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Profiles of our lay missionaries

Adele Lawler
Adele began her current assignment in 2002. Before taking up her assignment Adele worked in Aer Lingus.

Summary of work
“My main focus and current programme with Nos Petits Freres et Soeurs involves working with our 17 and 18 year olds to prepare them for life outside the orphanage.

I am teaching basic life skills through workshops to encourage team work, fair play and respect for each other at all times. We cover home management i.e. cooking and sewing, computer skills, languages, money management and much more.

Together with in-house training the children take field trips to the city and market places, local productions in the arts, etc., which I hope will prepare them to make it out in the real world.”

I also oversee work carried out by a group of teachers working in five slum schools which are run as an outreach programme, and I am involved in decorating a residence at our new hospital construction site.

Report: April 2005
“Before Easter I went down to one of the slum clinics with our resident doctor. Two boys had been just admitted with gunshot wounds. Both boys, one twelve, the other eighteen, were injured on their way to school. Both are now paralysed, victims of the senseless violence. During the two hours we were at the clinic, crowds demonstrated right past our door and more violence erupted on the street.

However, the children at the orphanage grow in mind and body and my work with the older children fills my heart with joy as I see these young men and women prepare to leave us in July.

Because children finish school around the age of twenty these young people will now live with their extended families until their studies are completed and hopefully be better prepared to make a life for themselves when they finish school.

Our new hospital construction progresses steadily under the supervision of Pat Mollaghan and Gerard Needham and we pray that this in itself is a sign of hope to the Haitian people that some things will work out.”