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home. In the driveway, in the dark car, we agreed to go through with the divorce. We promised to sit down together with the kids and break the news, doing our best to let them know everything would be all right. That was September 8th of2001. I slept on the sofa.
    On Tuesday, September 11, I sent the two older ones off to school. Katie was a junior and Danny was in seventh grade. Sam, then 9-years-old, and I engaged in our daily ritual of eating cereal and watching cartoons until it was time for him to leave. I kissed him good-bye, and told him again not to worry. He had always been more sensitive than the others, at least in ways more apparent. I sat down again on my newfound bed with my bowl of cereal, dreading going in to teach later in the day. I stared blankly at the television set.
    When I realized I could be watching something other than cartoons, I changed the channel only to see smoke billowing from the first of the World Trade Center towers to be hit. I don't remember much of the rest of that day, except wondering whether I should somehow let my children know that I was aware of what was happening, and that I would be home from work as quickly as possible after they returned from school. I did not fear for their physical safety; rather, I just wanted to tell them again that everything would be all right. But I knew that it wouldn't. Not because of the terrorists, but because of me. I was taking away their innocence and feelings of security, and no one should ever do that to a child.
    Visiting Haiti would have to be put aside temporarily, but I knew when the time was right, I would go. That time came a couple years later.

7
Heartland Center
    I looked forward to the preparatory meetings with members of the Heartland Center and others participating in the trip. They were held in a former classroom of a local Catholic school, no longer used due to declining enrollment. Father Gannon - or Tom, as we came to call him - was as interesting as my mother advised he would be.
    "You'll like him. He's a Jesuit," she told me. She had heard his sermons while he performed monthly Mass duties in town.
    "Why?" I asked her. I wondered what she knew ofJesuits' work. It was not the kind of thing we discussed. She was a dutiful Catholic, but it never occurred to me she differentiated Jesuits from the other religious orders. My grandmother's brother was a Jesuit who taught at the University of Detroit, but we just knew him as Uncle Pete, the priest. Perhaps my mother knew more about theology and the reputation of his order than I realized.
    "He knows so much, and he speaks in outline form. Something a professor would like."
    She was right. The first time I heard him give a sermon he quickly stood out among the other priests I had heard. If I had not known he was a Jesuit, I might have figured it out.
    Perhaps it was his sense of logic and wealth of knowledge, but more likely it was his bold stance on justice. It is not that priests of other orders are not committed to social justice, but there is just something about the Jesuit way.
    In preparing for the Haiti trip, he immediately earned my trust. This was not what could be considered a typical mission trip. I did not want to dismiss the work of others nor did he, but this project was not designed as charity or a short-term feel good experience for those who opted to go. To be honest, I would have gone anyway. But this made me more comfortable. We held serious discussions about the differences between charity and justice, how achieving justice was more challenging and perhaps apt to upset the social and economic position of those accustomed to giving a helping hand to those in need. True justice might exist only in a system where the poor were not kept poor and dependent upon the charity of others. He was not as radical in his activism as he might have been, but intellectually he understood the distinctions and conveyed his positions eloquently.
    We did not dwell on ideas too much, as we