By Joe Hallett, The Columbus Dispatch Twenty years ago today, Becky DeWine was killed in a crash on a rain-slicked road a few miles from her parents’ old country home near Cedarville en route from her internship as a reporter at the Xenia Daily Gazette. Then a 22-year-old recent graduate of Wooster College, she had planned a career in journalism. Always cheerful and optimistic, Becky wanted to inform and inspire. She accomplished that in death. Deeply Catholic, Mike and Fran DeWine are sustained through a never-gone grief by a certitude that the spirit of Becky — third oldest of their eight children — lives in a place she never saw or imagined. Her legacy came to full bloom on July 4 when the DeWines sat amid 126 children wearing white caps and gowns and green sashes in one of the world’s poorest and most violent slums, the proud first graduates of the Becky DeWine School. The commencement in the Cite Soleil district of Port-au-Prince, Haiti — a 400,000-resident garbage-laden hellhole — was 14 years in the making. Improbably, the graduates survived gang violence, the murders of school workers, a devastating earthquake, and a society rigged against success to get coveted high-school diplomas. Above the ceremony hung a portrait of Becky, for whom the school system was named in 1999 by the Rev. Tom Hagan, founder of Hands Together, a Catholic charity that educates, feeds and provides medical care to thousands of Haitians. “I just sat there thinking Becky would have really liked this,” said Fran. “She wanted to make a difference in peoples’ lives, and she has done that. As the students sang songs in Creole, I didn’t understand a lot of the language, but I kept hearing the words ‘Becky DeWine.’ She would have been happy with what has happened there.” Mike DeWine, Ohio’s attorney general, said his thoughts never strayed from Becky during the ceremony. “You think about how old she would be now, what she would be doing. You think about the kids she would’ve had and what she would have done with her life. There is nothing we can do to bring her back. So what we’ve done is try to help people and do it in her name, knowing that she would have touched people, she would have had an impact.” Fifteen years after the DeWines met Father Tom, as they call him, during a 1998 trip to Haiti when Mike was in the U.S. Senate, they marvel at what has been accomplished in Becky’s name and are daunted by how much is left to do. In late July, after their 22nd trip to Haiti, the DeWines were joined by Hagan and Doug Campbell, Massachusetts-based executive director of Hands Together, before an annual Columbus fundraiser to discuss what’s next for the new graduates of the Becky DeWine School and those who follow. “What we have said is that if any of these kids who graduate from the program can get into college, we want to pay for their college,” said Mike. “We don’t know how many can get in. This is all new territory. We don’t know how prepared they are socially, intellectually, academically.” Hagan is encouraged that the graduates “have done very well on the government exam” required to get into Haiti’s handful of colleges, but Campbell cautioned that, along with tuition, bribes often are calculated in the price of admission. “One of the things you learn is that Haiti is a pretty corrupt place and there are only so many slots in the universities,” he said. In the early years, the DeWines, like so many others, thought Haiti could be fixed, starting with a stable government that could deliver safety and services to the country’s 10million people. But Haiti seems perpetually afflicted with political corruption, unfathomable squalor and the ugly moods of Mother Nature, who intermittingly spins hurricanes and killer earthquakes like the one in 2010 which reduced to rubble many of the Becky DeWine school buildings and flattened Hagan’s home. “After a while, you figure out that fixing Haiti is probably not going to happen in our lifetime,” Mike said. “So the goal is to help one kid at a time. If these kids get educated and can go to college, each of them will have a better life.” In her mind’s eye, Fran still sees the new crop of graduates as preschoolers, some arriving at school naked, overjoyed to get a uniform and their only hot meal of the day. The Becky DeWine School was held in four classrooms then; now there are 144 classrooms and eight campuses — 5,000 students in Cite Soleil and 3,500 out in the hilly Gonaives district. Somehow those early students — but not all of them — made it to graduation, surviving the marauding gangs that fight for control of Cite Soleil. Just last Wednesday, Hagan sent word that Franzo, director of three of the schools, had been shot and killed, the latest in a succession of school workers murdered in a slum where jealously can be deadly. Beholding the graduating class, Fran remembered there used to be so many more girls, yet mostly boys climbed the dais to get their diplomas. Many girls, Hagan explained, are turned out of their ramshackle homes when they become teenagers, expected to start their own families. “The way the culture is, sadly enough, is if the young girl doesn’t have a child by 20, she’ll probably have to turn to prostitution. ... If there’s a project that really needs to be done in Haiti, it’s a residence or boarding house for girls 13 and beyond.” Hagan and Campbell continually hatch ways for Haitians to become vested in their country. Before the new graduates can get college scholarships, they have to donate six months of public service to Hands Together’s Barefoot program, teaching basic literacy to hundreds of children living on the streets. Hagan, who more than once has had a gun held to his head by a gang member, enticed 130 gang members into Project Dismas, named after the thief on the cross next to Jesus. The Dismas members help protect and improve the schools, each getting $25 a week. The gang members, Hagan said, crave an alternative: “They light up when you tell them they’re loved, that they have value. They don’t want this life.” Because Haiti is so unrelentingly desperate, the DeWines, Hagan and Campbell rarely pause to reflect on what they’ve accomplished in Haiti, and what they witnessed on the Fourth of July still seems impossible. “I’m so used to dealing with all the things that don’t work or are failing in Haiti that I just never believed we’d have high school graduates,” Campbell said. His thoughts still with the one now gone from his life for 20 years, Mike said, “As we sat there and listened to the songs and watched those kids, I knew Becky would have liked this. She would have approved.”
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 15:22:30 +0000
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