Having spent 30 years treating local children as a New Iberia pediatrician, Dr. Mike Halphen and his wife, Tommye, are living proof that retirement can serve as an even better means of bringing help to those less fortunate than many locals could comprehend.

Since his retirement in the ’90s, Mike and Tommye Halphen have spent much of their time traveling to various places, volunteering and reaching out to impoverished children in the United States, Mexico and most recently Haiti.

The Haiti mission has grown so close to their hearts that Mike Halphen has involved the New Iberia Kiwanis Club in bringing help to an impoverished Haitian community in the form of goats.

Tommye and Mike Halphen look at pictures from a recent missionary trip to Haiti. The New Iberia couple are helping bring goats and other necessities to a poor village of Kobonal, Haiti. Heather Miller / The Daily Iberian Advertisement

The mission was started about 20 years ago and is run by the Rev. Glenn Meaux, a Catholic priest in Abbeville.

It began by building a school that serves 1,200 children, some of whom walk six or seven miles every day to attend. But the mission has since expanded to offering lost of other help to families and locals in the region.

One of the goals is to make the community more self-sufficient, said Tommye Halphen, so the mission began giving families a female pig to mate with a male. The family gives half of the litter back to the mission, then keeps the other half as a source of meat.

“(Meaux) is very enterprising, and he thought maybe we could further the project with goats,” Mike Halphen said. “There aren’t a lot of meat sources in Haiti, and pigs and goats seem to be the easiest to raise.”

After visiting Haiti twice to help with the mission over the past two years, Mike and Tommye Halphen have been herding New Iberia and surrounding area Kiwanis Clubs to come up with money for the mission to purchase goats for the Haitian community.

Since the soliciting started, the club has been able to collect enough for about 45 goats for the priest to purchase in the Dominican Republic and send to Haitian families.

“The goat thing is just part of the total picture of the mission,” Mike Halphen said. “I think its something the Kiwanis Club can help with. The poverty in Haiti is hard for people here to understand.”

With an unemployment rate nearing 70 percent, Mike Halphen said poverty levels in Haiti “make Welfare recipients here look rich.”

“What the priest has done there is mind-boggling,” Mike Halphen said. “The mission’s grown by leaps and bounds.”

Though the Halphens have shifted their focus to Haiti in recent years, the two also have spent time volunteering in several other places before Haiti including a year in Oregon with AmeriCorps Vista, two trips to Mexico and a nine-week stay in Appalachia to work at a camp for underprivileged children.

“People always say how great it was for us to spend a year volunteering in Oregon, but little do they know what a wonderful year it was for us,” Tommye Halphen said. “At our age, each day is a new day. These (missions) are an adventure for us.”

The two recalled their first flight into the Haitian community, where they boarded a small plane from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, flew over mountains, then landed in a grassy strip of land where children and goats had to be shooed out of the way before the plane touched ground.

“It’s a challenge,” Mike Halphen said. “We get to have new experiences and enjoy other cultures. We’ve been so fortunate with everything in our lives, and not many people are able to do what we can because of so many circumstances that come up.”