HOT SPRINGS -- A priest from the small village of Colladere, Haiti, has wrapped up a 10-day visit to Hot Springs on a quest to raise funds for textbooks for his church's school, with the continued help of church members here who have taken his village into their hearts.
Benjamin Van Wagner and Wally Marroy, members of St. Mary's of the Springs Catholic Church, have been working with the Rev. Asmith Servil from St. Andrew's Parish since his arrival Aug. 11, and both have made frequent trips to his impoverished farming community to make what improvements they can to its infrastructure.
"I think Hot Springs is a very nice place," said Servil, who returned to Haiti on Monday. "The thing that gives me emotion is the generosity of the people in Hot Springs."
Servil oversees his church, which serves an area of about 2,000 people, the main school located next to it, and two missions out in the countryside that also have schools, with about 769 students in all three.
"He's been the priest, mayor, police chief, ambulance driver, doctor and tax collector," Marroy said, laughing.
Servil said he has been the priest at Colladere for nearly three years. Born in Maissade, Haiti, Servil said he was 9 years old when he decided he wanted to be a priest and "never changed the idea." He first studied in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, where the only diocese is located, and was ordained in January 2010. He was sent to study philosophy in Rome for three years and then assigned to Colladere.
Van Wagner, director of Information Technology at Oaklawn Racing and Gaming, and Marroy, a retired residential contractor, made the trip to Colladere again May 17 for five days and among other things did an inventory of the books available for the children.
The school next to the church was built in 2004 and the textbooks the students use have not been replaced since then even though enrollment has tripled.
"You basically have one book for every four to five students," Marroy said. "Think about when you went to school and how you would take your books home at night. They can't do that.
"Our focus with [Servil's] trip is raising money to buy books so every child will have a book."
Van Wagner said Servil needs about 5,500 textbooks for different subjects.
"What makes it challenging is they have to be in Haitian Creole," Van Wagner said. "There is a publisher in Port-au-Prince, so the books are there. We just need the money, about $35,000."
They have been going to area churches in Hot Springs and around the state, including visits to Conway, Camden and Magnolia, and have raised about $21,000 so far.
Another project the men accomplished during their last visit was to put the village's wind generator, which had been blown down in a hurricane, back up so it could continue to provide electricity to the church, school, rectory and teacher's dormitory.
"Ben came up with some better mounting brackets, so we think it will stay up this time," Marroy said. "Ben is a very resourceful guy."
When the generator fell the blades were broken, but Van Wagner said he was able to get the company to replace them. He noted that unlike the original blades where it was "plain to see" how to install them, with the new ones "the difference between the front and back was very subtle."
He said he downloaded a photo and "we installed them the way it looked in the photo," but once they got it up the blades were barely spinning. They even tried WD-40 at one point, to no avail.
Van Wagner said Servil, with no engineering or scientific background, told them he thought they had it backward, and it turned out he was right.
"I got the idea to grab it by the tail and spin it around backward to see how that would work," he said. "Well, it went crazy and started spinning as fast as it could go."
While getting the generator back up was a major project, they also had a more basic dilemma to address.
"There were no light bulbs," Van Wagner said.
When he installed the electricity during a previous trip in March 2016, he didn't put in light bulbs. The villagers installed some but they were "basically CFL bulbs" with very low wattage.
"That might be fine for a bedside lamp, but if your ceiling is 14 feet high that's no good," he said.
Haiti's version of a Home Depot store in Port-au-Prince didn't have what they needed, so they brought bulbs from the United States in May.
"I pretty much packed my suitcase with wide-angle, LED floodlight bulbs," he said. "Wally took some too. That ended up being one of the biggest things. Simply installing the right kind of light bulbs worked wonders for the place."
Marroy said there is also discussion about making a medical trip to Colladere later this year.
"They have no medical treatment there," he said. "We had a meeting with some local doctors and are trying to get a group together and do a medical mission. We especially want to be able to treat the children."
State Desk on 08/22/2017