Rebuilding Haitiby Anita Cirulis
After a devastating earthquake hits an already destitute nation, members of the Northwestern family find ways to help
Bryan Den Hartog was thrown from his seat on the bus when the earthquake struck. As the vehicle shook violently, he looked out the windows and saw buildings and trees mirroring the bus’ movements. Across the mission compound, his father was on the ground, trying to get up on all fours since it was impossible to stand. Shockwaves moved through the earth like waves on water.
Then everything stopped. Stunned, Den Hartog and his mission team colleagues emerged from the bus and looked out over Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Huge fissures split the walls around the compound. Dust rose over the city. Then came the cries of people trapped under the rubble.
“When we heard the screams, that’s when it really hit me what had happened,” says Den Hartog, a 1981 Northwestern graduate who works as an orthopedic surgeon in Rapid City, S.D. “I knew there were going to be thousands of casualties, I knew we weren’t prepared for that, and I felt this hopeless, sinking feeling in my heart.”
Den Hartog, his father, and two of his sons had arrived in Haiti Jan. 11, the day before the earthquake, as part of a 48-person construction and medical team working with an organization called Mission to Haiti. Within minutes of the 7.0-magnitude quake, however, their focus changed from building a clinic and seeing patients to saving lives.
As aftershocks rumbled through the area every 15 to 20 minutes, the two doctors and seven nurses on the team began treating the wounded. Because the clinic wasn’t finished—and because aftershocks made it dangerous to be in any building—triage was done outdoors on folding tables. People arrived with leg and skull fractures, paralyzing spinal cord trauma, and open, contaminated crush injuries.
“Five kids died in front of us that night,” Den Hartog remembers. “We pulled two little girls, 2 and 4 years of age, out of the rubble, and then three other kids died later on—one from a collapsed lung.”
Without the proper equipment and quickly running low on medical supplies, Den Hartog and his colleagues did what they could. Out of gauze, the team tore bed sheets into bandages. They cut plywood intended for the clinic’s walls into makeshift splints and administered life- and limb-saving antibiotics.
They worked through the night, treating as many as 70 Haitians by the light of headlamps and a yard light run by a generator. The next morning they drove 15 critically injured patients to a nearby hospital, only to discover it had no running water, no electricity and—at the time—no doctors.
“There were dozens of people in the courtyard of the hospital who needed treatment desperately, and it was so frustrating we couldn’t deliver that for them,” Den Hartog says.
The quake created chaos in a country with little infrastructure and a nominal emergency medical system. The team contacted six different embassies and the Red Cross, offering to help and pleading for medical supplies, but was stymied by a lack of communication and coordination. Finally, running low on food and water and with security becoming an issue, they began searching for a way to leave the country.
Fifty miles north of Port-au-Prince, Kristie (De Boer ’95) Mompremier and her husband, JeanJean, were standing by their Ford pickup when it began rocking up and down, its springs squeaking. The stone bench their daughters were sitting on swayed back and forth, and inside the house, pictures fell off the walls. Initial excitement at having experienced an earthquake, however, soon gave way to alarm when they learned how destructive the quake had been in Port-au-Prince and they were unable to reach family and friends living in the city.
Kristie first visited Haiti as an agricultural missionary a year after graduating from Northwestern. She fell in love with the country and its people—and eventually with JeanJean, a Haitian secondary math and physics teacher she met at the mission where she was working. The two were married in 1998 and then spent four years in Orange City, where Kristie worked as a nurse while JeanJean completed an online seminary degree.
Moving back to Haiti, the Mompremiers settled in JeanJean’s hometown of Caiman, a small, poor community composed of subsistence farmers. With the help of several friends, they founded United Christians International, a ministry that works through the local church to teach the word of God and equip Haitian leaders.
JeanJean leads Bible seminars for Haitian pastors, many of whom have had no formal training. Kristie provides medical care and teaches public health. UCI also has an agricultural ministry to help people support themselves. And when the Mompremiers saw children eating ashes because they were so malnourished, they started a feeding program that has grown to seven nutrition centers.
Despite its distance from the epicenter of the quake, the Caiman community was deeply impacted by the disaster. JeanJean’s nephew survived after being buried overnight in the rubble of his medical school in Port-au-Prince, but seven sons and daughters of the Mompremiers’ church friends perished in collapsed buildings. JeanJean conducted a memorial service for the victims. No bodies were recovered.
For several weeks after the earthquake, the Mompremiers were housing and feeding 35 refugees from Port-au-Prince. Four months later, they still had 19 houseguests. Those victims of the quake, however, have food and shelter. With southern Haiti now in its rainy season, hundreds of thousands of others are still living in massive tent cities in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area.
Even before the earthquake that claimed at least 230,000 lives, injured 300,000, and left an estimated 1 million people homeless, Haiti was the poorest country in the Americas. As much as 80 percent of its population lives on less than $1.25 per day.
But it wasn’t always so. When Columbus landed in 1492 on what the native Taínos called Ayiti—“Land of High Mountains”—he found a lush, tropical island paradise. The establishment of the first European settlement in the New World, however, introduced a lethal combination of infectious diseases, slavery and genocide that decimated the native population.
Looking for a new source of expendable manpower to cultivate sugar cane, the Spanish colonists began trafficking in slaves from Africa. When the western third of the island was ceded to France, the practice of slavery continued.
Slaves and the goods they produced made the colony the French renamed Saint-Domingue the richest in the world. By the late 1700s, it supplied three-fourths of the world’s sugar; was a leader in the production of coffee, cotton, rum and indigo; and generated more revenue for France than all 13 American colonies combined did for England.
Saint-Domingue was arguably the most brutal slave colony of all time. One out of every three slaves died within a few years of arriving on the island. Despite such high mortality rates, at the close of the century, Saint-Domingue’s population included at least a half million slaves.
Haiti’s birth as a nation began in 1791 when 35,000 slaves rose up against the slaveholders, killing white colonists and burning plantations. For 12 years, they fought French, Spanish and English troops sent to quell the rebellion. More than 150,000 slaves lost their lives in the battle for independence.
In 1804 the last European troops were driven from the island, and Haiti became the first sovereign “black” country in the modern world and the only nation born of a slave revolt. But in the centuries that followed, most Haitians would find themselves living under a different kind of oppression: 200 years of exploitation, corruption and tyrannical rule that played a major role in the devastating impact of the January 2010 earthquake.
Den Hartog and his colleagues were evacuated from Haiti on an Air Force transport plane three days after the earthquake hit. Just 14 hours prior to the team’s departure, the first American troops landed in the country to provide humanitarian support, disaster relief, and security.
“It’s hard for people to understand just how disabled Port-au-Prince was the first few days,” Den Hartog says. “The United States military is probably the best kind of an organization to handle these kinds of major catastrophes.”
Robin (Van Oosterhout ’92) Lewis, a Public Health Service psychologist, agrees. She spent six weeks on the Comfort, a U.S. Navy hospital ship that arrived in Haiti the week after the quake and was anchored in the bay outside Port-au-Prince for two months. A converted oil tanker, the Comfort has 12 operating rooms, a medical staff of 550, and a 1,000-bed capacity.
“The injuries were just incredible,” Lewis says. “There were a lot of crush injuries beyond repair, and because it had been a week since the earthquake by the time the Comfort arrived, severe infections had set in.”
The ship’s surgeons performed more than 850 operations during the Comfort’s time in Haiti, and while numerous amputations were necessary, physicians were also able to save many injured limbs. Lewis, who was known as “Dr. Ma’am” by the Haitian children on board, provided assessment and counseling for the patients who had been traumatized by the disaster.
The 18-hour workdays were exhausting, but the work, meaningful. Lewis found herself doing whatever was necessary: emptying bed pans, changing IV bags, feeding adults, cleaning blood off the floor. In an e-mail to family and friends, she wrote: “I never thought I would practice deep breathing/relaxation with a patient while he was having his raw stump cleaned. I never thought I would be exploring occupations with a woman with no arms. I never thought I would be holding children at night as they cry themselves to sleep longing for their mommies.”
Lewis also provided support to the staff—some of whom, though seasoned combat veterans, were brought to tears by the suffering they saw. Also difficult was the prospect of sending patients back home, where continued treatment and therapy would be inadequate for their needs.
On many occasions Lewis ended up escorting children to orphanages, which gave her a close-up view of Haiti. “It was the worst poverty I’ve ever seen in my life,” she recalls. “I’d seen Third World poverty before. I’ve just never seen it to the extent that was Haiti.”
Faced with acute poverty, people search for answers—an explanation for Haiti’s problems. Dr. Paul Farmer is a physician and professor at Harvard Medical School who has worked in Haiti for more than 25 years as the founder of Partners in Health. According to Farmer, it’s convenient to attribute the country’s ills to causes native to Haiti.
“Among the most popular explanatory models are those invoking ‘cultural’ factors,” he writes in his book The Uses of Haiti. “Voodoo, in particular, is often evoked to ‘explain’ Haiti.”
While Roman Catholicism is the official religion of Haiti, Voodoo may be considered the country’s national religion. Haitian Voodoo blends many of its rituals and beliefs—brought by slaves from Africa—with Catholicism. Central to Voodoo is the practice of serving and communicating with spirits.
“There’s a joke rooted in fact that says Haiti is 80 percent Catholic, 20 percent Protestant, and 100 percent Voodoo,” says JeanJean Mompremier. “That’s because everyone, Christians and non-Christians, has to deal with Voodoo all the time.”
Televangelist Pat Robertson made headlines when he said Haiti’s earthquake happened because the country is cursed for making “a pact with the devil.” His comments referred to accounts, passed down through the years, of a Voodoo ceremony that served as a catalyst for the slave uprising that started the Haitian Revolution.
The reasons for Haiti’s misery, however, are much more complex.
As Farmer writes, “Haitians found themselves in a world entirely hostile to the idea of self-governing blacks. [Anthropologist] Sidney Mintz puts it neatly when he suggests that the birth of Haiti was a ‘nightmare’ for every country in which slavery endured.”
In a concerted effort, the United States and Western Europe took steps to cripple the new nation politically and economically. The U.S. refused to grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti for nearly 60 years and pressured other countries to do the same.
In 1825, faced with a global economic embargo imposed by the United States and Europe, Haiti was forced to accept France’s demands for compensation of 150 million francs for the losses of the plantation owners. Payments on loans to cover the debt—equal to half a billion U.S. dollars today—had a catastrophic impact on Haiti’s economy.
Similar injustices permeate Haiti’s history. Divided by race and class, the country—95 percent black and 5 percent mulatto and white—is controlled by a few elite families that stepped into the positions of the former colonial plantation owners. Just 1 percent of Haiti’s people own 50 percent of the country’s wealth.
The poor in Haiti are used as a source of cheap labor. In 1925 an American financial newspaper lauded the fact that the average Haitian “gives a hard day’s labor for 20 cents, while in Panama the same day’s work cost $3.” Fifty years later, U.S. manufacturers were taking advantage of a 70 percent unemployment rate and wages of 14 cents per hour to establish assembly plants in Haiti.
By tradition, those who rule Haiti view the country as their private property and its treasury as their bank account, says journalist and author Amy Wilentz. Perhaps that’s why, over the course of nearly 200 years, Haiti has experienced more than 30 coups and suffered under a series of dictators backed by a repressive military, Haiti’s elite and foreign interests.
As much as 40 percent of Haiti’s more than $1 billion debt today is due to loans made to the brutal dictators François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude. During their reign, writes Farmer, the U.S. Department of Commerce produced figures to show that “no less than 63 percent of all recorded government revenue in Haiti was being ‘misappropriated’ each year.” At one point, Haiti’s finance minister revealed that “a monthly average of $15 million was being diverted from public funds to meet ‘extra-budgetary expenses’ that included regular deposits into [Duvalier’s] private Swiss bank account.”
With such a history of oppression and corruption, it’s little wonder Haiti lacked the construction standards, infrastructure, health care and planning to help it cope with a killer earthquake.
In the weeks following the disaster, the eyes of the world were focused on Haiti and donations for relief efforts topped $305 million.
Sarah Earleywine, a 2010 Northwestern graduate from Brodhead, Wis., participated in six different mission trips to Haiti during high school and college and is there this summer on a 10-week internship with Lifeline Christian Mission in Grand Goave, Haiti.
“The first couple of weeks were really hard for me because I wanted to be there so badly,” she says of the earthquake. “I don’t think I’ve ever prayed to God without ceasing that much before. It was constantly on my mind and heart.”
Because of her experience in Haiti, Earleywine was asked to speak at various fundraisers where she answered people’s questions about how they could give to—and pray for—Haiti. “I think God used me here during that time to be more of a benefit to Haiti than I could have been if I was there,” she says.
The earthquake also spurred an increased interest in adopting children from Haiti. Even before the quake, the country had 380,000 orphans—a number that likely grew by tens of thousands as a result of lives claimed by the disaster. After the quake, the U.S. and Haiti worked together to ensure orphans who had been matched with Americans before the earthquake received the care they needed. Humanitarian parole granted by the U.S. Immigration Services allowed nearly 500 orphans to enter the United States the week of Jan. 18.
Sara (Cleveringa ’00) Van Zee and her husband, Tim, had begun the process of adopting a child from Haiti in the fall of 2009. The Orange City couple felt called to adopt shortly after their marriage when they saw children living in poverty during a mission trip to Nicaragua.
Matched with 1-year-old Albear, the Van Zees were relieved to learn the orphanage he was in 90 miles north of Port-au-Prince was untouched by the quake. But their hopes for a speedy union with their son were dashed by the arrest of 10 American missionaries who were attempting to take children out of the country without the proper paperwork.
All processing of orphans stopped while Haiti changed its procedures, requiring the prime minister to sign every child’s paperwork and for all children to fly out of Port-au-Prince.
“I don’t know what their hearts were,” Sara says of the missionaries, “but I do know that when children and countries are involved, whatever your motivation is, you need to do things the right way. It’s just frustrating because you think, ‘If you really care about kids, do it so everybody can continue in this process.’”
When it was finally Albear’s turn to travel to the U.S., however, there were more problems. Haitian police at the airport refused to believe his travel papers were legitimate, and his American escorts were detained while Albear and five other children were taken and placed in a tent city.
Four harrowing days later, the Haitian government finally confirmed the paperwork was legitimate, and in a story covered by CNN, the children were reunited with their American escorts and flown to Miami where their new parents awaited them.
As the Van Zees fielded questions from reporters, Sara told them that while Albear now has a home, there are thousands of children in that same situation who have no hope. “It was worth it if this helps direct the light back on those children—if we can get them help and people can see this is not OK for a child to live like that,” she said.
Like Sara, the Mompremiers see good coming out of the disaster. On the one-month anniversary of the earthquake Haitian government officials canceled the annual three-day Carnival festival and instead called for three days of national prayer.
So far this year, JeanJean has baptized more people than in all the previous years of the Mompremiers’ time in Haiti combined.
“There is something about having the very foundations of the earth shake under your feet that makes you realize how we depend on the temporal instead of the Eternal One,” says Kristie. “I think the earthquake shook up the land, but it also shook up people’s faith.”
The Mompremiers have seen firsthand the difference God can make. Voodoo was a major influence in Caiman when they arrived, but the community has undergone a radical transformation. Where once there were Voodoo drums at night, now there is singing about Jesus. Where there was jealousy and suspicion, now there are people working together. Neighbors are helping neighbors in the process of replacing unsanitary dirt floors with poured cement.
“This wouldn’t have been the case even six years ago before the gospel was bought here,” Kristie says. “There would have been people sabotaging work sites and theft of materials. Truly, God’s love changes people’s hearts.”
“We believe God is the only answer to Haiti’s problems,” adds JeanJean. “Without people in the government and other leadership positions that truly care for the people and not just about lining their own pockets or advancing their power, there can be no progress.”
Although Haiti is now fading from the headlines, the crisis continues. People lack shelter. Disease runs rampant. The injured still need treatment.
Because of his connections in Haiti, Den Hartog has been commissioned by the American Orthopedic Foot and Ankle Society to make arrangements for teams of orthopedic surgeons to travel to Haiti.
“There’s no shortage of volunteers,” he says of the waiting list of 600 of his peers willing to travel to Haiti. “People are still interested in helping. They just need to plug in with somebody who has a plan.” In April, Den Hartog spent a week in Haiti, providing medical treatment and working out the logistics for such teams. In two to four months he will return with a group of surgeons to conduct reconstructive foot and ankle surgeries and train Haitian orthopedists.
Both Den Hartog and the Mompremiers, however, stress that humanitarian aid is not enough. Prayer, they agree, is the most important way to help Haiti. As for financial support, Den Hartog encourages people to give to organizations “not just worried about saving lives, but saving souls.”
“We have seen many great projects that are here for a short time and then collapse,” echoes Kristie. “We see Christian missions so concentrated on humanitarian acts that they forget to share the gospel of Christ. Without Christ, hearts can’t be changed and all the good deeds in the world will not last.” 
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