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Briefly noted

The Holy Cross Hospital and an affiliated nursing school in Leogane, Haiti, have been approved to receive a $200,000 grant from the Louisville-based Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. The hospital was described as destroyed in news reports, but the nursing school began operating as a makeshift hospital quickly after the January 12 earthquake struck. The hospital and school are ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti but have been a major focus of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission in Haiti.

Forgive Haitian debt, religious leaders urge: Grants, not loans, for rebuilding

Appeals for the world’s banking leaders to cancel the remaining foreign debt owed by earthquake-devastated Haiti were made in late January by the leader of the World Council of Churches and by a newly founded alliance of U.S. Christian leaders.

New WCC general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran, said January 25 that the international community must “focus on how Haiti can become sustainable.” Tveit was to take that message days later to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss winter resort of Davos.