Florida Couple Minister to Haiti’s Poorest : Slums: Charity builds houses for the homeless, erects market stalls for villagers and recruits volunteers to battle starvation, disease and squalor.

In the slums on Haiti’s northern coast, 3,000 people no longer go to bed hungry. Children spend their days in school, not on the streets. And there’s medical attention for most basic needs.

It wasn’t always this way.

A Florida couple spent years building a volunteer network to combat starvation, disease and squalor in this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation.

“We’re not evangelists. We don’t preach. We try to show them what love and concern is all about,” said Don DeHart, who with his wife, Eva, founded For Haiti With Love in 1982.

“We never charge for anything we do,” he said. “You can’t buy God’s love. It’s a gift.”

The nondenominational charity, based in Palm Harbor, works in Cap Haitien, the country’s second-largest city, and surrounding mountain villages.

They build concrete block houses for the homeless and market stalls for villagers to sell goods, then recruit beneficiaries for the labor force.

Two years ago the group built a school with benches and long wooden desks. Today 123 Creole-speaking youngsters, ages 5 through 10, make up three classes.

Besides French, English, math and geography lessons, the children are given clothing, soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a vitamin pill and a hot meal.

“It’s not our intent to be a certified school,” said DeHart, 60. “We’re trying to offer some basics so that if life ever changes for them the children will have something to build on.”

He spends seven months a year in Haiti overseeing projects. His wife works stateside, rounding up medical professionals and others who spend a week at a time doing relief work at their own expense.

She also arranges for shipments of supplies, ranging from formula and vitamins donated by pharmaceutical companies to beans and clothing donated by local church groups.

Basic foodstuffs have become scarce because of an 18-month-old trade embargo imposed by the Organization of American States after the September, 1991, army coup that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Cruise ships stopped coming. Jobs were lost. Prices tripled for such staples as rice and beans, and there was no flour for bread.

To feed 3,000 a day, DeHart said it takes 2 tons of rice and 1 ton of beans a month, cooking oil and charcoal at a cost of about $6,000 monthly. Last year the group raised and spent $162,000.

“Mothers can’t nurse their babies because they are too undernourished themselves,” said Eva DeHart, 56. “People are consumed with parasites, scabies, worms.”

Dr. Dean Fauber, a pediatrician at North Pinellas Children’s Medical Center, has made 10 trips. “The horror, the feel, the taste, the smell, the faces that you see,” he said. “They’re haunting.”

Dr. Dennis Jungerberg, a Tampa surgeon, has been there twice operating on 30 to 40 people a trip, mostly for hernias and small tumors.

Dentist Mikel Hopkins of Dunedin made four trips in two years, saw 530 patients and pulled 1,136 teeth. He works dawn to dusk using a flashlight and painkillers but no high-tech instruments.

“The poverty is unimaginable, but the feeling of being able to help is tremendous,” he said.

Over the last 25 years, DeHart has had successes and failures in Haiti. But he hasn’t lost heart.

“You don’t look at the defeats,” he said. “You look back over the years and see the accomplishments and say, ‘We’re having an impact.’ ”