In Haiti: Murder & Voodoo

I was in Haiti less than a week after the earthquake. I went with Churches Helping Churches on a aid-delivering and fact-finding mission to help the country and it's churches. What follows is an excerpt of my journal from the trip. Amidst the chaos I captured what I saw the best I could and am including pictures from our trip that help tell the story. Video from our trip and the individual stories from Haiti can be found here and here.

Looking around the campus, it was obvious the school was no longer functioning. Instead, it had become something of a refugee camp, with upwards of perhaps five thousand people sleeping all over the grounds at night. But, unlike the rest of the city, there was a joy among these people. Tensions were low and it seemed God's peace rested there to comfort the afflicted. Many children, some among the roughly eight hundred who attended the Christian elementary school on site, were playing games, singing, dancing, and making toys out of empty water bottles, using the caps as wheels.

Our crew broke up to interview people and hear the stories of God's people. A woman named Cindy demonstrated amazing faith in the midst of adversity, saying that the earthquake was forcing many Christians to flee to other regions and nations but they took with them plans for evangelism and church planting. Despite the devastation, she remained resolutely convinced that God remains both sovereign and good and that, like the persecution and tragedy in the book of Acts that scattered God's people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, he would use even this horror for his glory and the good of the nations. Curiously, her husband, along with the seminary president, graduated from Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon, where I did, and many of the faculty we met had graduated from Dallas Seminary.

Walking toward a makeshift clinic--nothing more than some gauze and band-aids mainly reserved for hurt children sitting under a tarp--we noticed a young boy carrying a cooler filled with ice cream treats. We bought everything he had and gave the treats to the children, beginning with the youngest and most wounded children. As we did, we heard a pop behind us. Perhaps fifteen or twenty yards away, a young man had been shot in the head while walking down a busy side street. His body lay motionless on the ground with blood pouring out of his head. He still had his headphones on and likely had not even heard his attacker approach. He died instantly. The blood from his head ran down the street. The people had apparently become so accustomed to such things that it did not faze them. For the next hour until we left, no one stopped to investigate but simply walked by. No one came to mourn, no police showed up, and no coroner showed up. The body just lay there and people walked around it continuing their conversations and journeys. It was a bit surreal and overwhelming, as we'd only been in the city a few hours and had already seen dead bodies rotting in the streets and one young man murdered just off campus of a seminary.

We continued our journey by taking with us one of the bilingual faculty members from the school as our guide. Our goal was to visit churches to see how the church in Port-au-Prince was faring, and so we headed into the city and the center of the devastation.

As we drove around, the religiosity of the city was curious. The makeshift cabs (called "tap taps") and other modes of public transportation were filled with people fleeing to the rural areas. And most of them had a biblical story, like David and Goliath or Daniel and the lions' den, painted on the side and back. Many cars had Jesus bumper stickers and signs on them. According to the reports, most Haitians consider themselves Christians (mainly Catholic but also some Protestant) but blend their worship with pagan practices taken from voodoo.

To be continued...

By Mark Driscoll  |  March 11, 2010; 3:00 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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