City Resident Volunteers Services, Again, To Haiti
Five trips to Haiti wasn’t enough for city resident Todd Boardman.
The private contractor turned humanitarian, who recently returned from his sixth trip last week, has indeed found a calling of sorts helping the impoverished in America and abroad.
Traveling with a scrappy team from The Chapel, a Western New York church that partners with nonprofit Mission of Hope: Haiti, Boardman spends week-long stints in Haiti, fixing roofs, restoring homes, planting trees and helping anybody who needs a hand.
“There’s extreme poverty down there … and it’s an eye-opener,” Boardman said. “I really think everyone should go there, just to understand that American poor are not poor.
“We have all sorts of support systems. Haitians literally sit there and worry about their next meal,” he continued.
Conditions, of course, are only made worse by the devastating natural disasters that have struck the island as of late, from an earthquake in 2010 to Hurricane Matthew, which leveled villages and reportedly killed more than 1,000 people in October.
Incidentally, Boardman was originally scheduled to visit Haiti the day Matthew struck. His trip was quickly postponed, and on Feb. 11, Boardman again returned and put his more than 30-year handyman prowess to work.
“We put tin on 15 houses — on the roofs that were blown away,” he said. “There were nine of us (in our group), and we broke up into three teams of three and each worked on a separate house. We worked with Haitian crews to put the framing on the roofs, which amounts to sticks and poles or boards that are recycled … put together by machetes.”
The work, he said, can be grueling. Not only are teams working in suffocating heat, but supplies are limited and traveling between villages can be excruciatingly long — mostly due to rough terrain and unpaved roads. Boardman described how traveling just 120 miles in a truck took eight hours to complete.
Despite the inconvenience, Boardman said helping those in need and making a positive difference is worth it. Having traveled to Honduras, New Orleans (after Hurricane Katrina) and Oklahoma (after devastating tornadoes), Boardman said he has no plans of quitting his humanitarian lifestyle.
“I’ve been doing it for a long time … and a lot of it has to do with my Christian faith,” he said. “When you go there for the first time, you’re really taken aback by poverty. You don’t really see it here. I’ve taken kids on mission trips to the Bronx, I went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina … and I also took my son to help out after the tornadoes hit Oklahoma … but despite all those things, when you go to a third-world country, they’re literally people starving to death and who don’t get medical attention.”
When asked if he plans to make another trip to Haiti, Boardman simply replied, “absolutely.”
Mission of Hope hosts thousands of mission trip participants every year from around the world, according to the organization’s website. Teams participate by serving in one of the 12 villages where they partner with the local Haitian churches.
For more information, visit mohhaiti.org.
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