Alumni Part of AIM’s First Wave Response in Haiti

A detailed description of each team member can be found on Steph’s blog. There were six of us on the Alumni team: Aaron Bruner, Jacob Hoyer, Sarah Diederich, Stephanie Tyrna, Ashley Musick, who served as our leader, and myself. Tonya Norman, also a WR alumna, led a smaller logistics/set-up team consisting of Jennifer Smith, Paul Hoyt and Paul Young; the four of them stayed in the DR/Haiti a few days longer and went into Port-au-Prince. 

At various points of the afternoon on Thursday, January 21st, each of us arrived in Santo Domingo. Jack Larson and his staff scooped us up and brought us to a hotel for the night. In the undeserved and unexpected luxury of our two room suite, after a pizza dinner, Jack shared some of the history of his ministry, Mision Emanuel. He summed up the twenty (thirty?) years of serving the Lord and His people in the outskirts of the city as “just trying to do the next right thing.” 

The water filtration and bottling plant, which gave us 5,000 bottles of water to take with us to the border, has blessed the next generation. Jack said that the clinic, which his ministry built, saw an 80% decrease of children coming in – and that was a good thing, because the clean water dramatically reduced cases of diarrhea. Mision Emanuel is where the poor and vulnerable – namely, undocumented Haitian immigrants – seek care and refuge. This is where marginalized can get dental care (which once proved life-saving), vaccinations, medicine, physical therapy and education. 

All this is the fruit not of any sort of expertise and experience but of going out on a limb in faith. We were so blessed by this ministry’s hospitality to and partnership with us. 

En route to Jimani, we picked up Pastor Raul and members of his church in Azua. This is where Steph and Tonya’s team from the H-Squad (January 2009) spent their first month of the World Race. A couple of members of this church – Chino and Ignacio – are Haitians who’ve lived in the Dominican Republic for a long time and were crucial in translating Creole into Spanish. Esperanza is studying to be a nurse. Kelvin and Eliezar who are in their early twenties also came to lend a hand, mostly as translators (Spanish and English) and like us, to lend a hand in any capacity. 

Our desire is to partner with and empower the local church and on the Dominican side of the border, we partnered with Iglesia de Dios – Pentecostal in Jimani. This church already has its hands full with caring for thirty orphans. Since refugees from Port-au-Prince started pouring into this town, this church has been moving even faster – doing what they can to reach out to the refugees as well as hosting teams from all over. 

Our ministry was to ease as much of the burden of the young women of this church who’ve been on their feet in the kitchen most of the day making gallons of soup for distribution to hospital patients and their families and the displaced refugees in the streets. When we weren’t in the kitchen or at the hospital or prayer walking through the streets, we became the orphans’ playgrounds. 

Chino consistently carried his Creole Bible around as we ministered in the streets. He was talking to the father/husband, Jean-Gabriel, of a family of three, and I just sat and listened with them. Thanks mostly to Raul, who also tried to connect them to a Haitian refugee center, we treated this family to lunch and assembled a small duffel bag of clothes and toiletries. Underneath the uncertainty of what lay ahead for them I saw a gritty, glimmering sense of gratitude that they were alive. 

God then gave us an opportunity to cross into Haiti, fifteen miles in from the border in a city called Fond Parisien. This is where we partnered with Pastor Prophete and his wife Bettie (Betty?) of Haitian Christian Mission (HCM). They too were already busy and got exponentially busier since the earthquake. We served this ministry by converting the chaos of the influx of donations that got overlooked in their busyness into orderly portions of food and goods for five Port-au-Prince pastors to distribute to their respective churches. The rest of the supplies were also apportioned for HCM to distribute to people. 

Thanks to your financial partnership, we were able to purchase large quantities of food – rice, beans, cooking oil – on behalf of HCM. We got to pray over patients who were waiting to be seen by the medical teams, visiting and on staff with HCM, and a couple of us assisted the medical team with triage. Esperanza got to help deliver a baby. 

(photo from Ashley Musick) 

After a couple days of ministry in Haiti (we would return to the DR for the night), our last full day of ministry was spent in Jimani. We returned to a Haitian church that Ashley and another teammate had previously visited; this church had become a makeshift hospital and mini-tent city. We prepared several gallons of hot chocolate to share with the patients and their families. 

This is where we met Francois and his family and heard the incredible story of how God spared Francois and his wife, who gave birth to their daughter just days after the earthquake. Read Aaron’s and Steph’s perspectives. Who knows how many more families, despite the still unknown death toll, were spared and need assistance in back on their feet? 

Our team was connected to the church in Jimani and HCM thanks largely to Miguel Shaul, director of AIM’s base in the DR. And now that we’ve caught just the small part of the beginning of the vision He has for restoring Haiti, it’s your turn. There wasn’t much that we had to initiate; we simply rode on the momentum that’s been multiplying. Now, we want to point you in the different directions that this movement is going. 

We were there for a week. Steph’s gonna be there for at least the rest of February. Aaron will go back and forth for as long as God sees fit. We challenge you to give God the one week, two weeks, one month or even longer and let Him multiply the seemingly small things you do and short window of time.