Duverger is an area located 70 miles outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Ravaged by an earthquake in 2010, the area has had constant volunteer groups flying in to help on relief missions. One of the groups was Southeast Missouri State University's own Catholic Campus Ministry.

The Catholic Campus Ministry is a group at Southeast that gathers together for prayer, worship, learning, service and social activities. Over spring break, CCM took a group of 12 students and three adults to Haiti on a mission trip.

The group flew from St. Louis to New York and stayed overnight for one night in New York. They then flew to Port-au-Prince in Haiti.

Kristen Rainey is the campus minister for CCM. She has been working at Southeast for six years now.

"Just driving through Port-au-Prince was an eye-opener because there's still a lot of devastation from the earthquake a few years ago. There's a lot of poverty, a lot of buildings that still have not been rebuilt, and a lot of people that are just living in tents," Rainey said.

The group arrived at an orphanage known as Kay Mari. It's full name in English is House of Mary, Mother of all Children. It's a catholic orphanage built by Movin' with the Spirit, Inc.

Sean Forrest is the founder of Movin' with the Spirit, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to proclaiming God's truth and love. Their mission is Haiti 180. The front-and-center projects of the mission right now are to build a medical clinic that can treat and care for the people in the villages of Duverger and Dandann, a home for the elderly who have nothing, a school in Duverger and to finish the church in Duverger.

"Sean just felt the Lord put on his heart that an orphanage needed to be built where the kids could be given kind of a family atmosphere where they were loved as individual people," Rainey said.

Kali Essner, a sophomore at Southeast, was one of the students who attended the mission to Haiti.

"Well, we stayed at an orphanage for the whole week, so a lot of the time we were just playing with the kids there and just loving them and being a friend to them and being Christ to them hopefully," Essner said.

Along with caring for the children, the group helped to build a basketball court for the local school.

Movin' with the Spirit built a school in Duverger for the children at the orphanage. Children from other villages were also accepted for a very small tuition fee. The school, Immaculate Conception School, had around 130 children enrolled.

Haiti doesn't have the construction equipment usually necessary to build large structures, so the people have to gather small boulders from the riverbed and lay a rock foundation. Concrete is then hand-mixed and poured in among the rocks.

Drew Garvey, a sophomore at Southeast, was another student who went on the mission trip to Haiti.

"My favorite moment was being able to hang out and play with a friend that I made, Joseph, who was a year old. We connected, and I felt like I could care for him," Garvey said.

The group also cared for the elderly in Haiti. Most of them were too weak to work for food, and when it came down to feeding either the elderly or the children, the children were always the first choice. The group met one woman who had such severe pain in her legs that she did not leave her hut for nearly three years.

"My favorite moment was when we were visiting one of the elderly women," Essner said. "She had been laying in her bed for three years because she had so much pain in her legs that she literally could not move. One day, one of the missionaries that was serving at the orphanage went to visit her and he brought her some Tylenol. The Tylenol took all the pain away and she got up for the first time ever. Well she's sitting there talking to us and she still has a lot of pain in her legs and all she does is sit inside her hut and spend all day praying. And she's like everyday, I thank God for this day."

After all the work, the group got to spend a day on the beach. They got to relax and swim in the Caribbean Sea.

"It looked like it almost wasn't real, like a postcard," Rainey said.

According to Rainey, the people in Haiti don't have a lot of material possessions. They spend a lot more time focusing on surviving, their faith and spending time with each other. Experiencing this for a week had an impact on the CCM missionaries that traveled to Haiti.

"I learned that simplicity is the key to an authentic, full life," Essner said.

Rainey believes that people should be more grateful for things like a shower or running water. What the group did to bathe was either bathe themselves in the river or pour a bucket over themselves.

"I learned to be more thankful about everything -- thankful that I have a meal, technically three square meals a day," Garvey said. "I learned to be thankful for what I have and that life is beautiful and there's a lot of good things, there's a lot of good people, there's a lot of things that can be done, that should be done."

The spring break mission trips have been going on for decades and will continue in the future. Some are in domestic areas such as Chicago or Detroit while others are international like Mexico or Haiti. Next year's location has not been revealed.

For information on how to get involved with Catholic Campus Ministry, check out its website at ccmin.org or like SEMO Catholic Campus Ministry on Facebook.