In late October 1994, Steve Smith came out of a surgical suite carrying a hand full of supplies that had been opened but not used or contaminated. A nurse, coming out of an adjoining room did the same, asked him what he was going to do with his and he told her he saved them for organizations going to and working in other countries. Although no longer sterile, there is a great need for supplies like these as long as they are clean.

She asked if she could give his phone number to a group making plans to go on a mission trip that could possibly use some of what he had. Twenty four hours later, Steve had been invited to make his first missionary trip and to Haiti. This came three days after a prayer group at their church had prayed God would open a door to the mission field for him.

After spending the last week of 1994 and the first week of 1995 in Haiti, Steve and Terry, along with their pastor and three friends, sat down on Saturday the second weekend of March 1995, set the ground work for the ministry, and gave it its name: Haitian Islands Ministry, or as it is known now, HIM. Steve says, “I wish now we could take credit for the name but that was our pastor’s idea and I guess in hindsight it sounds better than my name: Haitian Outreach Project, or HOP — although around Easter that might sound okay.”

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Sometimes, it seems we write the same things over and over, especially when it come to the political situation in Haiti. Once again we have a stalemate. The prime minister who oversees the day to day operations of the government and more importantly now, any reconstruction efforts, has resigned because those in parliament won’t work with him. He said after he had called a meeting with several of them and no one showed up, he knew he had no support. The reasons for that are many and we won’t go into all of them here. But what this does is effectively shut the government down until someone is named and approved to replace him.

This is not welcome news, especially to the estimated 515,000 people still homeless and living in 707 camps scattered across the capital. In an article that appeared in the Washington Post and written by William Booth on February 20, 2012, he states that many of those who have left the camps are now living in conditions worse than those found in the camps. And we know this to be true.

He goes on to say, “In Port Au Prince, 84,866 buildings have been marked with red paint, indicating they should be demolished. Nonetheless, more than half of the red-marked houses are inhabited, with little or no repair, as people desperate for shelter live in the ruins. Although it is not unusual for refugees fleeing conflict to be stuck in camps for years, rarely are people displaced by natural disasters for so long, and almost never in a camp in the central plaza of a capital city.”

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