When the earthquake happened in Haiti on January 12, 2010, it was a surreal experience for us. We had left Port-au-Prince just a few days earlier, after being there with a team from the US. The effects were devastating, and the aftermath was jarring. People were injured, displaced, and searching for help and answers that always seemed just out of reach. It was to this environment that we returned about three or four weeks later.

There were no commercial flights available at the time, and the only way into the country was by providing medical care, humanitarian aid, or going as part of a relief organization. Our founder, Greg Barshaw, first went through the Red Cross. At that point, Port-au-Prince had become a tent city. More than 200,000 people had been killed, and over a million people had been forced to take shelter in tents. Many of the city’s buildings had been destroyed or compromised to the point of being unlivable, so the immediate relief efforts involved treating injuries and providing temporary housing.

Not only was the infrastructure broken, but food was scarce as well. This meant that relief organizations were now the primary source for supplies and resources that had become unavailable. All of this instability translated into social unrest and violence in many cases. People were stealing food and supplies from one another, and anxiety for personal safety was high.

That’s when we started talking with pastors in the area. Rather than simply giving resources, we wanted to help by investing in Haitian society to bolster their infrastructure. After many conversations, we started rebuilding churches. We rebuilt twenty churches on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, and the goal was to draw people from the tent cities to these churches by offering food, supplies, and most importantly, personal investment and care from the churches’ pastors. Through these distributions, we gained the chance to share the gospel with everyone who came.

Each time we rebuilt a church, the construction was sponsored by a church in the US. An American church would take on the project, and then we would travel to Haiti with a team to start construction. Each rebuild took one week, and immediately after, we would start supporting the church’s pastor with food and medicine for distribution. And God blessed the work. People were coming to Jesus for salvation, and the church became a place of hope in the community. It’s amazing to see what God can do.

To learn how you can be praying with us for the ministry in Haiti, visit Prayer Requests.