For more than a decade, Atlantic Union Conference Haitian Ministries has sponsored and conducted medical mission trips to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This year, from July 16-24, dozens of volunteers from the United States, Canada, and Spain traveled to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, to serve people in need living in the region, many of them Haitian immigrants.
Medical personnel from Santo Domingo met the team to lend their services, and together the group provided free medical care to more than 2,000 patients. Altogether, the team—many of whom were on their 11th medical mission trip on behalf of the Atlantic Union—included doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, pastors, and lay people of all ages offering specialties, including general medicine, obstetrics/gynecology, podiatry, psychiatry, naturopathy, ophthalmology, and dentistry.
It takes an army of people working together to pull off a trip of this magnitude. Jose Joseph, Atlantic Union Conference vice president for Haitian and African ministries, and Elias F. Zabala, Sr., Atlantic Union Conference treasurer, worked with contacts and pastors from the Dominican Union Conference and the East Dominican Conference (EDC) to meet the vast logistical needs on the ground in Punta Cana.
Members, elders, and pastors from local Adventist churches, many of them wearing EDC Pathfinder shirts representing their various clubs, worked to set up waiting areas and medical offices, carried cases of water for the volunteers, and unloaded numerous boxes of medicine and other necessary medical equipment. Members from surrounding Haitian Adventist churches had also spread the word in the surrounding communities about the medical clinic and the evangelistic series that would take place at the same time.
The medical team split their time between Verón and Otra Banda, each located approximately 30 minutes and 45 minutes, respectively, from Punta Cana. The school in Verón that hosted the clinic was located off a small dirt road, and each morning, hundreds of people—primarily women and mothers with children—would already be standing in line as the bus pulled up with the medical team.
The stream of people increased as the day grew hotter, and patients clustered in groups under the trees to escape the burning sun. “We come here because a lot of people don’t have access to the medical system, and, for some, it is the first time they have met with a medical doctor,” said Joseph. “We praise the Lord [for the opportunity] because we can be the heart and hands of our Savior, Jesus.”
In the gymnasium, gown-covered dentists, dental hygienists, and dental assistants from Adventist churches in Santo Domingo spent long hours bent over dental chairs to the hum of air compressors and drills. A team of pharmacists, also from Santo Domingo, filled prescriptions in a makeshift pharmacy in a tiny room with a local church member stationed outside the door for security and crowd control.
The school’s second-floor classrooms became treatment rooms and an emergency triage unit. Signs posted above the doors indicated the specific medical specialty in both Spanish and French to serve all who came. While patients waited to be seen, the breeze carried the happy sound of children singing songs about Jesus. Averaging 150-170 children each day, volunteers conducted a lively Vacation Bible School throughout the week with action songs, stories, crafts, and a snack—which, for some children, supplemented a meager meal and took away hunger pangs.
The final three days of the medical clinic were in Otra Banda at a large elementary school with two buildings flanking a courtyard shaded by coconut and palm trees. Several church buses brought members and people from the surrounding communities to the clinic. “Due to the context of the situation in which we live on this island, receiving health care is very difficult,” said Junior Féliz, EDC secretary. “They need it very much because many of them do not have documents; they don’t have anything to receive care.” Speaking in Creole and Spanish, local church elders, Pathfinder leaders, and visiting volunteer pastors helped organize the hundreds of waiting patients into groups and manageable lines.
“I’m looking at this situation from a public health standpoint,” said Judith Faustin-Gabriel, Ph.D., M.D., N.P., a first-time volunteer from Florida. “The [number] of people coming with so many children without access to healthcare, in addition to the stress they are experiencing related to immigration, unemployment . . . and lack of emotional support because many have left family behind, it’s all very disturbing. Being here [and] doing this service makes such a difference.”
Daphne Robert, M.D., a podiatrist from New Hampshire, is on her third medical mission trip with the group. “During this trip, I noticed more people under a lot of stress and anxiety. Many complained of experiencing heart palpitations, which can mimic heart issues, but also may be attributed to stress.”
Nurses like Ketly St. Pre and Maia Chai, both from Brooklyn, New York, were on their third medical mission trip with the Atlantic Union. Chai enjoys working with all the volunteers and educating patients on medical information so they can better manage their own care. St. Pre says her first trip in 2013 impacted her so emotionally that she cried for several days afterward, and she continues to feel similar feelings on this trip as the patients’ dire circumstances weigh on her. “Many [of the patients] can’t read or write; some don’t even know their date of birth. Above all, many are scared to be sent back to Haiti,” said St. Pre.
On the third day of the clinic, local church officials learned that police detained a bus bringing patients to the Otra Banda clinic. Shocked and saddened by the news, volunteers gathered in groups throughout the day for intercessory prayer, pleading with God to step into the situation. “After negotiations with some local agencies, we thank God that the nine ladies were able to go back home. They were very grateful for the support of the Atlantic Union medical missionary team,” Joseph said.
Evangelistic Series
Spiritual healing and care are as much a part of the medical mission trips as physical care. The East Dominican Conference has nine Haitian churches in its district. Working together with both the local union and conference, visiting pastors conducted a six-night evangelistic series at eight Haitian churches around the area under the theme Celui qui régénère ton âme (The One Who Regenerates Your Soul).
Atlantic Union Conference administrators Pierre E. Omeler, president; Jose Joseph, vice president for Haitian and African ministries; and Henry Beras, vice president for Hispanic and Portuguese ministries, also preached during the series. Many of the pastors, such as Andre Trofort, a pastor from the Indiana Conference; Celeve Izean, ministerial assistant and pastor from the South Central Conference; Nephtalie Dorzilme, a pastor from Ontario Conference in Canada; and Othniel Francois, a pastor from the Southern New England Conference, worked double duty by helping at the clinic during the day and preaching at night. The final Sabbath culminated with 45 baptisms, with a special baptism of 25 youth and young adults at a public beach in Punta Cana officiated by both the visiting pastors and local pastors.
From praying and discussing treatment options with a woman who had recently received a stage-two breast cancer diagnosis, to working two hours on a young man’s teeth, giving him the confidence to smile again, to providing medication and lifestyle information so a man could manage his prescribed care, to sharing much-needed food and clothing with a man struggling to provide for his family, the individual stories of the people impacted by this trip are as varied as their faces. Each day, volunteers witnessed God using them to bring relief, comfort, healing, cheer, and in some cases, a miracle to these communities.
