Mission
of Love
Upper St. Clair man’s foundation celebrates an
orphanage in Haiti that’s been six years in the making.
BY PAUL GLASSER
A
group of 13 volunteers will soon depart for a mission trip to
Haiti where they will help build an open-air school for orphans
and organize a soccer camp.
The Yahve-Jire Children’s Foundation organized the trip, for which
participants will depart July 2 and return July 8. The organization’s
name means “God provides,” and the foundation supports about
25 children who were orphaned or abandoned by their parents. The
mission trip includes two seniors from South Fayette High School.
The foundation was organized as a 501c3 nonprofit in 2013 but
Dan Raeder of Upper St. Clair, president of Yahve-Jire, says he and
several other volunteers first began working in Haiti on an informal
basis in 2011. Raeder and four others went to Haiti to help rebuild in
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the wake of the 2010 earthquake that killed 200,000 Haitians and left
more than 1.5 million homeless.
Raeder and the other volunteers began working with an orphanage
a few miles outside of the capital, Port au Prince, which housed about
20 children in a building with three rooms and one bathroom. The
earthquake had damaged the orphanage and Raeder and the other
volunteers wanted to construct a new building to replace it. A local
man named Chedlin Justinvil runs the orphanage and had purchased
about 4 acres of land shortly before the earthquake devastated Haiti.
In 2011, Raeder and the other volunteers carried cement blocks in
100-degree heat in order to build a wall around the new location.