I received this long letter a few days after the massive earthquake on January 12. It is written by water and civil engineer Bruce Robinson, a missionary with CrossWorld. He lives east of Port-de-Paix on the northern peninsula of Haiti.  Bruce and his wife Deb have a well drilling (and everything else) ministry.  I met him back in 1986 when I lived in Haiti. David got acquainted with him since they were both bachelors at that point and would spend time together whenever Bruce would come to the capitol for supplies or R and R. David was living on the mission campus where the seminary is that Bruce describes in the article. I spent many hours on that campus when David and I were dating.

So, I have attached it for those of you hungry for this sort of thing. 

Thank you Bruce for your permission to share this.

Earthquake Haiti

I always expected the next big one would be here. On the north coast. In doing research for the bridge one of the things you do is check the earthquake history. For the last four hundred years. It is not pretty.

The north coast of Haiti is a fault. A bad one. Between us and the island ten miles offshore the water is 3000 feet deep. And the sides are almost vertical. In 1842, there was an earthquake along this fault. Cap Haitian to our east was leveled and half of the population perished. Port-de-Paix, the town where we go for supplies, got hit by a fifteen foot tsunami. There are no death statistics recorded. It is a coastal town and there probably wasn’t anyone left to record anything. Mole St. Nicolas to our west was also leveled.

It happened again in 1887. The newly rebuilt cathedral in Port-de-Paix collapsed into rubble. The history is full of heavy seismic activity up until the 1920s.

From then until the day before yesterday there isn’t a lot of big news. Sure some little earthquakes. When you live where we live, you often wake up in the night and think the bed shook a little bit. It is part of life. There are two kinds. One sounds like a freight train coming. You hear the rumble of the sine wave coming as the ground pulses up and down til it finally shakes the bejeebers out of everything and goes past. The other one I think they call a P wave. It is like some giant hits the southeast corner of your house with a giant sledgehammer. Just one time. If you look at the back opposite corner of our house you can see that the block are all cracked and coming apart. It is the same as crochet when you hit the other guy’s ball. You put your foot on your ball and wail on it. The back of our house is the other guy’s ball. It is trying to take off across the lawn.

But that is little stuff. Background noise. The book on the geology of Haiti says the major problem places are the north coast, Port-au-Prince, and someplace in the south. I thought we would be next up for a big one.

We have thought about what to do to get ready. We have eight little tents, some rolls of tarp material, and bought two bolt cutters for cutting through the rebar of the rubble. We and the men planned on taking care of who we could here and then heading to Port-de-Paix with jacks, crowbars, the rebar cutters and sledgehammers to look through the rubble for survivors. You have TVs. It looks like what we expected Port-de-Paix would look like except much of Port-de-Paix is built on soil that has the structural characteristics of chocolate pudding. Over the Christmas holidays I was talking to someone who is the contact for a well known humanitarian organization talking about trying to get 1000 tarps to preposition here. And some hardhats for the guys and orange T shirts that say rescue on them. He says this group wants to be the first in, even before the UN, which works for me. Gimme the tarps and we will have them on the job two hours after it hits. Write whatever you want on them for everyone to see. As long as they shed water and keep people out of the tropical sun. We were right about what could happen. We were wrong about the place

You have seen what used to be Port-au-Prince on the television and internet. I started to look through the photos and can’t bear to look anymore. I know too many of the places and love too many of the people. And the news is coming in. Everyone has a friend or a family member who just got out or didn’t. There are many who haven’t heard of people and still trying to get news.

All of our missionaries are accounted for finally after two days. We had one close call. Denny and Susie Day work among the unreached upper class of Haiti in a house church and Christian elementary and high school.

The Denny and Susie Day family are safe and living in their own house which is pretty much intact. When the quake hit, Susie was in her parents’ house (who were in Florida at the time, Susie is a missionary kid who grew up and came back to Haiti). She wrote last night. “I went briefly into Dad’s study…then it hit…it was unbelievable…it was horrible…dad’s office caved in on me…I had no time to react, no warning…a loud noise, then the violent shaking and screaming…I fell down on the floor in front of dad’s sofa, covered in debris. I got hit real hard to the right side of my head … I started talking to God…praying…crying…my legs were buried and I had injured my right arm. I guess I got up on dad’s desk…the iron window at his desk caved in with the wall and I climbed on top and pulled myself out. It was horrible outside – people screaming…rushing up the street …all over.” She has some stitches and is a little tattered around the edges and will probably get an x-ray of her arm to make sure it is not broken when things like x-rays are available again, but is fine.

The main mission headquarters and seminary is located on the side of the mountains almost overlooking what used to be the presidential palace. The seminary is a night school as most of the students work during the day and then go to class from 5 to 8 each evening. Class was in session when the quake hit.

The main seminary building is the Toirac building. It is a huge two story building with a central section that has a third story and a bell tower. It was built like a fort with 16” thick walls made of soft limestone mortar and must have taken years to build. It has classrooms, a chapel, offices for the seminary, and professors. It is also the office of the Union of Evangelical Baptist Churches that we work under in Haiti. It was the epicenter of evangelical training in Haiti for 60 years and where all of the pastors that we work with as well as on much of this island trained. When I came here, the students who were from out in the provinces stayed in a dorm rooms in the basement that have since been converted to offices.

When the earthquake hit there were about 200 students in the building. As an engineer, there are two ways that you measure success concerning buildings and earthquakes. One is if the building is there and useable after the quake. But if the quake is big and powerful enough there is no such thing as a building that will come through unscathed, especially with the building materials the missionary builders in Haiti in the 1950s had. The other measure of success is that enough of the building structure stays intact long enough (in seconds) for everyone to get out. By this measure of success, those who came before us scored a 99% plus. One student did not get out of the building. He died with his boots on training to help break this nation free from the chains of Voodoo and Satan and because of the present conditions will be the only person ever buried on the mission compound.

His father, a pastor, just came up the hill looking for information on his son. He had just come from finding news that his daughter died when the university building she was attending class in collapsed. He had not heard from his son yet. When he found that his son had also died he collapsed in the missionary’s arms in tears.

Seminary classes are probably over for the year. Where, how, and whether they can start in the fall is in the hands of God. There have been times in the past when there has been discussion as to whether to keep investing in the infrastructure where it is, or would it be better to move the seminary to a new location in the city that would have better access for the students and public transportation. That discussion will have to take place once the more pressing parts of the humanitarian crisis abate and aid starts getting to the victims. With infrastructure worth something north of four million dollars in ruins at the mission office, the Etch a Sketch has been turned over and shaken hard. The screen is blank and something totally new is going to need to be made and it may not look like what was there before. Meanwhile there is a humanitarian crisis on the Bolosse seminary campus that defies written description and pegs the needle of human emotion. You can see it on the CrossWorld website www.crossworld.org. I have not looked yet as I can’t bear the sight.

The Evangelical Seminary of Port-au-Prince (STEP) is located about in an area of the city called Bolosse about a mile south of the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. When I came to Haiti thirty years ago it was farmland with a few huts of poor people scattered around. Over the years the city has overtaken and past the Bolosse Campus. People rent a plot of ground large enough to build one or two rooms and a latrine and build on the land. They pay the landowner every year some small fee and have walkways between the houses that are as wide as aircraft aisles to get to the houses behind. On the east side of the campus some of the people have bought the land and made more substantial houses of concrete and multiple stories. On the east side call Grand Ravine the slopes are one story one and two room concrete block and tin first and later when they get money concrete roof houses. Some of the houses are made of plywood, tin, cardboard and whatever they can find but they eventually end up making them with block. There are many words that people use for high density housing like this. Many of them have the floor covered solid with sleeping people at night. But they are clean and swept and the people who come out of them are in general neatly groomed and clean even if it means bringing a bucket of water up hundreds of feet of elevation winding between the houses to get water to bath.

Grand Ravine has been a volatile place full of gangs and a few years back it got so bad that most of the people left until order was restored and a police and UN post was established in the neighborhood. In the past during times of problem the people in the neighborhood have spilled onto the campus as a refuge and lived there until the problems abated. How many times over the years the lower story chapel in the Toirac seminary building has been opened as a refuge during unrest, hurricanes and whatever I do not know. But the campus has as, it is now, always been a refuge in times of trouble.

There are currently about 2000 people living on the grounds. Some do not have houses to go back to. Others have houses or some part thereof remaining but they are scared to go back in and sleep in them. After the earthquake, Grand Ravine was covered by a dust cloud from the broken concrete and mortar. All these people and the seminary staff and two missionary familes are sleeping outside at night. Walking among the people one sees all manner of injury including the bones sticking out of compound fractures, severe burns, cuts scrapes and whatever. A Haitian doctor lives on the campus and is doing what can be done. Medical supplies were exhausted almost immediately.

There is no water. Food is scarce. It is cold at night with some of the remnants of the front that blasted the Southeast US still in the Caribbean. Some are under tarps, others are not. The other night it started to rain and thankfully stopped. They have finally had to dig a hole for a latrine as the sanitary condition is not good. I asked for measurements of the slab for the basketball and volleyball court to know how big a building can be built there and they were not sure of the accuracy. The tape measure had to go over beds all the way across.

The missionaries there report not having a shower since Tuesday. David Schmid grew up in Haiti following in his father’s footsteps as field leader. With his wife Phyllis, they have been there serving since the 70s teaching in the seminary and ministering to the Haitian church and missionary family. David also comes out to our area three times a year to do a seminar with the lay pastors to train them since we still don’t have enough trained pastors. David was supposed to be out here in the Northwest but by God’s grace the seminar was called on account of rain. God knew his leadership would be needed there.

Bruce and Cindy McMartin were there when I got here and I stayed in their house as a rookie missionary for orientation until their second daughter came into the world and put me out of the spare bedroom. Bruce teaches in the seminary and works on various projects to help pastors and churches make a living and currently has a coffee project. Cindy teaches, organizes and is the designated doer filling all manner of holes when someone needs something done or some kind of backup. They help organize the seminary mission’s conference each year out of which the Union of Evangelical Baptist Chruches has sent a missionary couple to Senegal to minister to the people who didn’t make the slave boat to Haiti. (One year the conference story was about Joseph and the Haitian students and leaders started wondering if God allowed them to be sold into slavery like Joseph so they would get the Gospel to take back to their people in Senegal).

Wawa and Jacques are two other men who are in charge of the campus. Wawa has a more sophisticated official name on his birth certificate that I never plan to learn to spell or pronounce. They worked on writing the extension courses for training pastors until they both went to Dallas seminary, got married, and came back to teach their countrymen in the seminary. Jacques is always laughing about something and Wawa is the serious one.

In talking to the ladies on Skype they have been telling us how conditions are in between interviews with Nightline and Christian radio stations in the US. A shallow 7.0 earthquake at point blank range is powerful and Cindy could not walk or progress down the hall in her house to get out. The aftershocks keep coming. Once you have had the big one they relate how each new aftershocks sends tremors of fear through their whole being. These are people who have lived through making runs to the grovery store in between demonstrations, found spent bullets in the yard, stayed in the country at the peak of the kidnapping ,and slept though uninterrupted gunfire for a week. When they tell you they are scared it is because it is scary.

We have been working with a church in South Florida and hope to have some immediate things to them the first part of the week. Tarps, an electric jackhammer, work gloves, water filtration equipment, and stuff that they need now.

But there are some bright spots. Like someone showing up at the missionary’s house because they heard they were short of water. And the singing. Groups of these people starting to sing and pray as soon as an aftershock hits again. The Catholics have been using the evangelical hymmbook for years here so everyone knows the words and the whole hillside sings.

We are also in contact with people who are talking about taking a dumptruck to Port-au-Prince to look for some of their family and bring them out of the city. We have a lot of things here that can be used like a small diesel generator and electric jackhammer for getting through the rubble. And forming jacks to support the part of the building that has not fallen in yet so they can salvage books, computers, and furniture before it rains. Please pray that we can do this. They didn’t have fuel for the truck but we do so maybe it can happen quickly like Tuesday.

A few weeks out we are hoping to get a prefab Quonset hut type building in that can be bolted to the basketball court and go up quickly. With the ground still shaking, you can’t build anything out of concrete for months and this will give them something to work out of and put salvaged stuff inside and people as necessary. We may be thinking of a second one of these buildings a little farther out. They go up in days.

I was trying to focus on the situation there because they are working around the clock and having to worry about getting the body out and buried and digging a latrine for 2000 people. We are pretty normal here and have the luxury of looking a few weeks ahead until someone on the team here asked about how it affects our work in this area. The answer is simple. It is stopping most outside help for this area because the need is Port-au-Prince is so great.

And then we started to see what is going on. Most of the 3 million people in Port-au-Prince are from out in the provinces. And they are all trying to get out of the capital and get out to places like here. Aletude, the man who runs our shop said this afternoon that he was going to drive a vehicle to Port-au-Prince for three families to pick up people stranded there. The phones sort of work sometimes and his people said that when there is food given out it goes to those at the front and the women and children in the back get nothing. He said they are hungry and tired and beat up from standing in the sun and need to come out here. It is his wife’s sister and her two children. With the car option expended, they pooled their money and sent one guy down with enough money to get them all home. Hopefully. They keep raising the price of bus tickets as fuel gets scarcer.

But then he asked me, “Where are they going to live?” And I am wondering what are they going to eat and how are they going to live. Multiply this situation thousands of times and we are on the verge of a crisis that will not make CNN.

God has been faithful and more than generous with Deb and I and the ministry here and we have never spent a lot of time asking for money. I personally don’t care for some letters we get all the time asking for money. I have said in the past that if we got an earthquake that we would make an exception. I know times are tough in the US and no one understands that better than the Haitians. When they pray over the offering they pray for the offering and also those who would have liked to give something and just flat out didn’t have anything to give.

If you have anything in the next couple months to help the people here, CrossWorld has a fund called the Haiti Emergency Fund or you can contribute to Crossworld and mark it ‘for the ministry of Bruce and Deb Robinson’. If times are tight at your house and you need prayer for a job or finances, we and the Haitians would love to pray for you so tell us. These people understand what it is for things to be tight.

Prayer:

Julie the French lady who helps us with agriculture took a bus to Port-au-Prince to evacuate and since the buses weren’t running took the local ones one after another. We know she made it part way but have not gotten word she made it. It was plenty safe here but her organization is pulling out for a few months and she had orders to leave. Pray that she makes it to Port-au-Prince and out.

Pray for Missionary Flights that they can fly in with supplies, especially our supplies for our mission at Bolosse. The airport is congested and they can’t always get permission.

Pray that we can get a dumptruck load of equipment and supplies to Port-au-Prince with the people out here. Things are chaotic and people are being accosted if they have backpack or are carrying something in their hand.

Pray for order. American troops are due on Monday. [that would be Monday, January 18, 2010]

Pray that we can know how to help the people coming out here with the clothes on their back.

Pray that we can keep putting people to work on agricultural and drainage projects.

Pray the banks will open up. We owe 300 men for digging a drainage canal. They understand and don’t have a problem but money is scarce and they could use this money.

For the team with us here to get out safely in God’s time. He is the only one who knows when the airlines will start to fly again.

Praise:

We have supplies to live, eat, and work

Bruce and Deb Robinson

CrossWorld