If you’ve been following along with us as we explore the beautiful community of Bois de Laurence, Haiti, you know that for $10 a month, you can give a child the gift of a year of education at St. Jean Bosco School. However, the impact of $10 per month goes far beyond the child’s education in Haiti.
You may not know it, but it also gives them meals to eat, clothes to wear, provides much-needed extra income to their mothers and fathers, and stimulates the local job market. Your monthly donation, that single sponsorship, contributes to the entire local economy of the village of Bois de Laurence.
Fr. Bavon, administrator and pastor of St. Jean Bosco, has a dream. He hopes to expand St. Jean Bosco to include a high school. There is already a shortage of teachers at the school, building a high school means hiring more faculty. In order to do so, the school needs the financial resources to be able to pay teachers and administrators a just wage. Jobs are incredibly hard to come by in Haiti, and especially in Bois de Laurence. The more students who are sponsored, the easier it will be for the parish community to afford to expand the school’s physical structure, increase enrollment, and thus provide jobs for more Haitians.
In addition to stimulating the economy through jobs, sponsorships also provide families with basic necessities. Many families can’t afford to have more than one meal a day, or pay for new clothes for their growing children. One advantage of schooling is that the children are given uniforms and fed a healthy meal during lunch time. For some children, this is their only meal each day — especially if the rain has ruined the family’s bean or rice crop (which happens a few times per season).
Many parents give almost everything they earn in a year to pay for their child to go to school. With their child’s school tuition sponsored, they will have more money to spend on things like health care and improving their quality of life, which (at least materially speaking) is often far below what they and their children need to thrive.
This Thanksgiving season, as we sit down to enjoy time with our families, please keep our missionaries and their efforts to expand St. Jean Bosco in your prayers. For those of us in the developed world, $10 a month seems like nothing; for a family in Bois de Laurence, it could mean everything.