FAITH WITH GOOD WORKS IN HAITI

A couple follow their Christly motivation to lift up brothers and sisters in need.

By Marilyn Jones

Larry Castagnola doesn't have a website. In fact, he isn't even on e-mail. Yet he and his wife, Jackie Johnson, manage to raise $20,000 a year to help children in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, Haiti.

As Larry tells it, "Things fell apart in Haiti in the early '90s. We had begun working with Haitian refugees coming into Miami, interviewing them and hearing their stories. That's really how our interest in Haiti began."

In 1995, Larry left the Jesuit priesthood and married Jackie, a social worker, who also had been in ministry. Right away, they went to Haiti, and in 1997 they moved to Port-au-Prince to work for the next two years at an orphanage that housed 300 children. "Actually, it was more like a shelter," Larry says. "Kids would just be living on the streets because their parents couldn't take care of them. The shelter's Creole name, La Fanmi Selavi, means "The Family is Life."

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