Philipsburg, SINT MAARTEN — At first glance, the airy, light-yellow beachfront St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church looks like the perfect tourist site. Built in 1843, its cool wood interiors beckon to the casual visitor.
But a food basket tagged “Bishop Ellis Foundation” placed strategically next to a side door hints at the massive need among the desperately poor on this tiny island. The overflow crowds packing the church seek help in finding their daily bread.
“Even in their poverty, poor families come to church on Sundays and Friday nights,” says the Rev. Thomas Krosnicki, 70, a Wisconsin native who has pastored the parish for four years. “They just want meat and potatoes to feed their families.”
Many of his parishioners have no car, so the church needs a way to bring them in from nearby slums of dirt roads and tin shacks half-hidden among bright pink bougainvillea, mango and banana trees.
To import and purchase a van from the United States costs $61,000. The priest also needs $300,000 to renovate the parish hall, so he rents out church parking spaces to local merchants for $250 a month.
The Pompano Beach, Fla.-based Cross International supplies $1,500 a month to the Catholic church to feed 250 families. The charity, an interndenominational Christian outreach to the very poor in 26 countries, learned of St. Martin of Tours through its work helping the poor in Haiti. Contacts told the charity of friends and family members who had fled to the more prosperous Sint Maarten.
Cross International, which can be reached for donations at www.crossinternational.org or www.crosscatholic.org, also gives $7,000 a year to New Testament Baptist Church a few blocks away to feed the homeless, jobless and some illegal immigrants.
“We think Jesus calls us to focus on the most in need,” said David Adams, vice president for overseas missions for Cross International. “We help indigenous charities that don’t have the infrastructure to qualify for aid from USAID or the bigger [nongovernmental organizations], such as World Vision.”
The money to St. Martin’s gets funneled through the Bishop Ellis Foundation, a nonprofit run by the church to fill a food pantry with rice, beans, soups, oatmeal and other cereals, and flour.
Father Krosnicki, a Divine Word Missionary priest who worked in the District at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops liturgical office and taught at Catholic University of America from 1972 to 1982, acknowledges things are tough on this isle of flawless beaches framed by aqua-blue surf.
Tourism - the island’s main industry - is down 20 percent to 30 percent this year.
“They say here that when America sneezes, we catch cold,” says Esperancia Sutton, a parishioner who makes frequent home visits to food recipients. “If the cruise ships stop, we are doomed.”
The island has long had sacred connections, having been named by Christopher Columbus, who spotted the place on Nov. 11, 1493, the holy day of St. Martin of Tours. Since 1648, both France and the Netherlands have laid claim to the island. Today, France administers the northern two-thirds of its 37 square miles, with the Dutch overseeing the southern third.
All 22,000 Catholics on the Dutch side belong to St. Martin’s parish in the port city of Philipsburg. Many are illegal immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic and by law are not allowed to work in Sint Maartin. Often, they do anyway; and in good economic times, jobs are not an issue.
But now they are. Estimates of the ratio of immigrants to the island’s Creole natives range from 54 percent to 70 percent, the highest in the Caribbean.
One family sitting dejectedly under a coconut tree next to an abandoned salt mill tells how Chinese merchants have banded together to squeeze out local businesses. One merchant, says a woman named Avril Gumbs, has cheated her out of the deed to her home. Her family of seven will be homeless as of May 1.
“I don’t know how we’d make it” without food from the Bishop Ellis Foundation, Mrs. Gumbs says, as chickens scratch in the dust by her feet. “But I can’t afford a lawyer.”
After a pep talk, Mrs. Sutton drives off. She thinks Mrs. Gumbs cannot read and was tricked into signing a document giving all deed rights to the merchant.
“Sometimes, when you’re not educated, you make these mistakes,” she notes.
She takes a visitor to several homes of impoverished residents, including a shack filled with dirty dishes and one white plastic chair. A woman clad in a pink robe explains her roof has been blown off three times by hurricanes. Her 12-year-old son shyly says he would like to be a policeman.
A lime-green house atop a hill on the French side of the island, which goes by the French name of Saint-Martin, houses 17 children abandoned by prostitutes and drug users. Another shack on priceless beachfront property is shared by three single mothers whose husbands have abandoned them. This, they tell Mrs. Sutton, is common on the island.
Atop a mountain, Roberts Raymond, 60, squeezes out a living in a used-car junkyard. He emigrated 40 years ago from the nearby island of St. Kitts. His family lives in a shipping container on one corner of the lot. His 4-year-old daughter runs about in rags; he has holes in his shoes.
“When you pass 40 here, no one will hire you,” he says from a perch beneath a tamarind tree. Even more discouraging, he adds, are the people who drop off their cars for him to repair, then never return to pick them up.
The stress of living hand-to-mouth overwhelms everyone, including Angela, a Guyanese immigrant who has no money to pay for the $167 private-school fee for her 11-year-old daughter. Because her payments are two years behind, she fears her daughter will be kicked out. Public school is out of the question because government officials will discover the daughter lacks citizenship papers.
Diabetes has ravaged her body, vastly increasing her weight. The lack of insulin has caused her left hand to freeze into a claw-like shape, making it impossible for her to work.
Her husband, from the nearby island of Dominica, has been deported, and she cannot afford the $75 for her five monthly injections.
But it is “God who will see me through,” she says as she irons some clothes while sitting on an old, ripped mattress. “God will see me through.”
• Julia Duin can be reached at jduin@washingtontimes.com.
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