REMEMBERING 12 JANUARY 2010
President Kennedy’s assassination. The World Trade Center attacks. There are events in life that forever etch images and emotions into our souls, into our memories, and in some instances, reveal new paths in our lives. We remember the smallest of details, where we were, who we were with, as if they had occurred just yesterday. For myself, the news images flowing out of Ayiti on 12 January 2010 were prefaced with the massive cloud of gray dust over lower Port-au-Prince. That image was followed in the following weeks with the unimaginable images of total destruction, death, and chaos in a country of 10 million people that had just experienced the second-worst loss of human life by an earthquake in recorded human history.
On February 21, 2010, I entered Ayiti from the Dominican Republic at the port of Jimani with fellow search and rescue colleagues. For the next week, our home would be a tent at the LOG Base near the Aéroport International Toussaint Louverture. From there, we would navigate around rubble piles of collapsed buildings in the streets on our daily passage to the community of Juvenat. It would take us two days to accomplish our mission of recovering the body of a young girl from a partially collapsed building. This marked my turning point on His path, as it became clear that He had prepared me for His work, not mine.
I returned to Ayiti in April and for the next 20 months, my wife and I would live and work in Ayiti to help the Ayitian people recover from their worst nightmare. We met many great friends in Ayiti… many survivors and many from other parts of the world who also felt the call to help. They will forever be in our hearts, especially on these days of remembrance.
