Artisans guild healing Haiti’s families
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI—Corrigan Clay conducts his interview while driving down a bumpy road in Port Au Prince, Haiti. He and his wife Shelley first connected with the country in 2005, when they were still both in seminary at Vancouver's Regent College. There, they began the process of adopting a child from a Haitian orphanage. But all that changed on a visit to the country a few years later.
"We had taken five different visits to Haiti," says Clay. Everything had gone as expected, until he and his wife learned the truth: "The orphanage director asked us if we wanted to meet the mother of the child that we were adopting."
They were even more shocked to learn that this apparent orphan's mother came to see him every week.
"We had a crisis of conscience," says Clay. "If [a mother] loves her child and visits him all the time, then why is he in the orphanage?"
Corrigan and Shelley began to investigate other orphanages in Haiti. What they discovered is "that the vast number of kids that are put into orphanages in Haiti are not true orphans: they have one or two living parents."
So the Clays changed their mission vision from working directly with orphans to working with parents that might be tempted to give up their children for economic reasons. In 2008, they started an organization called the Apparent Project, designed to give these people the skills and marketing needed to earn a living and sustain a family. It is, in essence, an artisan's guild, where these impoverished Haitians are taught how to make jewellery and ceramics, or how to bind books.
In the few years since its inception, the Apparent Project has grown to support 180 regular artisans. It has received media coverage on CNN, Vogue magazine, and Haiti's biggest newspapers. Even former U.S. President Bill Clinton stopped in for a visit last year.
But Clay is quick to attribute the success of the Apparent Project today to his seminary education, where he first learned how to combine his vision for missions with his vision for art.
"I was looking for a program that integrated art and theology," he says. "Regent blew those boxes open for me: how to see the world as one unified project that God is working on and that doing business and art and mission—all my divergent passions—didn't have to somehow be confiscated to certain compartments of my life. They could all be integrated and better for it."
When asked if he has anything left to add, Clay responds: "Any chance I get I tell churches that if they are not involved in any kind of orphan ministry then they ought to be. And if they are, then they need to be really careful about who they are involved with. There are a lot of sick and fraudulent things happening in the name of orphan care."
Dear Readers:
ChristianWeek relies on your generous support. please take a minute and donate to help give voice to stories that inform, encourage and inspire.
Donations of $20 or more will receive a charitable receipt.Thank you, from Christianweek.
