Marie-Jo Poux, the FEPE Orphanage, and the EFE School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Marie-Jo, the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants (FEPE) orphanage she founded 15 years ago, and the Ecole Foyer School keep on stepping..The GoFundMe by Marathon-runner Patrick Andersen now exceeds $68K!
MARIE-JO POUX and six STUDENTS living in the FOYER ESPOIR LES ENFANTS Orphanage of Delmas, Port-au-Prince , Haiti, one Sunday afternoon of April, 2018. You may want to gauge the love and hope in those eyes.
Patrick Andersen has raised funding for FEPE—many hundreds of thousands of Dollars in total—over 10 years. Many factors must move him, but love and admiration must be at their heart.
The years impress.
15 years, now, since Madame Marie-Jo Poux, a Pediatric Nurse for more than 30 years in New York City and Cincinnati, returned to Haiti at age 61 to help as she could in the Nation of her birth,
Marie-Jo began in November 2009 the Foyer Espoir Pour les Enfants (FEPE) orphanage in the Delmas district of Haiti’s Capital, Port-au-Prince, a mile or so from Toussaint L’Overture Airport toward the Port, and mile-or-so from the BelAir neighborhood uphill. She began in late 2009 with 13 students whose parents were either passed away or unable to maintain material care.
The now-famous Earthquake struck Port-au-Prince in particular of Haiti on January 12, 2010. Worlds changed within moments. Everything split and fell with rending crashes in most neighborhoods of the City of more than four million. Houses’ roofs dropped into kitchens and slid in broken, jagged slabs and crumbling blocks into streets. 35 seconds or so the first Shock lasted. At least 100,000 died in the crashes and rubble. Millions slept outdoors for weeks, then for months, in 2010.
College Canapé Vert, collapsed, in 2010.
By February Marie-Jo housed a total of 34 otherwise dispossessed students in FEPE. The orphanage moved to larger quarters, deeper into Delmas. Marie-Jo’s teacher when she was a Mademoiselle teen-ager, Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul, founder of College Canapé Vert in 1974, when she was a teacher of 20 years standing, and Mayor of Port-au-Prince between 1986 and 1988, after uprisings ousted Jean Pierre “Baby Doc” Duvalier, visited Marie-Jo at the new FEPE and posed the need for a School in Delmas to serve FEPE’s orphans and more. E.F.E., Ecole Foyer Espoir, opened in 2012.
Marie-Jo and her daughter, Maureen, with students at the new FEPE’s gate, Delmas, 2012.
One year later Sticking Up For Children began our association with FEPE and EFE. The following year, January 2014, Maryse and I visited FEPE during the Port-au-Pirnce International Jazz Festival.
We’ve since then been privileged to watch dozens and then hundred of students matriculate. We’ve been surprised by their creation of Drumsticks-as-Art. We’ve handled their would-be prosthetics from nascent 3D-Printing. We’ve worn and sold the splendidly colorful Freedom Sandals that they’ve produced. We taken in their performances of Shakespeare.
‘Les Papillons’, graduates of the youngest time-span in EFE, advance, June 2018.
That they and Marie-Jo and Staff such as Jonathand Saintine, now Principal of EFE, and Sabine of FEPE, and Claudine of FEPE. have ALL PERSEVERED over 15 years impresses us most. Like everything else about Port-au-Prince in particular of Haiti, the testament of their character is that they’re still striving upward.
Claudine Aimé of EFE and students of FEPE bring goods to southwestern Haiti after the August 2021 Earthquake.
2023, and Marie-Jo receives from Staff at Ecole Foyer Espoir APPRECIATION for her 14 Years.
You may want want to pitch into Patrick Andersen’s GoFundMe effort for Marie-Jo and the FEPE Students and Staff today!
You may want to check out more regarding FEPE and EFE on the Sticking Up For Children website. The brainchild of Madame Marie-Marthe Balin Franck Paul—now an improbably vigorous and accomplishing and ever more beautiful 88—, named Lèkol Toupatou in Haitian Kréyol, or School Everywhere, grows in halting steps toward its goal enabling literacy for every Haitian. We can never doubt what such characters as Madame Marie Marthe and her colleague Madame Mireille Cherie Antoine and Madame Marie-Jo Poux may accomplish
College Canapé Vert, 2014, rebuilt anew four years after the January 2010 Earthquake.
In Haiti of the 1950s, the exchange of greetings went like this, we’re told. “Honor!” said one on meeting another. “Respect!” the other answered
“Honor!” and “Respect” to Madame Marie-Jo Poux and ALL whom she benefits and who benefit her!
I appreciate these windows into Haiti very much. Everything you have told here encourages those of us who have different obstacles and struggles to not only honor and respect the efforts and accomplishments of the women you have given such a vivid portrait of, but to make greater efforts ourselves to work against those forces within the “ belly of the beast” which have held back and trampled the people of Haiti for so long. Thank you for this report and others before as well. Beautiful pictures!
Wow again, dear YVONNE. I'm so glad that you and CYN and CYLAMEN and others DIG the marvelously accomplishing and generous women and men of Haiti whom I'm lucky to know. Also, you're SO RIGHT in remarking on how these people's accomplishment afford us perspectives against the Media Sewers that surround us.
By the way, your new friend PAUL introduced himself during a GREAT series of peroformance by PHIL MINTON, AUDREY CHEN, HENRIK MUNKEBY NURSTEBE, and HELEN GILLET and CLIFF HINES last Saturday. We wished you were there!