But this morning he is not going to tend the rocky earth. He is going to the altar. The hoe is his thank offering, his way of celebrating the Mesi Bondye (“Thanks be to God”) festival in the village of Cange — once one of Haiti’s poorest, most neglected areas.

This year’s festival coincides with the 25th anniversary of Episcopal presence in the village, a presence that has brought hope and human services to thousands of impoverished rural Haitians. It began with the vision of the Rev. Fritz Lafontant, whose pastoral service in the Diocese of Haiti is in its 54th year.

Pè Fritz, as he is known, first arrived in the Central Plateau in the 1960s, centering his pastoral work in the city of Mirebalais. He soon was introduced to rural communities ravaged by poverty and hunger north of the city.

The communities’ struggles were exacerbated by the completion of the Peligre hydroelectric dam, built along the Artibonite River in mid-century with American funds and oversight. Though hailed as a major technological advancement for rural Haiti, it brought neither electricity nor irrigation to the region’s poor.

With the dam’s opening, the region’s villages essentially became makeshift refugee communities. Most families retreated to the steep, denuded hillsides encircling the flooded valley. As severe poverty, political instability and disease deepened, Lafontant was determined to sustain and extend Episcopal commitment to these communities.

Practical solidarity

In the early 1980s, Lafontant presided over the first confirmation in Cange in a small room with a leaky thatched roof. Few confirmands had shoes or clean clothes. Many, Lafontant recalls, “were malnourished and covered with scabies.”

Today, Cange is an epicenter of health and educational services in central Haiti. It is a model of what practical solidarity can accomplish in service to the poorest of the poor.

The Cange partnership has many components, but two of its most central advocates have been the Diocese of Upper South Carolina and Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian sister organization of the Boston-based public health institution Partners in Health (http://www.pih.org/).

Under the leadership of the now retired Bishop William Arthur Beckham, in the late 1970s Upper South Carolina formed a companion diocese relationship with Haiti, with particular commitment to Lafontant and Cange.

Emphasizing education and health, several parishes united to work toward building and sustaining key infrastructure for the Cange region — from scratch. The long-term companionship’s achievements include: an extensive potable water system that runs on free-powered turbine technology (now serving nearly 5,000 people); a primary and secondary school with more than 1,200 students (which posted the best national test grades in central Haiti in 2004); a dental clinic; a sewing and crafts center; an agricultural initiative; and countless medical mission trips.

In 2003, the diocese unveiled an “Adopt a Village” initiative designed to enhance educational services in 12 of the area’s main villages. A third resource for transformation for Cange was Dr. Paul Farmer, whose life and work are the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder’s recent book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Farmer’s charisma and unswerving commitment to providing comprehensive health-care services for rural Haitians led to the creation of Partners in Health and its Haitian counterpart Zanmi Lasante, which together have built a public-health movement to provide “a preferential option for the poor in the domain of health care.”

A large socio-medical complex now dominates Cange, offering wide-reaching programs to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, a women’s health center, surgery facilities, a dental and eye clinic and an extensive pediatric ward. Poverty-stricken villages now have access to arguably the best health-care system in Haiti. Cange’s hospital attracts patients from all over the country.

Long-term obligation

The engineers of hope in Cange say Zanmi Lasante and its Episcopal partners have cultivated a  perspective of long-term moral obligation to the poor. In rural Haiti, suffering often is summed up in the proverb: Deyè mòn se mòn. There are mountains beyond mountains. The logic of serving the Haitian poor must run counter to this, suggests Marie Flore Chipps, daughter of Lafontant and administrator for Zanmi Lasante: “We believe that with faith, will and determination, we can indeed move mountains.”

Farmer quickly adds that much moving remains to be done. “After a quarter of a century of taking seriously that admonition that ‘faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead’ (James 2:17), the people of Cange can point with pride to a strong base from which to launch efforts far beyond the confines of this parish.”

At the Mesi Bondye festival this year, the people of Cange struggle against the mountains with gifts. During the offertory, the center aisle is crowded with inhabitants swaying toward the altar with chickens, goats, bunches of plantain and bananas, and other produce. Farmers and builders bring the tools of their trade, led by the elderly man in his pressed brown shirt.

After the Eucharist, a mother rises to bear witness to the transformation of her son’s health — calling forth the doctor whose constant care helped her son walk again. The service unfolds as a pageant of giving and thanksgiving, propelling the community forward for the next 25 years.

Cange’s future, says Jackie Williams — parishioner of Christ Church in Greenville, S.C., and founder of Cange’s sewing and art center — will continue to fall within the valence of her diocese’s service. “There is nothing on earth the Episcopal Church does that is so fine as the work in Haiti.”