A Letter from Pastor Michel

Dear friends,

As a spiritual leader, I am beginning to sink into the reality of my environment. I am beginning to realize that many of the houses that do not show in the photos have been carried away. As the survivors come down from the rooftops, I am beginning to read in their slim bodies the rough impact that this struggle is having on their spirits and their emotions. I am beginning to feel the heart of the Mayor of Gonaïves who confided in me that he is discouraged. I am beginning to become conscious of the fact that more than half of our people have become homeless overnight. I am beginning to realize that all the churches are under mud. We haven’t been able to worship in our temples for two Sundays, and most of the pastors don’t have any hope of gathering their flocks for several months. We are not thinking about schooling; survival has taken precedent over education.

This tragedy occurred shortly after we had spent nearly one and a half months with about 600 hundred young people from 80 churches in Gonaïves. We had taken them to mountaintop, and now they have fallen to the bottom of the pits of life. Their leaders have been unable to locate some of them. They have been separated from their physical families and environments. They have been isolated from their spiritual families and environments. Some of them have sent word from their temporary shelters where children are being choked almost daily (those shelters are too crowded and sanitation is nonexistent) and adults are dying from thirst and starvation. Eben-Ezer is managing to organize a special shelter for those young people and their families under an interdenominational leadership. The leaders have identified the right location, a former orphanage. We are now praying for food, clothing, toilet kits and other basic necessities.

As I have become more and more conscious of what has happened to us, I have come to realize that this is an act of war of the powers of death against life. Unless the people of God arise and strike back with power and might, we shall be defeated in every area of our lives. Monday was a very sad day for me. We were approached by two food organizations and MINUSTAH to provide a list of 600 families with an average of 4 or 5 children per family. They made an appointment with the mothers of those families (600 mothers) at the mission’s compound for 7:00 Monday morning. MINUSTAH showed up after 9:00. They found a sea of people, many times the 600 mothers we invited. Those people woke up our village at 2:00 a.m. Some walked through the waters during the night from seven kilometers away. Everyone wanted to be first in line because they knew there wouldn’t be enough for everybody. The husbands accompanied their wives through the night. Around 11:00, the MINUSTAH soldiers excused themselves to me. They felt bad, but they said they had been called back to their base. They abandoned the crowd. Think what could have happened to the mission. Later, one of the two organizations called and reported that the other food organization had a problem. The distribution was cancelled.

Hard and sorrowful news to share with those miserable people who had left their starving families behind. We finally faced them, and they were very understanding. But they preferred to lie down under our trees for the rest of the day because they had neither the physical nor the moral courage to face their children. My heart is still following them…Nature has not only broken Gonaïves. It has made her vile.

Michel Morisset

Advertisement