D’ARCY, Sask. – Ken and Denise Wallis couldn’t stay away when they heard about the earthquake that devastated Haiti earlier this year.
The grain farmers from D’Arcy, Sask., arrived Jan. 24, almost two weeks after the earthquake killed more than 250,000 people and left hundreds of thousands more injured and homeless.
They found collapsed buildings littering the landscape, rubble piled high beside the tattered highway, and thousands of people living out in the open in makeshift tents, often built from nothing more than cotton sheets and twigs.
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Most of the bodies had already been removed, buried in mass graves along side the rubble, but the aroma of the dead was still strong in their nostrils.
Despite the horror, the Wallises were compelled to help.
“We couldn’t have sat here and watched it from afar,” Ken said. “Haiti has become a part of our life now.”
The couple had developed a close relationship with the country over the last five years.
They had gone on several missions with their Free Methodist church, working on various construction projects, helping medical teams and building churches and hospitals in poor communities.
They also sponsor a 15-year-old Haitian girl named Medjinah, who they call their daughter.
“The day after the earthquake, he was ready to fly to there with a back pack and find a horse,” Denise said of her husband. “He was ready to go.”
That kind of attitude has been vital in helping Haiti cope with the magnitude of this most recent task.
The Wallises were mainly involved in facilitating medical efforts, assisting in the distribution of medical supplies and helping surgeons and doctors reach the people who needed their help most.
“I’m a farmer, so I have skills at doing whatever it takes to get by – the Haitians call it Degage, which means make do with what you got,” Ken said.
“We got things so that the surgeons and the doctors can do what they have to do.”
Added Denise: “Farmers fit well.… We can make do with what’s there, food wise or tool wise or whatever.”
Ken was born and raised on a homestead in northern Saskatchewan, and his family has been farming land near D’Arcy for almost 100 years.
He and Denise are now grain farmers on that same land. They have five children, with the eighth grandchild on the way. They believe that their upbringing has helped them relate to the tragedies of Haiti.
“I often tell the people that the conditions I was born into are not that different from the conditions they are living in now. I was born in a log cabin in northern Saskatchewan. We didn’t have electricity or running water. We lived a lot a like they are living now,” Ken said.
“It’s not as overwhelming for us because we lived that life. Whereas someone coming from a developed city who always needs their shower at night and wants to go to Tim Horton’s for breakfast, those things are just not available there.”
When they finally arrived in Port-au-Prince, they were relieved to find Medjinah still alive. She was living on what had once been a soccer field and was now a makeshift tent city.
Even though none of her family members were killed in the quake, the emotional damage to the little girl was unmistakable.
“When she first came to us she wouldn’t sleep at night. She wouldn’t make any sound, but she would just cry and cry,” Denise said.
“She tripped over dead bodies. She was running around the dark screaming, looking for her aunt. She saw terrible things.”
After seeing the horror of this tragedy, the Wallises consider themselves lucky. Had they arrived two weeks earlier, as they had originally planned, it is likely that they too would be among the dead.
They describe seeing the guesthouse they were supposed to have stayed in crumbled to the ground. Buried beneath it were the bodies of three Americans and one Haitian with whom they had worked.
The head of the mission was also killed in the quake when the mission headquarters collapsed.
Despite the immense devastation and personal loss of so many people, the Wallises see bright spots in Haiti. Agricultural production was not severely damaged by the quake, which means is still possible for food to move into the cities.
On a more human level, they said they are proud of the Haitians for their continued endurance and hospitality in the weeks following the quake.
Ken spent the better part of three nights sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the Canadian embassy, during which time they experienced a 4.6 magnitude aftershock, and he said he never felt threatened by the people around him, even though they had lost everything.
The Wallises said the hardest part of their trip was leaving Haiti.
“We hated to leave our Haitian daughter behind,” Ken said. “We cried buckets.”
They talk to Medjinah almost every night and are trying to adopt the girl and bring her to Canada.
