Even with cancer, Vernon Hills woman focused on helping Haiti
As she lay ill with cancer, its treatment taking a toll, Ruth Paul Caudle admonished visitors who began to cry.
“She would send people back home — ‘Don't cry for me, there are people in Haiti who don't have anything,'” said her brother, Jude Paul. “It's not only a loss for people who knew her. She touched so many lives. It's beyond what we can explain.”
True to form, the Vernon Hills resident and native of Haiti had her mind on others even as the illness that was supposed to have taken her nearly three years ago progressed.
Her death on Feb. 24 at age 39 leaves a blank for the many who considered her an inspiration.
“With my wife, Christ was her center and her example. The legacy she wanted to leave our kids is we live our lives to help other people,” said her husband, Brian.
And that meant giving with no expectations, be it paying for surgery for a fellow cancer patient or raising funds to buy a new vehicle for a friend who had to shuttle kids in a battered van with a broken window.
But the focus of the woman who raised $20,000 to build a school near her hometown and tens of thousands more to reduce poverty, improve education and other causes, always has been on the little ones — be it her own or others.
Brian recalled her standard answer to why she didn't slow down: “I'm the voice of those children. If I don't speak for them, who will?”
Friends and family described her as a determined, make-it-happen type of person who was constantly finding ways of helping others, even as she dealt with her own illness.
“She had a very positive energy and positive spirit about her,” said Linda Sones, a neighbor and best friend.
“She was not an author but she wrote a beautiful book,” Sones' husband, Todd, said of one of the many fundraising avenues Caudle engineered to help those in her native country and at The Spirit of Truth School she founded there.
Linda Sones accompanied Caudle to Haiti in April 2010, three months after the massive earthquake, to distribute tents and supplies.
Libertyville Elementary District 70 learned of Caudle's cause, and students and staffers raised nearly $15,000 for her school, which had been heavily damaged.
Rockland School third-grade teacher Dale List worked on “A Caring Community Helping Haiti” project. Despite meeting Caudle only once, she came away with a lasting impression.
“The love that she generated was unbelievable and her smile was so beautiful,” List said. “She just emitted caring and love and concern for others. Her gratefulness to us was so genuine, she truly had a belief in what she was doing.”
Caudle's effort to help those in her home country brought significant media attention, but she never mentioned her own condition.
In 2009, shoulder pain led to a devastating diagnosis: Stage 4 cancer that had spread to major organs.
“She would have nothing of it,” Todd Sones said. “While she was here, she was going to do the best she could every day.”
Caudle grew up amid poverty in a town about an hour south of Port-au-Prince. Her father, Edner Paul, was a pastor who started an orphanage in Guibert, near where the family of 12 kids was raised.
She left Haiti as a teenager to attend Lake Forest College and married Brian Caudle in 1998. After her father died the following year, the couple made it a mission to build the school as a complement to the orphanage. It opened in 2003 with about 40 students through third grade and now houses more than 500 students through high school.
Last fall, she started a microlending program for farmers in Haiti and partnered with her brother, Jude, to open a new school and church.
“They know that she brings hope,” he said. “Back home, people are crying.”
Besides her husband, she is survived by three children, Corey, 12, Kayla, 10, and Sophie, 6; her mother, Auxanne; and 11 brothers and sisters.
Visitation is 5 to 9 p.m. Friday at Christ Church of Lake Forest, 100 N. Waukegan Road, Lake Forest. Funeral services are at 10 a.m. Saturday at the church.
Donations to the Ruth Paul Caudle Memorial Fund can be made to Renew Hope Inc., 122 W. 67th St., Westmont, 60559, or visit http://www.renewhopehaiti.com/contact-us.