His church-planting trip to the Dominican Republic (DR) had been planned for a quite a while.
But the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti changed his plans. It changed nearly everything.
“But it was a no-brainer that we should still go,” said team leader John Gunter, who serves in Hispanic ministry in south Alabama after nearly a decade of service in the DR.
It just meant the team’s mission was now twofold: to evangelize and plant churches in the DR and to deliver food, medical supplies and relief to devastated areas of Haiti.
So Gunter and his team of 22 divided into two groups — one to stay in the DR during the entire Feb. 1–8 trip and one to take a four-day side trip to Haiti Feb. 2–5 — and headed overseas.
While devastation in Haiti is still expansive and the aftermath of the quake has left many without homes, forcing them into tents, Gunter said the hopes of the people are a little higher than he anticipated.
“I didn’t see a lot of hopelessness. I saw a lot of people striving to take care of themselves and those around them,” he said. “They were gathering food, cleaning up debris and trying to get their homes back together. … It’s almost like even though they lost a lot of people, life goes on.”
Gunter recalled his team walking through the streets and seeing a group of people gathered under a tarp amid ruins.
“People were holding up their hands and we thought, ‘this is another distribution area,’” Gunter said. “But it was actually a church. Their church (building) next door was totally flattened so they were having worship and praising God right there in the middle of disaster and destruction.”
And a lot of that hope could be from the outpouring of support Haitians are receiving from believers around the world.
“On the airplane there were a lot of … other teams coming or going — other Christian groups, Southern Baptists, nondenominational groups, doctors and medical care (personnel),” Gunter said. “I think it’s a huge encouragement for [Haitians] to see people from all over the world coming to help them out.”
In addition to setting up medical clinics for Bethel Mission Outreach orphanage and its surrounding community just outside of Haiti, the team delivered a truckload of food to another orphanage and four Baptist churches that have been designated as feeding sites.
When the team departed from Haiti Feb. 5, Gunter’s brother, David Gunter, a member of Mountain View Church, Anniston, stayed behind to continue caring for children at Bethel Mission Outreach, helping with medical relief and doing construction work around the area.
He has plans to return to the United States the beginning of March.
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