Read an incredibly compelling story focusing on the efforts of Father Rick Frechette in Haiti following the earthquake. The article was written by "The Weekly Standard" columnist Matt LaBash.

As disaster-chasers go, I’m pretty lousy. It’s ten days since the most catastrophic earthquake in modern history shook Haiti loose from its ever fragile moorings, yet the only disaster I’ve come near is at the Hartford airport in Connecticut. The iron-willed meter maid at the Continental desk informs me that Acts of Nature or God aside, my bag is 50 pounds overweight, and I’m going to have to dump provisions I’m carrying to Haiti.

Wishing to make my flight, I comply, muttering profanities as I hurriedly unload Clif bars, bottled water, and whiskey into a rickety box. As I do this, a band of ten or so curious Haitians watch my struggles, with their leader, an American Catholic priest of the Passionist order, Father Rick Frechette, looking on bemused.

“Everything alright?” he asks.

Though it’s taking me a while to reach the land of newly minted loss (in 40 seconds’ time, at least 230,000 Haitians were killed on January 12, one in every 50), I’ve come to Hartford to collect a man who, no matter where he goes, can’t seem to escape the dead. Father Rick, as most call him, has lived in Haiti for 22 years. He is founder and director of the Haitian branch of the international children’s organization Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (“Our Little Brothers and Sisters”).

In the Tabarre section of Port-au-Prince, Frechette runs St. Damien Hospital, Haiti’s only free pediatric hospital. He also oversees an orphanage and the sprawling St. Luke missions, a boots-on-the-ground enterprise responsible for everything from its 18 simple street-schools in a country where fewer than 75 percent of children attend school, to running water and food to the city’s most ferocious slums ... Click here to read full article

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