Hard Times in Haiti : Lay Ministers Escape Uprising, Bring Back Stories of Suffering

Eight lay missionaries from an Irvine church on Tuesday calmly described their experiences in Haiti last week, where they were trapped during a violent uprising.

But the missionaries’ calm faded and their emotions showed when they talked about the grinding poverty they found among the people of that strife-torn Caribbean nation.

The eight missionaries from the South Coast Community Church had left for Haiti on March 31 to work in a village about 45 miles south of Port-au-Prince.

On April 2, a group of rebel Haitian army officers attempted to overthrow the government, plunging Haiti into chaos, they said.

Jim Loomis of Santa Ana, leader of the missionary group, said: “We were concerned. We could hear gunfire and cannon shots, but we didn’t have much information” about what was happening among opposing forces.

Floyd Graves of Costa Mesa said: “We contacted the American Embassy (in Port-au-Prince) because we wanted to let them know we were there. . . . We were worried that if the (Haitian) government changed, there would be anti-American feelings. . . . As Caucasians in a predominantly black country, we stuck out like sore thumbs.”

They barely managed to find a commercial plane to depart that country, they said, but they arrived in California on Monday.

Despite their fears, the missionaries said, no anti-American sentiments emerged during their 10-day stay. They added that the Haitian people appeared deeply grateful for the help the missionaries brought.

Jean Watts of Tustin, one of the missionaries, began weeping. “It’s real hard for me to talk about this because my heart was touched so deeply,” she said. Many Haitian children, she said, depend on contributions from “sponsor parents” in the United States for food and survival.

“The children refer to their sponsors as their other mama and papa,” Watts said. “All of the children really dream of having their other mama and papa write them letters. They feel very sad and feel abandoned when they don’t receive a letter from their sponsors. The highest status symbol among the children is for their sponsors to come and visit them.”

Loomis said the missionary group’s original goal was to spend 10 days at the Haitian village building a new church. Those plans fell apart, but the group succeeded in bringing supplies from America to the village.

Watts, one of the three women missionaries in the group, said she helped a Haitian woman with the birth of a child. “An old-looking woman, who I later found out had had nothing to eat all day, came to me and asked me to help the woman with the baby. . . . The women in Haiti have a very desperate life. . . .