Jean Hugues Desir

You do not have to spend long around Fr. Jean-Hughes Desir to notice the smile. For a lot of people, it is the first thing they remember about him.

He speaks four languages, writes and delivers his own sermons, and can pick up a guitar and have a whole room singing along. But talent is not the thing people reach for when they describe him. He has a way of making a room feel lighter, and years in ministry have earned him the same handful of words again and again: warm, humble, personable, and spiritually uplifting, a man with a big heart who folds a little humor into his homilies and means every word of it.

He grew up in Limbe, in northern Haiti, one of four children, and some of his earliest memories are of going to Mass with his mother, every single day. He came to the United States as a young man, mostly to see the country, and he loved it. But somewhere in that new life he felt something was missing, and what he kept circling back to was the Church he had been raised in. He decided to return to it, this time as a leader, and was ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 2004. Being here has never meant forgetting where he came from. "I feel very blessed because I'm here," he once said. "But because I feel blessed I can't just forget my country and my people. I pray for my people every day."

The years since have carried him from Ocala to Clermont and now to Kissimmee, and the people he leaves behind tend to say the same thing, that they will miss him. What stays with Fr. Jean is never the buildings, it is the people, the ones he once called a lovely family. At St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, where he now serves as pastor, that shows up most clearly in a mission he has thrown himself into: feeding the hungry, growing the parish food pantry into something larger, a place to gather and to eat, built on a line he keeps close, to build community and defeat hunger with love. For all the languages and the years and the miles, what he does has always come back to something plain. "I trust in the Lord," he says. "Doing this work, I feel more close to God."