A former Windsor-area priest who was missing in Haiti made a long-awaited call home on the weekend to say he is alive.

No one had heard from Rev. René Giroux, 77, since Tuesday's magnitude 7.0 earthquake.

"Thank god our prayers were answered," said Vera Arkell, who took a short call from Giroux on Sunday. "He just said he was okay ... had some water and I think he said a little bit of rice and that was about all."

Giroux has lived in Port-au-Prince for 25 years where he has worked to set up schools, nutrition programs and health centres in the city's shantytowns.

'He couldn't get a hold of anybody, so he turned around and just started working'— Mark Adkinson, Roman Catholic Diocese of London

"All I heard him say — it was very staticky — but he said that things are really bad, I don't know what's going to happen," said Arkell, who co-ordinates Giroux's mission out of LaSalle, Ont.

Friends, colleagues and former parishioners at each of 120 churches in the Catholic Diocese of London had offered prayers that Giroux survived the quake and would eventually call.

Priest sleeping in the streets

"It's par for the course for him," said Mark Adkinson, spokesman for the diocese. "He just sounds like he couldn't get a hold of anybody, so he turned around and just started working."

Giroux continues to try to help the people of his adopted country, said Adkinson, and is sleeping in the streets with his parishioners from St.Michele Church in Caillou, near Port-au-Prince. The diocese had hoped Giroux would make his way to the Canadian Embassy to get food, water and shelter.

"He's a little worried, at 77, that he wouldn't have the stamina to make his way through the rubble and the hills in-between his location and the embassy," said Adkinson. "So he's staying put for now."

Giroux runs four schools in Haiti, educating 1,200 poor children at a cost of $100,000 a year.

That money is raised in Windsor and Essex County.

Now those same Ontario parishioners are gathering donations to support earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.