teams, and done eyeglass clinics. They built a school with construction teams from the United States.

Children gather at a mission in Haiti.

    They raise money to support an orphanage and feed 200 children in a school in Dame Marie one meal a day of beans and rice.
    “Now we’re making microloans,” Sue Gross says. Amounts are small, about $200, but used correctly, these tiny loans can reap big benefits.
    Some recipients buy rice in bulk and resell it in portions at the market. Some buy goats which they raise for milk that they can sell. A few can buy motorcycles and start their own taxi service, but this privilege often goes to the pastor or teacher who is working (and paid only sporadically) in the community.
    The Grosses work in an area called Jeremie, which has tiny clearings in a landscape of rubble and rock, dead gray dirt in which nothing can grow and that leaves everything covered with dust when it’s dry and mud when it’s not. People call piles of sticks “home.”
    They save their best dress for church, and the women prize their Sunday hats above almost all of their possessions. “Church is hope,” Sue says.
    There’s the story of the mud cookies. Most people don’t really believe that anyone would feed mud to a child, but desperate to fill her child’s empty belly, a mother can do strange things. Like beg a stranger to take her child — not because she doesn’t love her child, but because she does. “That was hard to witness,” Sue says.

The terrain is dusty when it’s dry, muddy when it’s wet.

Photos provided

    “At first, it’s shocking,” Sue admits, to see such overwhelming poverty. Everywhere you look, there is need. Sue finds peace within her faith: “We pray harder.”
    Ken and Sue have built a relationship with the people and with Father Isaac Jacquet, who has 20 tiny churches scattered about in the mountains. They’ve built a school, and through the school they feed children a single meal each day of beans and rice. It’s probably the only meal they’ll have.
    One boy found a way to share his food with another child, not a student, by feeding him through a hole in the fence.
The orphanage is a place for hope to begin, but there’s not enough room for all the children. Many want to get in, yet there’s no place to put them.
    School and education is another way, but there are few schools and few teachers willing to live in the conditions required.
    “A fair number who come (to the U.S.) to be educated return to help their people,” Ken says.
    But the problems are so broad. Everyone knows the “teach a man to fish” parable. But how do you teach a man who doesn’t have a pole, a line, a hook or bait and has no way of getting one?
    Throughout Haiti, devastation still reigns from the 2010 earthquake. The most basic needs — food, water and shelter — are still out of reach for so many people.
    Their water source and their laundry is a dirty river.
    Sue and Ken Gross have been raising money to buy inexpensive, reusable home water filters to clean the water. The cost is about $30; but that’s a fortune to someone who makes $1.25 for a day’s work, if he or she can find it.
    On the last trip, Sue Gross took dresses for the little girls made by the ladies of Briny Breezes Hobby Club. She had 46 dresses, but “There were about 200 kids and I didn’t have enough! The ladies vowed to make twice as many dresses this year, and they’ll also make some shorts for the boys.” One boy received a single pair of underpants but he was happy to have them.
Volunteers are even happier, Sue notes. “They come back more changed than those they sought to help,” she says. “It’s a privilege.”
    “When God gives you a talent, you have to give it back,” Ken says. “Everyone brings their own talent to the table, and Sue’s talent is leading the teams.”
    Now the Grosses are officially full-time residents of Briny Breezes, leaving behind the frozen Chicago winters. They’ll continue to take groups to Haiti, which is a lot easier from Florida, as long as there is a need.
    “We do get so much more out of it,” Sue Gross says. “For anyone who wants to help, there’s always something you can do.
    “It’s all important.”

Water and the world

• More than 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water. 
• An estimated 25,000 people die every day from the lack of clean water and proper sanitation. That’s one person every 3.45 seconds.
• One-sixth of the world’s population is ‘water-stressed.’
• Nearly 80 percent of all disease in the world stems from unclean water and poor sanitation.

Haiti facts

Population: 10.6 million
4.5 million lack access to safe water
7.6 million lack access to improved sanitation
58 percent of the total population lives on less than $1.25 per day
80 percent of people live below the poverty line
SOURCE: waterprojectsinternational.org

What you can do

Five suggestions from www.haitilutheran.org:
    1. Buy a ceramic water filter that will provide clean water to a family of six people for five years. These sustainable filters meet or exceed the World Health Organization’s standards for water filters at an astonishing 99.999 percent pure. Cost? $30.
    2. Pay a teacher’s salary. Haiti’s Lutheran schoolteachers earn $50 a month but do not get paid regularly. They often must leave their teaching jobs to find other employment so they can feed their families. Without teachers, the schools close and the feeding program stops.
    3. Give the gift of sight. Buy eyeglasses or sponsor an eyeglass clinic.
    4. Make dresses or shorts and shirts for the orphans.
    5. Join a missionary trip. Volunteers pay their own way. It costs about $2,000 per person for eight days, which includes airfare, meals and transportation.