Missions Report

Haiti Travels, Part 1
How God called me to do missions work in Haiti.
Posted by Joey Kelly

I remember so very clearly when God called me to minister in Haiti. In June 1993, a fellow soulwinner named Mark took his second trip to Port-au-Prince to preach in a few local churches. He asked me to pray for him while he was gone, and it was during that week of prayer that God impressed upon me to go with him on his next trip. But when he got home, he swore he wasn't going back! But at my insistence, he took me and another of his friends for a week, right before Christmas that year.

He said he didn't want to make any more trips because June was just too hard on him, and I found out very quickly what hard was all about. In December, when Americans were enjoying cool weather and looking forward to several months' relief from summer, I was getting sunburn. It was HOT! And dry, dusty, crowded, very fast-paced, and very much foreign to me and my previously-sheltered life. We had to walk everywhere we went, or catch a tap-tap, sometimes standing on the bumper and hanging on for dear life as the driver wove in and out of traffic. One evening as we sat down to supper up the hill at our hotel in Petionville, we were given a gallon jug of lukewarm water. We each poured a glass and downed it, then thanked God for our food. By the end of the meal the jug was empty and we were asking for another… the dust and heat sapped all of our energy, and nothing tasted as good to us that evening as lukewarm Culligan water.

But God met us that week. We preached in a couple of churches and also on the radio. One of the pastors we worked with ran a Christian radio station in downtown Port-au-Prince, and he graciously allowed us to preach and testify on the air, with him interpreting for us. That Friday he took us to his church near Citi Soleil, a very large structure that sat a few thousand. Their biggest service of the week was late Friday morning, and Mark, Barney and I took turns preaching to the assembled crowd. Not long after we arrived, we noticed (couldn't help but hear, really) a mother holding a screaming child that was clutching his stomach. The pastor asked us to pray for him, which we did, several times. After the service was over, we realized that the boy was no longer screaming his head off… he was standing up, had a big smile on his face, and was eating a cookie. The pastor remarked that it would have been a shame if the boy had not been healed, with all the praying we had done for him. As we traveled back to the hotel, we praised God for His healing touch.

When I got back to the states, I made up my mind to go to Haiti as a full-time missionary, and had made plans to move there in the fall of 1994, but was never quite able to pull it off. I've made several short-term trips over the years however, for which I'm very thankful, and if the Lord helps me I'll continue to preach there and in Haitian congregations here in the states.

Please pray for the people of Haiti. Their economy is horrible, their political climate is unstable at best, and then there was the terrible earthquake a few years back, but the people are hungry for God. On street corners here in America, no one wants to hear what the preacher says nor read the tracts he hands out, but in Haiti they've left the Catholic church by the hundreds of thousands, and genuinely want to hear what the evangelist has to say. Christ's words are true regarding Haiti: the harvest is plenty.