A Christmas wish for Denise

Island church offers special gifts to Haitian teen

by Alice E. Gerard
Grand Island Dispatch, December 22, 2006

Denise Dominique of Haiti, right, stands with Michelle Hook of Whitehaven Road Baptist Church, center, and Laura Myre, mobility trainer from the Olmsted Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Denise Dominique, 18, tentatively tapped the floor in the living room of Michelle and Kevin Hook’s Cardinal Lane home with her cane, searching for the step that would take her into the kitchen. She stopped near the Christmas tree, seemingly unsure of where to go next.

Laura Myre, mobility instructor for the Elizabeth Pierce Olmsted, M.D., Center for the Visually Impaired, verbally guided Dominique until she reached the step and walked into the kitchen, smiling broadly.

Until Tuesday, Dominique had never traveled independently with a cane, Myre said. She explained that Dominique, who had come from Haiti to the United States for cornea transplant surgery in September, would learn skills of independent travel that she should be able to “carry back to her home village.”

Dominique will also carry a few other things back to her home village of Platon, Haiti: an auto harp given to the young music lover by piano teacher Darcy Rogers and an envelope containing a “gift certificate” for a new church for her community. That is her Christmas gift from Whitehaven Road Baptist Church, located at 1290 Whitehaven Road.

The Journey

Dominique’s journey to the United States for eye surgery had taken several years of effort, according to the Rev. Abram Dueck, pastor of Whitehaven Road Baptist Church. He explained that his church has been involved in mission work in Haiti for the past five years. Working with a Haitian organization called Bethanie Evangelical Mission, volunteers from the Whitehaven Road Baptist Church have built two churches and a health clinic in that island nation.

Michelle Hook, a member of the Whitehaven Road Baptist Church choir, said that members of a medical team met Dominique in the Cavaillon medical clinic three years ago. Ophthalmologist Diane Cress examined Dominique and determined that her blindness was caused by parasites and that she was in need of a corneal transplant, a surgery that could not be performed in Haiti but was doable here.

It took the Western New York Society of Optometrists and church members Larry and Cherie Stolzenburg approximately two years to put together all the documentation necessary to bring Dominique to Western New York.

Extensive Eye Damage

Dominique’s surgery was performed in September by James Reidy, a local surgeon who donated his services. Dueck said that the surgeon told him that the damage to Dominique’s eyes was more extensive than previously believed. “She had active parasites in her eyes. She had retina damage and optic nerve damage, so there was cataract surgery. They implanted a lens and also did a corneal transplant for her.”

The prognosis for Dominique’s recovery had become less bright after the surgery, Hook said. “They weren’t sure of how much vision she was going to have,” Hook said. She noted Reidy said that he did not expect that Dominique would ever have enough eyesight to be able to read.

Hook added she felt disappointed after she found out that Dominique was not going to regain her sight completely.

Stay Was Extended

Dominique, however, did not despair. When she was told that her eyesight was not going to be completely restored, she responded, “‘God will take care of me,’” Hook related.

Because Dominique needed to learn independent living skills to compensate for the fact that she wasn’t going to regain all of the sight that she had lost, her stay in Western New York had to be extended. Shortly before Thanksgiving, Hook realized that Dominique would be in Grand Island during the Christmas season. Hook asked Dominique what sort of Christmas present she would like to have.

It took Dominique a week to come up with an answer. When she did answer, she told Hook that she would like to have a piano for her church. This time, it was Hook who was speechless. “She didn’t want something for herself or for her family but for her church.”

A Gift for a Village

Hook suggested that it would be easier to bring an electric keyboard to Haiti. “We needed to know if the church has electricity. So I asked her what her church is like. She’s telling me that the roof is really bad. It doesn’t have any floor, and the walls are bad, and they don’t have any electricity.”

Dominique was quiet for a moment and then said, “‘I know what you can give me. You can give me a church. If you put the money in an envelope, I can carry that back to Haiti.’”

At that point, I thought, how can I say ‘no’ when we have so much and she’s not asking it for herself, but asking it for her whole village?”

Hook said that she knew that she could not accomplish the task of building a new church for Dominique’s village by herself. She told Dominique that she would “talk to Pastor Abe and talk to your brothers and sisters here and we will see what we can do. So we’ve done that, and the response has been absolutely amazing.”

The money that is being raised will go to “provide the building, funding for the pastor for a year, a keyboard, a sound system, a generator, and, hopefully, we’ll be able to provide some guitars because that’s generally the way they do their music in Haiti in smaller churches,” Hook said.

Thus far Dominique’s recovery has exceeded expectations, as she has regained enough sight to perform daily tasks. This week, James Simmons, the ophthalmologist at the Olmsted Center who had arranged for Dominique to have eyeglasses, gave her a magnifier.

“She was able to read regular print. So we went home and we were downloading Bible verses from the Internet in Creole so that she could read them. We downloaded the Christmas story from Luke for her, too, and she was reading that. It was very exciting,” Hook said.

A Merry Christmas Church

Hook said that she would like to see more participation in the project to build a church for Denise, from other churches and from individuals in the community. She said that people are welcome to donate money or to volunteer to participate in mission work.

Dominique, who has five sisters and two brothers back at home, said that she is “very happy about my Merry Christmas church.”

Hook said that the youth group at the Whitehaven Road Baptist Church is planning to go to Haiti to help build the church and that she would like to make the trip a family adventure. She said that she and her son, Sean, 16, are looking forward to going and that she hopes that her husband and her daughter, Tara, 15, will also share in the enthusiasm for the upcoming trip to see and be part of Dominique’s world.