By Susan Gallagher

Joey Stetzer was just 11 months old when he left a Haiti orphanage for Montana and an adoptive family. This summer he went back to Haiti for the first time, a teenager intent on helping however he could in the aftermath of the big earthquake.

Joey, a high school junior who has grown up in Helena and in St. Mary Parish, spent eight weeks as a volunteer in Haiti, helping to get a Christian day camp ready for children ages 5-15 and then working with them. The U.S. nonprofit operating the orphanage through which Joey was adopted 16 years ago also runs the camp. This summer it served 150 children, all too familiar with the day-to-day hardship of life in Haiti’s capital of Portau- Prince.

“I couldn’t sit on the couch, eat a bag of Doritos, send a couple hundred dollars (for quake relief) and say, `I’ve done my part,’” 17-year-old Joey said in an interview this month, three weeks after returning to Helena. A lifeguard at the Helena YMCA, he primarily taught the campers how to swim. Joey was “passionate about the children, their safety, their wellbeing and their day-to-day physical needs,” Byron and Shelley Tlucek, who worked with him through Maranatha Children’s Ministries, told The Montana Catholic by e-mail.

When not working, Joey often played soccer with children in a tent city filled with the makeshift homes of Haitians still displaced months after the Jan. 12 earthquake, which the Haitian government says resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. Joey had the opportunity “to be an extension of Christ’s hands to the very neediest children in Haiti,” the Tluceks said.

His family paid for his airline tickets, he said, and he traveled alone, his first time on a plane since flying to the United States as an infant. He paid $10 a day for room and board. Joey left Montana with “lots of Repel (insect repellent), water wings and a Bible,” St. Mary Parish’s weekly bulletin announced in a notice headlined “Joey is traveling to Haiti!”

Finding an organization willing to accept a minor as a volunteer was difficult, but Joey said his mother, Janet Stetzer, “looked for ways to make it happen.” Once the arrangements were made, she resolved not to worry about Joey, one of four children she has adopted internationally.

“I decided that he was going to do a godly thing, and that I would have to have faith that it would be fine,” she said.

Joey said that over the years he had thought about visiting Haiti, and in making the trip this summer he anticipated perhaps meeting some of his relatives. He was a baby when his birth mother died, but he wondered about finding his father and siblings. Those thoughts dwindled quickly, however.

“After I got down there, finding my relatives wasn’t so big anymore,” Joey said. “It was more important for me to help those I could who were in front of me.”

Sometimes he walked home with children who were in his swim classes at the day camp. Doing so provided an opportunity to observe their brothers and sisters, and see whether those children needed health care or food, Joey said.

Memorable kids include Obed, who had only one arm but still learned to swim, and Emanuel, whose love of life was abundantly evident despite his having lost both parents to AIDS a couple of years before the earthquake, Joey said. There was Rosmon, orphaned and seriously injured by the quake, and hospitalized throughout Joey’s time in Haiti. On some days, Rosmon was carefully moved to the day camp for a few hours as a respite. He has since been released from the hospital, and relatives were to care for him, Joey said.

He said he went to Haiti with “no clue what I was getting into,” but never considered returning home early. “Once I got down there, I really didn’t think about coming back,” he said. “It was more important for me to stay.”

He had been in Haiti six days when he turned 17, on June 26. Joey didn’t tell anyone about his birthday because he wanted it to pass quietly, and it did. He said anything more would have been improper, given the environment.

Culturally stunned in many ways, he observed people in Port-au-Prince unwilling to move so an ambulance could pass through a congested area. Hospitals and trauma centers were dirty, he said, and although “I knew there would be garbage all over the place, I didn’t realize how much.” The major cleanup of a field was among the projects he initiated.

He came home with a new perspective on U.S. life and the expectations here. A power outage lasting only an hour brings out the complaints among Americans, he said, but in Haiti there’s hardly a murmur when the electricity is interrupted for days.

Joey always has been a sensitive person, said his mother, who remembers the posters he and childhood friends put up when they found roving animals and wanted to reunite the critters and their people.

He said he wants to obtain paramedical training and join the Coast Guard. He also hopes to work in natural-disaster response. His work in Haiti was a start, Joey said, then added, “I wish I could have done more.”


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 9, September 17, 2010.