Thursday, May 27, 2010

Heurese's Survival Saga Continues

 
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If you follow this blog at all, you may know about Heurese.

Heurese is a 31 year old Haitian female that has survived two heart surgeries, abandonment by OSF-SFMC in Peoria, four tropical storms, Haiti's gangs, the UN soldiers and the epic earthquake on January 12, 2010.

Heurese told me today that she was outside her shack in Carrefour talking to a friend the night of the quake. They heard a loud noise and watched shacks as they collapsed. They heard people screaming from everywhere.

Heurese said she knew for sure that it was an earthquake and thought for sure that she lost her two young children as they were headed home from school with her sister Jenny. However, Jenny and the kids showed up two hours later, afraid but not physically hurt.

Her cell phone did not work so Heurese, her kids, Jenny, and another sister Vita huddled in the street and stayed there for four days. Their brother showed up four days later and they all went to their mother's home in Bainet on Haiti's southern peninsula.

Today Heurese is in cosmetology school in P-a-P and sleeps in a pup tent with Jenny.

Heurese has survived again.

Malnutrition in Haiti

 

Eight month old delightful baby boy.

He weighs 10 lbs.
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Friday, May 14, 2010

The Foxes and the Henhouse

I think the foxes are watching the henhouse again.

OSF HealthCare in Peoria is entering a formal discussion with Rockford Health Systems. The idea is to see if OSF Saint Anthony's in Rockford would combine with Rockford Memorial. This would expand OSF's business interests in northern Illinois.

But this move would probably cause OSF to create more scandal in the Catholic world of health care. Will women's "reproductive rights" such as abortion, sterilization, and oral contraceptives be allowed if the two hospitals in Rockford combine?

In the meantime, Catholics in the Peoria and Rockford Dioceses sit on their hands as the hospital's business leaders make the decisons. And where are the Bishops of the Peoria and Rockford Dioceses? Where are the OSF Sisters of the Third Order? When are we going to hear from them?


OSF HealthCare may acquire Rockford Health System

GateHouse News Service

Last update May 13, 2010 @ 05:53 PM

ROCKFORD — Peoria-based OSF HealthCare System wants to acquire Rockford Health System, and officials from the two facilities will spend the next several months researching the deal, according to reports in the Rockford Register Star and Rockford television station WREX-13.

The move would bring together the region’s two oldest hospitals — Rockford Memorial and OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center — and expand OSF’s services in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Officials signed a nonbinding letter of intent this week and cited federal health care reform as one reason for the potential deal. A combined operation would reduce costs and provide more efficiency.

Representatives from the health systems declined today to comment on the deal.

Jim Farrell, senior vice president of communications and marketing for OSF HealthCare System, told the Journal Star that a news conference in scheduled Friday morning in Rockford to discuss the plans.

This would be the sixth attempt at a hospital merger locally in the last 23 years. Rockford Health System went through a similar process starting in 2008 when it announced a potential merger with Oak Brook-based Advocate Health Care, but that deal fell through about four months later.

OSF HealthCare, which is based in Peoria, has seven acute-care facilities in Illinois and Michigan. It also has a long-term care facility and two nursing colleges.

Rockford Health System is comprised of Rockford Memorial Hospital, Rockford Health Physicians, Van Matre HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital, Visiting Nurses Association and the Rockford Memorial Development Foundation.

John Chadwick, general manager of WREX-13, is a member of Rockford Health System’s board of directors. He did not inform the Register Star about the potential acquisition.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Who Can Mock this Church?

May 2, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Who Can Mock This Church?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
JUBA, Sudan

Maybe the Catholic Church should be turned upside down.

Jesus wasn’t known for pontificating from palaces, covering up scandals, or issuing Paleolithic edicts on social issues. Does anyone think he would have protected clergymen who raped children?

Yet if the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests — notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican believes that this newspaper and other news organizations have been unfair and overzealous in excavating the church’s cover-ups of child rape. I see the opposite. No organization has done more to elevate the moral stature of the Catholic Church in the United States than The Boston Globe. Its groundbreaking 2002 coverage of abuse by priests led to reforms and by most accounts a significant reduction in abuse. Catholic kids are safer today not because of the cardinals’ leadership, but because of The Boston Globe’s.

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS. But what about Father Michael Barton, a Catholic priest from Indianapolis? I met Father Michael in the remote village of Nyamlell, 150 miles from any paved road here in southern Sudan. He runs four schools for children who would otherwise go without an education, and his graduates score at the top of statewide examinations.

Father Michael came to southern Sudan in 1978 and chatters fluently in Dinka and other local languages. To keep his schools alive, he persevered through civil war, imprisonment and beatings, and a smorgasbord of disease. “It’s very normal to have malaria,” he said. “Intestinal parasites — that’s just normal.”

Father Michael may be the worst-dressed priest I’ve ever seen — and the noblest.

Anybody scorn him? Anybody think he’s a self-righteous hypocrite?

On the contrary, he would make a great pope.

In the city of Juba, I met Cathy Arata, a nun from New Jersey who spent years working with battered women in Appalachia. Then she moved to El Salvador during the brutal civil war there, putting her life on the line to protect peasants. Two years ago, she came here on behalf of a terrific Catholic project called Solidarity With Southern Sudan.

Sister Cathy and the others in the project have trained 600 schoolteachers. They are fighting hunger not with handouts but with help for villagers to improve agricultural techniques. They are also establishing a school for health workers, with a special focus on midwifery to reduce deaths in childbirth.

At the hospital attached to that school, the surgeon is a nun from Italy. The other doctor is a 72-year-old nun from Rhode Island. Nuns rock.

Sister Cathy would like to see more decentralization in the church, a greater role for women, and more emphasis on public service. She says she worries sometimes that if Jesus returned he would say, “Oh, they got it all wrong!”

She would make a great pope, too.

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church.
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I don't agree with everything written in this article. But I do agree that the "simple" priests and nuns and the "simple" laity of the Church, many living in the developing world, make the Church go.

jc