General News and Announcements

January 5, 2012

New schools are built with United Church support

The United Church of Canada works with two key partners in Haiti: the Methodist Church of Haiti (ÉMH) and the Karl Lévêque Cultural Institute (ICKL). We have worked alongside the Methodist Church for more than 45 years and with ICKL for almost 20 years. These two organizations have placed a priority on education.

With the generous financial support of United Church people to the 2010 Haiti earthquake appeal, partners have been building schools—nine Methodist schools and two rural community schools supported by ICKL.

By September 2011, construction was underway at six Methodist schools, part of a national network of more than 100 Methodist schools that are also supported by Methodists in the United States and Great Britain. Two of the schools were ready by the time the new school year started in October. Several more were expected to be ready in early 2012, and construction was expected to begin at three more schools in 2012. Photos of the Methodist school construction are posted on the United Church’s Global Partners photo site.

Workers complete construction of a community school at Codtrelle in southern Haiti.

With the United Church as the largest single donor, ICKL was completing work on a school in Codtrelle, a village in the municipality of Marigot (near Jacmel on the south coast). The old two-room, thatch-roofed school has been replaced by a concrete-block four-room school that will serve children from pre-school through Grade Six. More photos of the construction in Codtrelle are posted on the Global Partners photo site.

Your contributions to the Mission and Service Fund support the core work of both groups: the Methodist Church's various ministries and ICKL's community development efforts in rural Haiti. Support for school reconstruction is drawn partly from the church's 2009 Haiti emergency fund and partly from the more recent Extra Measures Access to Education campaign.

With schools, you build communities, Haitians often say. Churches run about 80 percent of the schools in Haiti. The state maintains schools for about 15 percent of students, but the country's extreme poverty means that 500,000 children in Haiti cannot go to school at all. And the Haitian government is also wrestling with the problem of nearly 600,000 people who are living in tents in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The United Church has also supported the Methodist Church's scholarship fund to offset school fees, and helped to rebuild the church's printing press and publication capacity.

In addition to our core work in Haiti, we have been able to provide more than $3 million for relief and rebuilding in the areas affected by the January 2010 earthquake. Most contributions to the United Church's Haiti fund were used in the immediate relief phase and channelled through the global ACT Alliance and its members. Any remaining funds will be distributed in 2012.

The church has also supported the work in Haiti of the World Association for Christian Communication (Alterpresse, an alternative communications media project) and Agricultural Missions (networks of farmers in the central Artibonite Valley).