THE PULSE
Compiled by Adam Miller
Ideas, insights, inspiration for you and your church
MY TURN: Being the Church, together
By Seneque Saintil
The day 51 Haitian evacuees arrived in Atlanta I visited the hospitals that had received them. I had lost family in the same earthquake in Port-au-Prince so I had an immediate connection. These were my people, and though I’d been in the states for many years I knew what it was like coming here from there and under the duress of disaster.
I was the first Haitian to visit these people, thanks to information of their arrival from the Georgia Baptist Convention and the North American Mission Board, and I was immediately able to get the women in our church cooking food for a Haitian’s palette. When I notified the leadership of Dunwoody Baptist Church and North Lanier Baptist Church, those congregations went to work setting up assistance with transportation, lodging and other necessities.
What was so encouraging was the amazing power of partnership we experienced in those early days after the arrival of these people, many of whom had seen loved ones die and had themselves been in serious danger. One lady was pregnant when she was trapped for 18 hours.
Others were amputees. More than a dozen were children. All of them were homeless and without personal contacts in the states. Government assistance was still days or weeks away and they would have been helpless without the selfless efforts of our churches.
A year later, now at the end of government aid, many of these same evacuees are struggling to find employment and are in danger once again of being homeless. So I and other Haitian pastors are working to join in partnership with fellow Southern Baptists to provide them with ways to support themselves and care for their families.
The way Southern Baptists helped Haiti both in Portau-Prince and stateside has been an amazing testimony to the amount we can accomplish when we work together across ethnic and national lines to be Christ’s hands and feet to the hurting and helpless.
Seneque Saintil is the pastor of Mitzpa Haitian Missionary Baptist Church in Norcross, Ga. For more information about how you can help these and other Haitian evacuees in North America, contact pastor Saintil at 770-912-4894.
44 Summer 2011 •
onmission.com
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