Priest-doctor with Baltimore background travels from bedside of dying mother to 18 funerals in Haiti

WASHINGTON – Passionist Father Rick Frechette, the Haiti-based director of medical services for Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos International who served at St. Joseph Passionist Monastery Parish in Irvington in the 1970s, was at home in New Jersey with his dying mother when the magnitude 7 earthquake hit Port-au-Prince Jan. 12.

“I was determined to stay with her to the end, especially since my whole adult life I have been far from home in the foreign missions,” he wrote in a letter posted on the Web site of the Passionists’ St. Paul of the Cross province.

But when news of the devastating quake arrived, Gerri Frechette told her son: “You have to go. The problems there are worse than mine.”

After a plane ride from New York to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and a lift in a helicopter belonging to the president of the Dominican Republic, Father Frechette arrived in Port-au-Prince Jan. 14 to a series of what he called “sadnesses” – including 18 funerals that first day.

“One for John who works at our St. Luke program,” he wrote in a Jan. 15 e-mail. “We miss John very much. He often stopped at my door to tell me the milestone of his developing baby, which delighted him no end. … Another was for Johanne’s mother. Johanne is one of the directors of the St. Luke program. All the others were of unknown people who were sadly rotting by the wayside. …

“Other stories of deaths of people who are dear to us keep coming in,” he said.

The St. Luke program operates street schools in the poorest slums of Port-au-Prince.

In an interview with NBC News late Jan. 14, Father Frechette said one of the worst things about celebrating funerals after the earthquake is knowing that the survivors “have to go to the cemetery with their picks and shovels to bury their own dead.”

Father Frechette, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, oversees St. Damien Chateaublond pediatric hospital; the Father Wasson Center, where educational and rehabilitative services are provided at the site of the former pediatric hospital; and St. Helene orphanage, which housed more than 350 children.

Although the orphanage was not significantly damaged, the seven-story Father Wasson Center collapsed and “about half the outer perimeter walls (of St. Damien’s) have fallen,” the priest said.

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