At least three groups of Lincoln County residents are working to help the earthquake victims in Haiti.
Newcastle’s St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is partnering with neighboring St. Patrick’s Catholic Church and five other churches to host a fundraising dinner to help feed earthquake victims who have fled to a town called Gros Morne in the northwestern mountains of Haiti.
St. Andrew’s parishioners Frazier and Susan Meade, both longtime supporters of the tiny Caribbean nation, said there is a small hospital in the town. As many as 12,000 victims have sought refuge there, said Frazier.
“We are collecting money to help feed the hungry and to help fund athletic programs for the children,” he said.
As schools there are closed, officials are trying to help occupy the children’s time with the athletic program, he said.
The Newcastle dinner, featuring Haitian food and music, is at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 12.
Tickets for the dinner are on sale at the Maine Coast Book Shop and at St. Andrew’s Church. Tickets for adults are $25 while children and youths under age 18 are $15.
In Jefferson, Terry Johnston of Broken Acres Farm, and three other ladies have recently returned from Haiti where they spent nine days working in a village named Terrier Rouge where some Maine residents, including those from the Somerville Baptist Church, have been funding school programs.
Other Lincoln County residents on the Haiti trip were Hannah Koski of Newcastle, Helen Barnes of Palermo, and Elizabeth Libby of Montville.
“We brought $3500 with us to the town to help fund education projects but ended up using it for food for the hungry,” she said.
“We took more than 200 pounds of rice to a town called Ouvray. We had to use a donkey to carry some of it and walked up a road that was more like a cow path for more than 4.5 miles,” she said.
“There was no damage there, but a lot of people were moaning that they couldn’t get in touch with their relatives,” she said.
At Ouvray the schools are closed. Because the kids eat at school, some of them had not eaten for three days. Some of the children were refugees and had lost their parents.
“They came up there with just the clothes on their back,” she said.
Johnston collects funds to sponsor families through the church L’Eglise Baptiste of Terrier Rough. For $70 a year, she can help educate and feed a grade school child.
While she collects the money and charges no fee for overhead or administration, she urges others who ask how they can help earthquake victims to donate to charities that have little or no overhead and give money directly to the needy.
In Damariscotta, some students from Great Salt Bay Community School are gathering health and hygiene kits for Haiti earthquake survivors.
The products will be donated to the Church World Service, an international humanitarian organization that has provided assistance in Haiti for years.
Participating GSB students are assembling kits that include hand towels, wash clothes, combs, toothbrushes, fingernail clippers, soap and bandages.
Several GSB classes are participating in the project, which will bring the assembled kits to a Portland warehouse on Feb. 9 for shipment to Haiti.
