This year’s theme is “Lee for Haiti,” and will focus attention on and send aid to LaSaline Church in Port-au-Prince.
“The churches in Haiti ... have provided education and medical relief to the people, and the churches have been destroyed,” said Campus Ministries secretary Deborah Page.
“Our goal is to help rebuild those structures so that they can go back to some form of normalcy and be trained and equipped for the future.”
Since 1991, Missions Week has been carried out in honor of a Lee University student, Dee Lavender, who died on a summer Mission Trip to Panama just before her 21st birthday.
According to archived information in the office of Campus Ministries, Missions Week projects have been in place for nearly 20 years, and a week devoted to missions has been part of Lee programming since the 1940s.
During the week, chapel services and guest lecturers will provide students with information about Haiti and other mission opportunities. Lee will continue to sell Missions Week T-shirts, and all profits and other donations will go directly to help the Haitian community.
In May 2012, a group of Lee students will travel to Port-au-Prince to help rebuild the church and serve the Restavek Freedom Foundation, founded by Joan and Ray Conn in 2006. This organization works to end restavek, a harsh and prevalent social system that has placed an estimated 300,000 Haitian children in domestic servitude.
For more information about Missions Week, contact Campus Ministries at 423-614-8420. To learn more about the Restavek Freedom Foundation, visit www.restavekfreedom.org.
