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Getting the job done: Mission volunteers eager to return to Haiti Bill Fentum, Feb 5, 2010
UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY MIKE DUBOSE
A worker loads bags of rice into the United Methodist Committee on Relief truck at the Boutique Market in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. UMCOR is conducting a pilot project to feed 160 families in Mellier.
By Bill Fentum Staff Writer
The fragile infrastructure in Haiti—where roads and lines of communication were crumbling from neglect even before the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake—has plagued government efforts to reach survivors displaced to slums outside the city centers.
But Methodist churches deeply rooted in those neighborhoods will help fill the gap, delivering aid from the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR). A team from UMCOR traveled Jan. 21-30 in the island nation, to begin food distribution and clean-water projects with partnering agencies and leaders in the autonomous Methodist Church of Haiti.
It’s a model already seen in Africa, where UMCOR and the Côte d’Ivoire conference of the United Methodist Church launched a campaign in 2008 to fight malaria, distributing 700,000 insecticide-treated sleeping nets. The United Methodist global connection was at work, as churches in Côte d’Ivoire delivered the nets, together with mission volunteers from the Texas Conference.
“In Haiti we’re working alongside brothers and sisters in Christ,” said the Rev. Tom Hazelwood, an UMCOR executive. “We’ll build our capacity to serve, so that anyone who needs help will get it.”
Waiting to return
Even though the denomination lost its relief agency’s top executive, the Rev. Sam Dixon, and mission leader Clinton Rabb in the earthquake, their legacy of work continues among the least and the lost.
Hundreds of Americans serve in Haiti each year, for instance, through Volunteers in Mission (VIM), a program of the denomination’s General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM).
Though mission teams were evacuated from the country after the quake to ensure their safety, many volunteers have already asked about returning, says Bishop Joel Martinez, interim top executive of the missions board.
“We have already received an outpouring of inquiries and offers for volunteers to provide a variety of services,” Bishop Martinez said in a Jan. 20 statement. It’s not time to go back yet, he added.
“While we are encouraged by this spirit of support, we strongly advise that teams and others not set out for Haiti at this time. There will be great need for short-term and long-term volunteer mission groups in due course. . . . The time for volunteers will come, and their assistance will be crucial.”
And they have the connections to get the job done, unlike government agencies that are finding it difficult to get relief supplies into a country where the already-weak infrastructure has toppled.
United Methodist Patty Kauffman, for instance, has logged 17 mission trips to Haiti since 1996 as part of a covenant between the Wyoming Conference and the Methodist Church of Haiti. She was there when the quake hit, and returned to the U.S. two days later on a military transport plane.
“I was torn about coming home, but it was best to let professionals take care of clean-up and searching for people,” Ms. Kauffman said. “When I left I said, ‘As soon as you need me back, I’m there.”
Wyoming United Methodists work alongside Haitian Methodists, serving remote rural areas largely ignored by government agencies. Ms. Kauffman and others have built churches and schools on the southern coast, and helped with repairs after the region was hit hard in the 2007 hurricane season.
“To our knowledge, everything we’ve built is still standing,” said the Rev. Roger Richards, a pastor in the conference who chairs the partnership. “But if it all came down, our relationships with the church in Haiti continue.”
Mr. Richards had planned seven volunteer trips in 2010, but those have been put on hold until late spring or early summer. Then, volunteers will work through UMCOR to schedule the teams and determine what kinds of skills are needed, he said. At loss for words
The Rev. Paul Doherty, an UMCOR consultant who leads a Haiti task force in the Detroit and West Michigan conferences, has kept in touch since the earthquake with Methodist pastors in Haiti, and struggles to find words of comfort.
“In many ways I’m just totally heartbroken,” he said. “What do you tell someone when they lost not just a family member, but in some cases, their whole family? But they persevere. They are deeply spiritual. No matter all the grief that I hear, there’s always an element of hope.”
Besides sending monthly mission teams, churches in Michigan have helped provide food and water for Haitians. They support an UMCOR program that serves hot lunches to students at 93 Methodist schools in Haiti. It’s often the only meal a child eats in a day, Mr. Doherty said.
The Michigan teams have also installed water filters in the schools, using a BioSand technology process that removes all parasites and nearly all bacteria from drinking water.
“The filters are life savers available to the whole community,” said Mr. Doherty. “More children die in Haiti from water-borne diseases than anything else.”
The Dakotas Conference participates in another UMCOR project in Haiti that distributes solar ovens to cook food and pasteurize water. Manufacturing parts collected in the Dakotas are shipped to a warehouse in the capital of Port-au-Prince, where Haitians assemble the ovens with help from mission volunteers.
The smokeless ovens don’t need fuel—a vital concern because some 50 million trees are cut down in Haiti each year, and only 3 million new trees are planted.
“The health and economic consequences of deforestation are terrible,” said Rick Jost, a United Methodist missionary who runs the program through a non-profit business in Brookings, S.D. “But Haiti is a land of abundant sun. This gives them a way to cook without more harm to the environment.”
Montas and Raymonde Joseph, a Haitian couple who train new owners to use the ovens, survived the earthquake but lost their home. “They’ve got lots of issues to put their lives back together before the work can continue,” Mr. Jost said. “But if we can see a good side to this disaster, it’s bringing more awareness to the mission. I think that can only help.”
Planting seeds
Jim Switzer, a member of Faith UMC in Farmington, Minn., visits Haiti at least once a year to help a medical team in Port-au-Prince. Since 2007 he has collected 7,000 pairs of new and slightly worn shoes to distribute at the clinic.
He’s helped in other ways, too. On one trip he noticed children at the clinic had a fungus on their scalps. “We washed their heads, put on anti-fungal cream—a one-time treatment—and hardly saw any infection on our next trip,” Mr. Switzer said.
“God had to be working in that, saying, ‘I need you to do this little bit, and I’ll take over from there.’ God steps in and takes what we do, and magnifies it.”
That should encourage other United Methodist mission and relief workers, said the Rev. Chris Heckert, director of communications for the GBGM.
He points to another nation struggling to emerge from years of poverty and violence as an example. Sierra Leone in West Africa is still recovering from a civil war from 1991-2002 that killed 50,000 people and displaced one-third of the population.
“But when I went to Sierra Leone in 2008,” Mr. Heckert said, “some of the brightest spots of hope had the [United Methodist] cross and flame on it: hospitals, clinics, schools, projects for women, a limb-fitting center for people who lost limbs in the war.
“It happened because people in Sierra Leone came together with others from around the world—as a reaction to the gospel of Jesus Christ—to rebuild lives and care for one another. I really believe that coming together in the same way in Haiti will bring healing, rebuilding, and hope in years to come.”
UNITED METHODIST NEWS SERVICE PHOTO BY MIKE DUBOSE
Waiting to return 
