Gene Birdsong said old men cry too. “I just couldn’t help it,” he explained.
He wasn’t alone.
“There wasn’t a one of us on that missions team that didn’t have to step behind a wall at some point and cry,” said Birdsong, a member of First Baptist Church, Jasper.
The seasoned physician, one of seven members of a medical team that kicked off Alabama Baptists’ work in quake-ravished Haiti, said the emotional moments just kept coming.
A child’s broad smile when chaplain Hub Harvey played with him.
A woman jumping into their truck bed to pat nurse Susan Alexander on the hand and say, “Thank you for what you are doing for Haiti.”
The sight of makeshift kites flying over the city. “There’s some hope here — the children are playing again,” said team member Martha McMinn.
The team, which ran a medical clinic five days in mid-February, saw more than 700 patients and helped a number of Haitians come to Christ.
But it wasn’t about numbers, they say. Most of all, Birdsong remembers one 2-year-old.
“She hadn’t slept since ‘the event,’” he said, noting that Haitians refer to the Jan. 12 disaster as “the event” — they don’t say “earthquake.”
“She and her family are living in a pickup truck now, and they hadn’t eaten in two days,” he said.
The family is a vivid picture of how the work there is far from over, said Mel Johnson, disaster relief strategist for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM). “This is the first of many, many trips down there,” he said.
An ongoing stream of Alabama Baptist medical teams will be sent down through a partnership with Baptist Health System, and other teams will be going down doing work ranging from water purification to food distribution. Alabama Baptists’ first water purification team went at the same time as the medical team and has returned after drilling multiple wells in the needy nation.
“This is going to be a long-term effort stretching over two to three years and involving many volunteers,” Johnson said.
More than 350 volunteers were trained to go during SBOM-sponsored disaster relief training sessions around the state in February. And still more volunteers are needed, Johnson said — specifically structural engineers who could help determine the safety of buildings damaged by the earthquake.
Alabama Baptist churches are also continuing to send teams, such as Shades Mountain Baptist Church, Vestavia Hills, which sent a team in mid-February, and Dawson Memorial Baptist Church, Birmingham, which has a medical team set to leave Feb. 27.
Buckets of Hope filled with specific provisions are also needed to meet immediate needs for families in Haiti and will be collected at points around the state March 4–5. For more information about how to pack a Bucket of Hope or where buckets are being collected, visit www.alsbom.org/haiti.
If you are interested in volunteering in Haiti, contact Johnson at 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 273.
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