A man from Bakersfield, just returned from a mission trip to Haiti that happened to land him there just before the earthquake hit, and right in the middle of all the chaos. But still, Jim Duggan says what stood out to him most was the resilience of the Haitiian people.
Stationed just seven miles from downtown Port Au Prince, Duggan's small missionary team from Mission Viejo Christian Church knew what they were sent to do, but never imagined what they'd encounter. When the earthquake hit three days after they arrived, their missionary trip to feed orphans became a rescue mission.
"Someone else had brought the picnic table out from the boy's home patio, out in the dirt road, and we carried her up to the table and that became the clinic," Duggan describes pulling a woman from a home next to the orphanage he was working. In the first few hours after the quake, the staff helped set up a clinic at the boy's home.
Although they were ill equipped they aided hundreds, many who'd lost limbs or needed amputations. But it's not the devastation Duggan remembers so much as the resilience. "I saw calmness, amazing people of Haiti that were so calm."
His family at home wasn't so calm at first. "We didn't know for over 30 hours whether they were alive or what," said Lou Dunkin, Duggan's mother. But the family finally got word out that their entire team was safe. The Saturday after the quake, a plane was chartered to take the team home.
Duggan says he was ready to stay weeks longer, and looking back he now knows the true mission of his trip. "When we got there, several of us including the flight attendants were commenting on that there were just a lot of missionaries coming down that week. A lot more than usual. When you look back and see it, was how God was using that to have some more team on the ground to do his work when the earthquake hit."
Duggan's church sends a team to Haiti twice a year to help aid the organization "Child Hope International."
