While the country of Haiti remains in shambles after a Jan. 12 earthquake, its people are in high spirits, say two locals who recently spent two weeks aiding the island nation.
The Rev. Dan Bowman of Gateway Bible Church in Scotts Valley and traveling companion Wayne Huck returned from Haiti on Feb. 24 after 14 days offering help to the country’s residents in any way they could.
“They had hope,” Bowman said. “Where they catch it, I don’t know. It just blew my mind. As a result of the earthquake, they saw the opportunity to change.”
The duo arrived in Haiti and toured the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince, before driving north to Saint-Marc, a city where 40,000 out of roughly 66,000 people were displaced and camping out.
On the way, they drove past a mass burial site, where tens of thousands of Haitians killed in the earthquake were buried.
“You could smell it for, like, 2 miles,” Huck said. “It was the unmistakable stench of death.”
But their experience was not of a dead country, but of one united by the disaster.
“They live as a community,” Huck said. “One of the things that stands out about the people is their community heart.”
Bowman and Huck, who attends Gateway Bible Church and lives in Los Gatos, worked with Youth with a Mission, the United States Agency for International Development and the United Nations World Food Programme to distribute food to Haitians — many of whom were injured or orphaned.
They found the most efficient way to get the food to the people was to give large quantities of food and water to the pastors of local churches, who knew which people were displaced from Port-au-Prince and which were locals looking for freebies.
Another of their duties was to help set up a clinic in Saint-Marc. As the city had no resident physicians, volunteer doctors from around the world, including Canada, Norway and England, staffed the clinic that housed more than 165 Haitians after a few days.
“They were just so thankful that anyone would care enough to help them,” Huck, 44, said.
Bowman, 39, said he was struck by a 15-year-old girl who had her arm trapped under cinderblocks in the quake, but yanked it free to avoid starvation. Her skin and ligaments were torn away, but she didn’t complain or ask for medical help, just for food.
“These people are survivors like you’ve never met before,” he said. “They are warriors.”
Bowman and Huck also visited orphanages and jails to spread love to people who simply needed human contact.
“There were kids hanging off of us,” Bowman said. “They were starved for touch. They would force you to hug them.”
The pair left after two weeks, but they are hopeful the island nation will continue to rebuild.
“There’s not a sense of hopelessness or despair,” Huck said. “There’s a softness about it. There’s hope — and even a sense of excitement.”
