Student stories from 2011

Medical team brings more than healing to Haiti

Don Graham
IMB

She doesn’t remember much, but Louphine Demorcy won’t ever forget the sound — like a runaway freight train roaring beneath her feet.

“I heard the voice of the earthquake coming,” says the 31-year-old mother of three. “I called out for Jesus to save me.”

The next thing Demorcy knew she was lying under a pile of broken concrete that used to house her small sundries shop. It was Jan. 13 — the morning after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake slammed Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Demorcy tried to move but couldn’t. One of her arms had been crushed and pinned by a chunk of concrete the size of a dishwasher. A leg also was trapped under rubble. The pain was excruciating. She screamed for help, pleading for a doctor.

A couple of months later Demorcy sits quietly under a tree at a field hospital near Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic. Merry Holt, a 62 year-old nurse from First Baptist Church, Norfolk, Va., kneels beside her, gently wrapping fresh bandages around Demorcy’s right arm, amputated above the elbow, and left leg, amputated above the knee.

There to help
Holt is part of a six-member medical team that’s come to Haiti through Baptist Global Response, a non-profit disaster relief and development organization supported by Southern Baptists.

Demorcy is grateful she didn’t lose more than her limbs. Her children were not hurt in the earthquake, and thanks to volunteers like Holt, her wounds are nearly healed. Soon she’ll be fitted with prostheses that will improve her quality of life.

“Nurse Merry is always an encouragement to me,” Demorcy says. “She tries to get me to overcome the situation that I’m in. She always sings with us and tries to keep stress from overwhelming us.”

Once she’s finished changing bandages, Holt stays true to her reputation, taking time to teach a song to Demorcy and other patients before moving on to the next row of tents. Smiles spread across patients’ faces as they sing; Holt’s beams with affection.

“I’m amazed at what God does through the smallest little gesture,” she says. “There is so much hope in this camp. More today than when I arrived … because the physical healing is taking place, and their souls are being healed, too. … I’m so blessed to be a part of it.”

Scene out of M*A*S*H*
The field hospital where Holt’s team is working is known as the Disaster Recovery Center (DRC). It is run by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and feels a bit like a scene from the ‘70s TV show M*A*S*H* with the buzz of helicopters ferrying patients to and fro.

Despite its amenities — including wireless Internet access — working conditions at the DRC are challenging. The heat is intense. Outside temperatures top 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside patients’ tents it can reach 115. Constant wind makes the heat more bearable, but it also coats everything with a fine dust — less than sterile conditions, especially for patients with skin grafts and large, open wounds.

Sweat begins to roll down Kerri Dewitz’s forehead as she steps inside a tent on the children’s ward to check on 13-year-old Junior Renaud. Doctors were forced to amputate three-quarters of Renaud’s right foot when a deep wound he received during the earthquake became badly infected.

Holding out his foot, Renaud grins when he sees Dewitz, a 43-year-old pediatric nurse from Cove Church in Hampton Cove, Ala. “This kid is always smiling,” she laughs. Before changing his dressing, Dewitz washes his feet, an experience she calls “spiritual.”

“I feel God with me every time I wash a patient’s feet … I can’t help but think about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples,” she says. Dewitz joined the BGR team when she felt God calling her to Haiti. It is her first international mission trip.

“I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world,” she says. “It’s life changing.”

Broken bones on the mend
James Rogers, a 60-year-old pharmacist, and his wife, Brenda, from Hermitage Hills Baptist Church in Hermitage, Tenn., are leading the BGR team. He takes advantage of a slow moment to visit his favorite patient, Weber Joachim, whose leg was badly broken.

Metal rods protrude from the 58-year-old general contractor’s left leg. The tinker-toy-like rods are known as an external fixator that holds the bones in position so they heal correctly. It likely saved him from an amputation, but the rods are painful.

Rogers visits Joachim nearly every day to pray with him and read the Bible. Today he’s brought more than Scripture. Rogers carries scraps of a two-by-four to level Joachim’s cot, which is slanting steeply downhill. He also gives Joachim a gift — a pair of size 12 shoes. Joachim’s only pair was stolen several days ago, forcing him to walk around the hospital barefoot.

Joachim says Rogers has the “heart of Jesus,” but the pharmacist gently dismisses the compliment.

“We’re ordinary people,” he says. “Don’t assume you can’t be used by God because He will find an opportunity to use the ability that you have.”

No swanky hotels
Hard work isn’t the only sacrifice volunteers like Roger have made to serve here. Volunteers sleep on the ground in tents and take baths in a bucket. Rice and beans — a Haitian staple — is on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Malaria, tuberculosis and scabies are all health risks for the volunteers, as is heat stroke if they don’t stay hydrated.

But no one on the team doubts the sacrifice is worth it. Back in Virginia Beach, Holt writes about breaking down in tears while singing with the choir during her first Sunday back at her home church, First Baptist Church, Norfolk, Va.

“We began to sing How Great Thou Art,” she writes in an e-mail. “It was then that it hit me. I saw Louphine’s [Demorcy] face, no arm, one leg … and I began to cry. … Count your blessings, and don’t ever forget that while we thought we were a blessing to them, how much they were to us.”

Demorcy won’t forget the day Haiti’s earthquake took her limbs. And she’s not likely to forget the people who helped her take back her independence either, or the God that brought them.

“I know God is a God that always make a way, even when there is no way,” she says. “If I did not believe in Him I would not be here today … May His name be glorified.”

Act

Give
100 percent of your gift will be used for meeting needs of earthquake victims in Haiti if you give through these channels.

• Haiti Response Fund, IMB
• Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, Baptist Global Response

Volunteer

• E-mail: E-mail haitiresponse@imb.org. Indicate your name and contact information, what skills you have and when you are available. Southern Baptists interested in donating supplies or offering other assistance also can send an e-mail to this address.
• Contact your church or state Baptist convention to learn about other Haiti projects they may be planning.

Contact the creative team

• E-mail writer Don Graham don.graham3@gmail.com
• E-mail photographer Joseph Rose joseph.rose78@gmail.com.

Haiti: the sweet smell of sweat

Don Graham
International Mission Board

Andre Dorlette smiles as he scans the heap of shattered concrete and twisted rebar that used to be his family’s home. Perched on a hillside near Port-au-Prince, the house represented the life savings of the 61-year-old cobbler and father of four — gone, he says, “in the blink of an eye” when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti Jan. 12.

To anyone else, the scene would be heartbreaking. But Dorlette isn’t focused on the rubble; his eyes are on the team of Georgia Baptist college students helping him clean up and start over.

Flying debris
Chunks of concrete fly as Billy Chanaberry pounds a sledgehammer into the remains of Dorlette’s roof, a six-inch-thick slab of reinforced concrete that flattened the single-story home when its supports crumbled. Chanaberry is one of 11 guys from Middle Georgia College in Cochran, Ga., who sacrificed their spring break to clear debris from damaged homes like Dorlette’s.

“If Jesus sacrificed His life for us, then we should sacrifice our lives,” says Chanaberry, a 22-year-old math major, who, until now, had never been on a mission trip, left the country or flown on an airplane.

The work is brutal. For Dorlette to rebuild, the team must demolish the home down to its foundation. There are no power tools; all the work is done using sledgehammers, mallets and pickaxes. And that’s only half the job.

After painstakingly crushing the concrete into football-sized pieces, the team must move the rubble, using only five-gallon buckets and a few wheelbarrows, more than 100 yards down a steep, narrow path to the street below. There, it’s loaded on a dump truck. The job site bakes under the blistering Haitian sun as temperatures reach more than 95 degrees.

Haitian-American teamwork
Haitian volunteers from First Baptist Church of Carrefour, where Dorlette serves as a deacon, work alongside the Georgia students. “Ahhh-OO! Ahhh-OO!” the students chant with each swing of a sledgehammer to cheer each other on.

It’s no small irony that the hillside where they’re working overlooks the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. The view represents what spring break might have been like, but Kevin Oni doesn’t give it a second thought.

“Ten million people can go to the beach, but how many can say they went to Haiti and worked? I feel like I’m not giving enough,” says 19-year-old Oni, a mechanical engineering major.

Joseph West understands what Dorlette is going through. His Cobb County, Ga., home was left uninhabitable last fall after days of heavy rain flooded parts of Atlanta.

“One afternoon I got a call from my sister who said that our house had been flooded and that my family had to be evacuated by a boat,” says the 23-year-old criminal justice major.

Hard labor with eternal value
Sweat drips from West’s face, soaking his shirt as he passes buckets of broken concrete along the human conveyor belt moving rubble to the bottom of the hill. But the students’ sweat is exactly what team leader Tracey Deavers is after.

“It’s a sweet smelling aroma to God’s nostrils,” says Deavers, the Baptist collegiate minister at Middle Georgia College. “These people don’t need a tract in their hand right now. They need to see the love of God.”

But Deavers adds that Haitians aren’t the only lives being impacted by the students’ labor.

“When we go out to be the hands and feet of Christ, we really begin to deepen our own personal relationship with Him,” he explains. “I hope these students get a bigger worldview, that they understand that there’s a world out there that’s so much larger than Cochran or Atlanta or wherever they’re from, and they realize that they can actually make a difference. … I hope these guys will leave [Haiti] and forever be lifelong missionaries.”

Home away from home
Rank with sweat and covered with sunscreen and dust, the students head “home” to First Baptist Church of Carrefour, which is hosting the team. After a grueling day’s work, there’s no hot shower or soft bed waiting for them.

They bathe using a bucket of cold water. They sleep in tents on the church’s concrete roof. But no one complains. After seeing the poverty and disaster around them, they’re grateful for a simple Haitian meal of rice and beans and a little time to unwind.

Some find the energy to play soccer with the neighborhood kids in the alley next to the church. Even on the job site, many of them use their breaks to play with the children who watch. Matthew Middleton, a 23-year-old airport management and logistics double major, admits the language barrier is frustrating, but everyone “understands a smile.”

“I’ve never experienced poverty of the magnitude that I’ve seen here, and you don’t really escape it. It’s everywhere. You’re totally immersed in it,” Middleton says. “… as bad as things may be, they still laugh, they still smile, they still have hope — they still live. It’s inspiring and it’s something that I hope I take back with me to the States.”

United in prayer
On their last day together, the Georgia students and Haitian volunteers huddle in a giant circle where Dorlette’s home once stood. Dorlette stands in the center with tears in his eyes as the teams pray for him and his family.

It took them four days to accomplish what a bulldozer and front-end loader could have done in four hours, but that isn’t the point. Working together with the Haitians, the students moved a whopping 35 tons of reinforced concrete — by hand.

“I feel like I am alive again,” Dorlette says. “As the Apostle Paul said in the Bible, whether Jew or Greek, we are all one in Christ. … God sent my brothers from America to come to help in Haiti.

“God is a great God. Even though the wealth that I had is gone, I have life. And hope again. … When you serve God, everything is possible.”

Video coming soon! Click “View” in the window above to see…

• GALLERY: Four days of hard labor

Act

Give
100 percent of your gift will be used for meeting needs of earthquake victims in Haiti.

• Haiti Response Fund, IMB
• Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, Baptist Global Response

Volunteer

• E-mail: E-mail haitiresponse@imb.org. Indicate your name and contact information, what skills you have and when you are available. Southern Baptists interested in donating supplies or offering other assistance also can send an e-mail to this address.

Chile interrupted

B.J. Paschal, a senior history and political science major at Arkansas Tech University, had planned to spend spring break in Chile teaching first aid classes to the Mapuche people. The Feb. 27 earthquake and tsunami changed B.J.’s plans. Instead he spent the week building shelters for people who had lost their homes.

B.J. went to Chile with a team from Second Baptist Church in Russellville, Ark. The church has committed to help International Mission Board missionaries reach the Mapuche people group through prayer and repeat mission trips to the area.

Here are excerpts from his reflections on his experience:

It started with a text message
Why I came on the trip? Well, God has put missions on my heart through our BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries). I’ve helped out a lot on their local missions. … I headed up our local missions there at the Baptist Collegiate Ministries. So, missions is something that I love doing. I like to work whenever I can. And, this trip, Brother Bobby, our pastor, he sent me a text message over Christmas break, and asked me if I had thought much about going to Chile.

The money thing
I had thought a little bit about it. But you know I’m a college kid — it’s kind of the whole money thing. That was probably really the biggest thing that was making me hesitant from the very beginning. I told him, you know, the money thing is a kind of a little bit of an ordeal. He said, don’t worry about it. … Money thing aside, would you go? Yeah, I was like, I would go. I’d love to go and help out. So that’s what I did. There were about about three or four families from the church at Second Baptist that sent me here. And, so, I’m very grateful for that. It’s been a great experience so far.

A place to stay
Right now, we’re standing behind the bodega. This, here, is a bodega, which is like a warehouse storefront. … This one was a warehouse. That’s where we’re staying, we’re staying here in the warehouse.

The stuff here that’s beside me — there’s a wall that was actually in the process of being built when the earthquake hit, and it crumbled some of it. Since we’ve been here, we’ve been building relief shelters for those affected by the earthquake and the tsunami. Those in the coastal regions, mainly. … I’ve heard, they are still struggling … So, that’s why we’ve been building these shelters and taking them there to those guys.

Showing, not telling … yet
Missions, when you think of missions, you think of, you know, going door to door and sharing the Gospel. And, that’s all great and good. … To be quite honest with you, I’ve not shared my faith with a person yet, and we’ve been here for three days. And, the reason I haven’t is because I’ve been building the whole time. …

But there’s going to be families that get it. And they’re going to be asking, hey, why are we getting this? And even if there is the smallest seed planted, you know, well, we’re Christians, and we love you and Christ loves you. And, we want to give you this. We want to help you out because we love you. Well, why do you love me? Because Christ loves you.

And even if a question comes out of that, what about this Christ? That’s what it’s all about.

Chilean church takes the evening shift
Last night, for instance, we headed out probably about 7, went and got showers, had a little dinner and got back maybe around 10. When we got back, there were about 15 guys that had picked up. I guess when we left, they got here. One of the pastors had called his congregation and said, hey, come build. And they worked until midnight last night. And, so, just to see their passion for other people. It’s their own people.

It’s about people
What it’s about is, you know, the people around you. Your ministry is who is around you. It doesn’t matter if you’re in Chile or Arkansas or anywhere else. Your ministry is to the people who are around you. God’s put you there for a reason and you can minister to people by sharing your faith, by building shelters for them, even opening a door for somebody. Just any way to show Christ’s love — that’s ministry.

What you do has a major impact. My uncle is a football coach down in Monticello [Ark.]High School — the Monticello Billies. And, if there’s probably one person in my life that’s had the biggest impact on me, it’s probably been him, just for the way that he shares his faith in the things that he does, not necessarily in the things that he says. Not to say that he doesn’t share in the things that he says, but it’s more the things that he does. It’s the things that he walks and does. …

I’ve seen the way that his mission field is Monticello Public High School right now. … And I’ve tried to take that model, his model that I’ve seen from him, and the model that Christ displayed for us of having time for people. Christ was never too busy for people. He always had time to talk.

Too wired for face time
I know, for me, that’s one of the biggest things that gets a hold of me is my cell phone or my e-mail or my Facebook or something that I’ve got to go and get to or appointments that I’ve got to make, and I forget about the people around me. While I’m walking down the street, checking my cell phone, there’s 10 people that pass me. And, I’ve told people this before, I wish people would have signs that say either Saved or Lost because I think we would act so differently. If we saw a sign — Lost — that would totally change our perspective. But that’s how Christ looked at people, as sinners who needed time.

I think that is part of what drives me personally … knowing that the one thing that you do have … you do have a voice, you can change where someone is going to spend eternity.

Timeline for eternity
I like to think about things on a timeline, I’m a history buff. If you were to draw a timeline that stretched from this hand to this hand, about this much of it would be now, would be my lifetime, and the rest, the eternity that would keep going on both ways… That little bit right there can have an effect on somebody, on where they are going to spend eternity.

Just the love that people have poured out onto me has transformed me. And it’s Christ love, without a doubt. And that love has transformed who I am, and now I want to do the same thing because there’s power in it. I know there’s power in it.

Act

Read more on response to the quakes in Chile and Haiti in the summer issue of CommissionStories tabloid. Subscribe for free.

Find updates and links to blogs on the three missionary families who work with the Mapuche on the Mapuche team’s prayer blog.

Volunteer to go to Chile to help.  E-mail imb@imb.org. Indicate your name and contact information, what skills you have and when you are available. Southern Baptists interested in donating supplies or offering other assistance also can send an e-mail to this address.

Online donations can be made in three ways:

• Chile Response Fund, IMB
• Chile Earthquake Relief Fund, Baptist Global Response
• Text: Donations of $10 can be made by texting “CHILE” to 40579. The donation will be added to your cell phone bill. Your donation will go to Chile Earthquake Relief Fund, Baptist Global Response.
  

100 percent of your gift will be used for meeting needs of earthquake victims in Chile.

Voodoo priest’s son leads other Haitians to Christ

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‘No bottled answers:’
Haitians ask volunteers ‘what do I do’ now?

IMB Staff

What do I do?” the Haitian man asked helplessly. The Jan. 12 earthquake had destroyed his home and taken the lives of his wife and two children. He was living out of a suitcase.

Butch Vernon, pastor of Thoroughbred Community Church in Nicholasville, Ky., struggled to answer the man’s question. Vernon was in Haiti as a volunteer with a Kentucky Baptist disaster relief team.

“I’m not asked that question a lot back in the States, you know?” said Vernon, his voice cracking with emotion.

“It’s not one of those deals where you can say, ‘take two [Bible] verses and call me in the morning. It’s the only time I’m going to see that guy, and there are no bottled answers.

“I prayed with him and I hugged him, and we gave him some medicine that won’t fix [his problems], but it made him feel better,” he added. “We’re seeing a lot of that.”

Teams on the ground in Haiti
From Jan. 31 to Feb. 8, Vernon and the Kentucky team joined forces with a Mississippi Baptist disaster relief team. They were part of a coordinated effort among the Florida Baptist Convention, which has a long-standing relationship with Haitian Baptists; Baptist Global Response, a Southern Baptist relief and development agency; the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board.

The toughest part for a volunteer is accepting that you can’t help everyone, said Daniel Edney, who directed the medical response efforts with the Mississippi disaster relief team.

“But we can take care of those who God puts in front of us,” said Edney, a member of First Baptist Church, Vicksburg, Miss., who had led relief teams in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami.

“When those you help walk out with a smile on their face, you know you’ve done something.”

When the Mississippi volunteers pulled up to a church on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, they were surprised to see people praising and worshipping God — so many of them were struggling to get by without food and water.

“It was a neat thing to drive up and hear them singing and praising the Lord and worshipping,” said Kay Cassibry, Mississippi’s state WMU executive director who led the 10-member relief team.

“They have been so receptive,” added Cassibry, a member of Highland Colony Baptist Church in Ridgeland. “People do not know us, but they are receptive to our hugs and everything.”

Many helped during week
During the week, the Mississippi team helped at makeshift medical clinics and saw more than 1,100 patients.

“We have treated all kinds of things,” said Cassibry, while walking through one of the clinics. “There were a lot of respiratory problems, a lot of infection. We had to set a couple of bones.

“We’ve got a guy on an IV,” she added. “He asked for a Bible as soon as he woke up. We were pretty excited about that.”

For Hester Pitts, another Mississippi volunteer, the biggest blessings were the thank you letters she received from Haitians.

“I know what it means for us to be here,” said Pitts, a member of First Baptist Church of Vicksburg, “but [these letters are] tangible evidence of what it means for them.”

Pitts admitted her life-changing trip to Haiti was almost a missed opportunity.

Vacation interrupted to serve
She was on vacation with her husband, Kerry, and two other couples in Tampa, Fla., when she was contacted about joining the relief team. Pitts — a retired medical technologist — admitted she wanted to wait until later to volunteer, but she couldn’t shake her burden for Haiti.

Pitts agreed to go to Haiti immediately and asked others in her vacation group if they wanted to join her. One of her friends, David Baldwin, broke down in tears.

“He said, ‘Hester, I’ve been sitting here praying that God would open that door for me to go,’” Pitts said. “I could not believe it.”

Within two hours, the couples were on the road back to Mississippi so that Baldwin and Pitts could prepare for their trip. For Pitts, giving up her vacation was an opportunity of a lifetime.

“I’m just thankful that I didn’t miss the experience,” she said. “I came so close to telling God ‘no.’”

Act

Give
100 percent of your gift will be used for meeting needs of earthquake victims in Haiti.

• Haiti Response Fund, IMB
• Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund, Baptist Global Response

Pray

• CompassionNet: Watch for daily prayer updates.
• Twitter: To watch for latest updates from the Haiti follow @IMBconnecting. Please use #haitiprayer for your updates and prayers.
• Blog: Join those adding their prayers to the IMB Prayer Director blog.

Volunteer

• E-mail: E-mail haitiresponse@imb.org. Indicate your name and contact information, what skills you have and when you are available. Southern Baptists interested in donating supplies or offering other assistance also can send an e-mail to this address.

Share

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• Running the race
• A servant’s heart
• Not forgotten

Learn more on the Web

• Great Commission Kentucky: Read more reports from the Kentucky team.
• IMB.org: Watch for more news from Haiti.