Wineka column: Baptists in on Haiti relief

Ryan Bennett, left, of South China Grove Baptist and Roger McIntire of Trading Ford Baptist, help an earthquake victim with a broken femur and head injury.

Haitians empty out of a hospital in the Dominican Republic after a 6.0 magnitude aftershock hit. Some jumped from balconies, while others pulled mattresses down two flights of stairs.

Brent Barker, a Baptist Association missionary, assists with Haitian earthquake victim.

This Haitian wanted Jim Harris of the Rowan Southern Baptist Association to pray for his eyes.

Drawn to the Haitian earthquake's aftermath, nine Baptist team members from Rowan County labored more than a week in a war zone of human need.

Now back home, they can't forget certain things.

The suffering connected to crushed bodies.

The frenzy associated with every aftershock.

The lonely fear created by the loss of loved ones.

Yet the group returned to the States inspired, too, seeing God's hand involved in these early days of recovery.

"The Lord took us to the right place," says the Rev. Jim Harris, a retired pastor. "This was God meeting the needs of a people."

Under the guidance of Associational Missionary Brent Barker, the delegation worked roughly from Jan. 18 to the end of the month from a camp connected to Jimani Project Hospital.

The new hospital, which wasn't supposed to open until May, is located in the Dominican Republic, just on the other side of the Haitian border. It's about 70 miles from the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, from where most of its injured came.

The Baptist team volunteered for every job imaginable: distributing food, providing medical supplies, installing generators, driving ambulances, carrying stretchers, cleaning out portable toilets, picking up trash, repairing water pumps and cars, fixing flats, changing bandages, conducting worship services and spiritually counseling the injured.

"Everybody just plugged in and found a place where they were needed," says the Rev. Mike Motley, pastor of Trading Ford Baptist Church.

Their working environment was much like a MASH unit, constantly seeing victims coming and going by ambulance, bus and helicopter.

Amid all that activity, they served 9,000 meals to patients and family members, using their two rental vans for picking up and delivering the food.

When the call went out one day for an extra operating table, Motley and a fellow volunteer from Ohio built one from scraps of materials they could find.

"I thought it was a pretty decent table," Motley says.

Harris discovered that he and others were ministering to people filled with spirituality and hope, even with all they had been through.

"They take tragedy and go on," says Harris, who went from bed to bed, praying with victims and their families. "They have God."

Motley also saw an incredible resiliency in the Haitian people.

"Their normal was difficult, then this," he says. "They were absolutely doing the best they could to begin with."

The Rowan delegation showed its own toughness. Their daily "one-gallon showers" consisted of standing under a plastic jug of water.

Barker "splurged" once and had a two-gallon shower.

They slept in two-person tents. The daily temperatures constantly registered in the high 90s and sometimes over 100 degrees.

They ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

"We were roughing it," Motley says. "It wasn't even as good as going deer-hunting, I can guarantee you."

The tents in which they slept were next to the expansive post-operative tent, where patients had to lie on thin mattresses on a dirt floor.

When buildings fell Jan. 12, they often crushed the limbs of survivors. Many people at the Jimani Hospital were coping with lost arms and legs. Others had been fitted with long casts and steel rods.

At first, the hospital had no crutches or wheelchairs. A glaring need for the future will be prosthetics and the need to teach Haitians how to make their own prosthesis, Barker says.

The kids who have had amputations will need many new artificial limbs as they grow.

The Rowan delegation included Mike and Sandy Motley, Brent Barker, Harris, Carolyn Barker, Roger McIntire, Chris Earnhardt, Ryan Bennett and Matthew Thompson. During their stay, they teamed up with a six-person Baptist group from Magee, Miss.

One night, soon after their arrival, an aftershock registering a 6.0 in magnitude rocked Jimani and created chaos among the patients inside the hospital.

Two men jumped from a second-story balcony, leaving one of them with a broken back. Virtually every other patient ripped out his or her IVs as family members pulled mattresses into the front yard of the hospital.

They would not be caught inside a building again. For the rest of the Baptist delegation's stay, the hospital yard was filled with patients and their beds. Luckily, it never rained.

When the patients realized they were safe, Harris recalls, they broke out "in revival, singing songs of praise."

Harris conducted several nightly worship services. Routinely, the group had to rely on interpreters for both French and Spanish.

Sandy Motley, Mike's wife, is a registered nurse who spent two-and-a-half days in post-op and four days helping to organize the pharmacy.

The Baptist teams put together two "travel pack medications" worth $10,000 that were sent to Port-au-Prince. They also provided 71 bags of cement, 3,000 concrete blocks and four truckloads of sand to rebuild a Baptist-sponsored orphanage.

Their field hospital community of doctors, nurses and other volunteers came from across the world, not just the United States.

And the stories the team members tell are heart-wrenching.

Every night as they tried to sleep, a 10-year-old boy named Jeffrey would wake up in the post-op tent crying for the parents he lost in the earthquake.

"Our people would go over, just to hold him," Motley says.

Harris speaks of a 2-month-old baby who had been found in rubble under four dead bodies.

The baby was brought to the hospital near death because the infant was in need of a right-sized package to administer IV fluids. Heroic efforts by volunteers found the necessary equipment, and the baby was doing better before being airlifted elsewhere for more intensive care.

Jackson, a young boy, had shown up at the camp outside of the Jimani Project Hospital by accident.

He had lost his parents and three sisters in the earthquake.

Scared and homeless, he wondered aimlessly around Port-au-Prince until one day stealing away on a transport vehicle carrying injured countrymen to Jimani. He soon became a familiar figure around the tents outside the hospital.

Realizing Jackson's plight, Baptist team members made his welfare one of their priorities, but Motley knew the day was coming when they would have to leave.

On the day of departure, Motley spoke with an intake nurse at the hospital to ask what would happen with Jackson. Would someone be looking after him?

The nurse said UNICEF possibly could find a new home for the boy.

The whole emotion behind what he had seen in Jimani hit Motley at that moment.

"That's when I broke down," he says, "when I had to hug him and say goodbye."

Financial contributions continue to be accepted at Rowan Southern Baptist Association, Haiti Earthquake Relief, 832 S. Main St., Salisbury, NC 28144.