She lost her house in the earthquake, but not her faith...

Dear Friend in Christ,

Her bed is a thin carpet on rocky ground. The roof over Elna Bilius’s head is dry palm leaves. Her walls are curtains. Elna was left with only the clothes on her back when her house collapsed during Haiti’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

“I don’t have a house. I have no place to stay. I have nothing,” said Elna, 40. “Someone had to give me a cup to drink water out of.”

Like countless others in Haiti left homeless after the earthquake, Elna now lives in a tent city. Except for her daughter Isna, 8, Elna’s children are staying with friends because there is no room inside the closet-sized tent. Yet, despite the misery of her living conditions, Elna draws strength from her deep faith and the knowledge that God is always with her.

“God is our strength, so we always put Him ahead of us. I always pray. Prayer gives me strength. God shows me how to live,” Elna told us. Faith is all she has after everything she owned was buried in rubble. But Elna is thankful that she and the children are alive. During the earthquake, Elna rescued her 3-year-old, barely escaping the house collapsing around them.

“I was outside and everything started shaking,” she said. “I ran into the house to get the baby, and as soon as I got outside, the house fell.”

Bellevue, which means “beautiful view” in French, is the tent city where she now lives. It’s sandwiched between a busy highway and the ocean. Elna fears the ocean will one day flood the camp. “I worry about the high tide, but we have no place to go,” she said. “Sometimes when it rains and the tide is too high, we leave because I’m too scared. We go up near the road and watch the tide.”

During rainstorms, Elna and Isna get drenched if they can’t run beneath someone else’s overhanging tarp. “We just stand here in the rain,” Elna said. “Even if the insects come in here and bite us, we have no place else to go, so we have to sit here and take it.”

All over Haiti, mothers like Elna live in crude tents and have only their faith to get through the night. Will a venomous spider or a rat bite them as they try to sleep? Will their children fall ill from diarrhea, infection or the other illnesses now plaguing Haiti’s homeless children?

What will happen when hurricane season arrives? How can their simple tents endure a strong rainstorm, let alone a tropical storm or hurricane?

I pray that you’ll dispel these fears by helping to provide a sturdy home for a family. For only $2,600, we can build a safe house for a desperate family like Elna’s. Your compassion and support are urgently needed to rebuild houses for homeless families in Haiti.

Thousands of families in Haiti are in need of safe housing. They pray for help because they lost everything during the earthquake and can’t even afford a tarp.

Food For The Poor homes are solid and strong. Most of the houses we built in Haiti withstood the earthquake, earning high praise from officials looking for models to use in the rebuilding.

It breaks my heart to think of Elna and her daughter enduring such misery, especially when it costs only $2,600 to provide a safe house for them. Thank you for your prayerful consideration and for reaching out to help shelter Haiti’s poor. May God bless you.

A servant of the poor,
Robin G. Mahfood