Our Twinned Parish:
St. Jude in Baptiste Haiti
Home Creole Proverbs Creole Pronunciation Twinning Guidelines
What Kind of Relationship?  How Do We Form It?
Some Suggestions:
The Diocese Twinning Guidelines say "The American approach of going in with lots of money is not what they need and does not work.  The people of Haiti know what they need.  We need to listen to them and hear."  The guidelines also recommend visits to the parish in Haiti--at least by our parish twinning coordinators--and visits by our Haitian parishioners to Holy Family.  But the guidelines also suggest creative projects that provide vehicles for the mutual sharing of gifts.  How about some of these ideas, provided here just to get a discussion started:
  • Letter writing between people of each parish--especially the children.  Email, if we can establish such contact with our twinning parishioners.
  • Crafts?  We have an active crafts program in our J.O.Y. group.  Could they coordinate a children's auxiliary who could create hand-made things that could be used in the schools--creative book covers for donated books, decorated pencils, maybe?  And, since we're not supposed to just go in with lots of money, maybe crafts created by our St. Jude Baptiste parishioners could be sold in our book store and/or from this web site.  Would things like dolls, baskets, woven reed trays and dishes, cookbooks with yummy local recipes, hand-made clothing and jewelry be big sellers?  Any profits could be used to support the parish, school, medical resources, or whatever it is that they tell us is really needed.
  • Songs?  Could the various Holy Family parish choirs, teen ensemble and interested parish groups record their favorite songs of worship and periodically send tapes to St. Jude?  Might such recordings from Haiti be wonderful items for us to enjoy listening to, learn to sing along with and sell in the bookstore and on the web site?
  • Language tapes?  How about our children donating story books and including with each book a tape of the donating child reading the book?  How about folks from Haiti telling us their folk tales in Creole with translations in English so we can learn to speak their dialect of Creole?
  • Newsletter?  Once we get both parish's contact people in frequent communication with each other, we could create a newsletter like the one Virginia Tech's Neuman Community does for their Matabonite community to keep us all informed of events and progress towards building our relationship.
  • Now it's your turn.  Any ideas?  Please post them in the disucussion forum so we all can see and be inspired by them.  Or, feel free to send them directly to the webminister.