Brenda Hamilton hasn’t been the same since she traveled to Haiti earlier this year.

And the Rev. Noe Bernier is delighted by her transformation.

Hamilton of Waldoboro is a member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle. She visited Port au Prince, the Caribbean nation’s capital, in January a few weeks before violence broke out.

Haiti is known as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

“There is clarity of vision that happens in Haiti,” Hamilton wrote earlier this year for a publication read by Episcopalians around Maine. “In places where people are starving, life is pared down to its barest essentials and priorities become clear.”

During Bernier’s visit to Maine, Hamilton, a former social worker, met with him to discuss her next mission trip to Haiti, scheduled for November.

Conditions in Haiti have deteriorated since her last visit.

“It is easy to hear the voice of God in Haiti,” Hamilton wrote. “‘Feed my sheep ….’ Well, there they are in front of you, hungry. The difficult part is when you have to leave that kind of clarity and enter the confusion of modern life in the United States.”

Bernier, 32, is an Episcopal priest who oversees churches and schools in and around Cap Haitian, a city in northern Haiti. He was in Bangor earlier this week to raise money and urge people to work in his country.

With the rebel uprising that forced Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of power and out of the country in February, the government has changed leadership. Devastating floods and mudslides last month killed more than 1,500 Haitians and displaced 75,000 to 100,000 people.

Although other clergy are part of the new government, Bernier said, he is not involved in politics.

“My job is preaching the Gospel and doing social work and that’s enough,” he said.

The father of three young children grew up in the Episcopal Church, a small denomination with about 100,000 members out of the 10 million people who live in Haiti. When Bernier was 10, the Rev. Stephen Davenport visited Bernier’s parish and encouraged the boy to become a priest. Davenport and other Americans helped pay for his education.

Bernier said his monthly salary of $150 puts him in the small group that makes up his country’s middle class. Teachers at his church-run school make $55 a month. A $100 donation can send a child to school for a year, he said.

A majority of Haitians, however, live in desperate poverty. Each month, many try to enter the United States illegally by making the dangerous 600-mile crossing to Florida on homemade rafts.

“Life is so hard in Haiti, people tend to leave and try to get to the United States,” Bernier said Tuesday, “but [the U.S. government] sends them back really fast. [Haitians] can’t send their children to school. They can’t eat every day. They think [the United States] is the land of God.”

Maine’s Episcopal diocese has had a formal relationship with the Haitian diocese since 2000. The diocese raises money from church members in Maine to support churches, schools and orphanages in Haiti.

In a visit Tuesday with parishioners at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Brewer, Bernier said that money sent through church organizations does not go through government officials. Because of corruption, little state aid sent to Haiti from government agencies filters down to the people who need it most, he said.

For information about making donations to the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, call the Episcopal Diocese of Maine at 772-1953.