Margaret Trost was on her second visit to Haiti when the relationship between public policies and personal catastrophes became crystal clear to her.
Trost, 45, earned her master’s in journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked in production at WHA-TV. She first went to Haiti in early 2000 to try to find some meaning in her life after the sudden death of her husband from an asthma attack at their Cottage Grove home in September 1997.
While there, she discovered an opportunity to help a priest in Port-au-Prince start a lunch program for the very hungry children who inhabit this poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. A few months later, she was back trying to learn more.