Angels in Haiti
Last week, during a post-game interview after a physical game with the Boston Celtics, Joakim Noah of the Chicago Bulls sent his thoughts and prayers to the people of Haiti. Along with other NBA players, like Alonzo Mourning and Samuel Dalembert, and other sports, hollywood, and political celebrities have joined hands in helping the victims of this recent tragedy to the already suffering nation, and help us all realize what life is truly about. Unfortunately, fanatical comments, like such made by Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh, have made more headlines than the good-doers. The media is also filled with images of the distruction, the dead, and the dying living us with nothing to the imagination and the victims no sense of respect or privacy.
But amidst all of this catastrophe, there many acts of humanity that were left unnoticed by the press. Everywere in the country, Haitians and other volunteers have come together to help fellow victims and pick up whatever there is left. Many of those who perished were volunteers who had done heroic acts of kindness for the impoverished country.
I pray for those who were victims and heroes, and for the volunteers, that they may be provided with the basic needs, manpower, comfort, and hope. God bless Haiti.
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MrNonsense is Jesse. He was born and raised by two solid parents in Tondo, Manila. He came to Iowa when he was 17 and is now raising a family in Washington, where a group of Filipinos adopted them as their own.
Mr. Nonsense can often be seen in the Tacoma-Seattle area carrying a camcorder, accompanied by his two sons and his personal chauffeur, his wife. He uses his Tondo upbringing to nurture his children and to survive in a mental institution, where he currently works. He enjoys basketball, cooking, singing, cartooning, producing short movies, and making his own furniture out of junked wood because he's so cheap. He is a self-proclaimed "Man of the House,"...when his wife is not home.
Nice one Jesse.
I hope the Haiti folks will be able to recover from this tragedy. Gawd, I pity them all.
we have been here many times before. and there always acts that would touch us and lessons that we’d learn. haiti is now doing us all a favor by reminding us how precious each day is and how people can unite to achive a common noble cause.
gawd! you should have seen this boy pulled out from the rubbles, 8 days na ba? susko! naiyak ata ako dun! buhay sya!
buti na lang eh di ko napanood…iiyak lang ako. i have made a point, since ondoy and maguindanao, of not watching tradegies like these. i, as a father, have to keep a positive outlook.
Scary talaga what happened in Haiti. Naiiyak pa rin ako kapag nakikita yung image ng bata.
Pray na lang natin the souls of the faithful departed.
scary talaga…pero nakakailang yung image ng legs mo. hindi tuloy ako makapagdasal sa kakatingin…kelangan ko ay mangumpisal!
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Let us all pray that Haiti can recover from this tragedy.
Let us also pray for all the people who were trapped inside the collapsed concrete. Sana matagpuan silang buhay…
either way…kailangan ng closure ang mga pamilya…matagpuan sana soon…
all pinoys can offer is the positive outlook.. ang pinoy, sanay ngumiti sa gitna ng trahedya..
i do hope haiti would recover just like what pinoys always do.
yes, promking, we all have been here before. and we have to put our trust to the Lord and each other
Mourners remember ‘Saint Molly’
The News Tribune 1/21/10
The easy way to think of Molly Mackenzie Hightower is as a saint, her uncle told some 600 mourners at her funeral Mass on Wednesday in Lakewood.
But Molly was complex, said the Rev. Craig Hightower. She was smart, funny, tough, gentle, fierce, loving and subject to the same tensions any 22-year-old woman might experience.
Eight days after she and an estimated 200,000 others died in the earthquake that demolished Haiti, family and friends celebrated Molly Hightower’s life.
They came early to St. John Bosco Catholic Church. They filled the nave, then two auxiliary spaces. The mourners were asked to squeeze together to make more room in the pews. And still it was standing room only.
Molly’s friends from schools in Port Orchard, Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma and the University of Portland were there, along with family friends, rows of relatives and people who never met her.
Monique LeTourneau was one of them.
“I’ve been really touched by her story,” said the Washington State University graduate who followed news reports about the search for Molly in the rubble of a collapsed day center for orphans.
Molly, a volunteer for Friends of the Orphans, lived in the building where she gave physical therapy to disabled children. She was six months into her yearlong commitment and had posted her thoughts and photos online at mollyinhaiti.blogspot.com.
She headlined the blog with a quote from “Rent,” the musical: “525,600 Minutes. How do you measure a year?”
The quote motivated LeTourneau, a Tacoma resident.
“If you had one more year of your life, what would you do?” she asked. “That inspires me to do something of value.”
In a processional to Wednesday’s Mass, Molly’s great uncle and her uncle led more than a dozen Jesuit priests from Bellarmine to the front of the church. The Rev. Oliver Lee Hightower is the St. John Bosco parish priest. Craig Hightower is director of ministry at Gonzaga University in Spokane. He delivered Molly’s homily.
“Love colored everything she did,” he said.
An athlete, a triple major in college and a beautiful woman, Molly could have done anything she wanted, he said. So she worked for a year with some of the poorest children on the planet.
“She looked into their eyes, she laughed with them, bandaged their wounds and danced with them,” Craig Hightower said. “She was willing to go beyond self. There’s no doubt Molly earned the crown of righteousness,” a reference to the Bible verse of 2 Timothy 4:8.
And there’s no doubt she was totally psyched about it, said Molly’s older sister, Jordan, in her eulogy.
“She was a princess,” Jordan explained.
She’d been one since she was a little girl and intended to be one all her life, said Jordan, 24, a graduate student at WSU. Every crown was a good fit on Molly’s head.
They’d spent their childhood the regular way, Jordan said, with “sarcasm, tattletaling and clothes stealing.”
Molly loved to sleep and managed to be perpetually tardy to any appointment with an “a.m.” in it. She loved taking pictures, and had 51 photo albums on Facebook.
“She was our own private paparazzi,” Jordan said.
Molly took hundreds of photos of her parents, Mike and Mary, Jordan, and her brothers, Zach and Sean.
In 2008, Molly asked Jordan what she should do after graduation.
“I made a list,” Jordan said.
“Move to California to become a Disney princess” would have been perfect, she said – if Molly were not too tall.
There were other options, including, “Fulfill our lifelong dream of appearing on ‘Supermarket Sweep,’” and “Become a professional cow tipper.”
“She pointed out that since she grew up in Port Orchard, she’d already been there and done that,” Jordan said.
The mourners cracked up.
Molly grew up in a faith-filled Catholic family, Jordan told them, but at the University of Portland, Molly “fell in love with God.”
She could have had the princess life of a good job, a comfortable home and peppermint frappuccinos. Instead, for one year – for 525,6000 minutes – she chose dicey water, rice and beans, and the orphans who gave her so much joy.
“It would be easy to say that this is the end of the world for my family,” Jordan said. “Over the last week, it has certainly felt that way.”
Molly would understand the grief, and then demand better of everyone, Jordan said.
“I have one simple question for you: What are you doing with your seasons of love?” she asked the 600 who had come to honor Molly. “And what are you waiting for?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3youQNXZ2E