‘Accounted For’ in Haiti

All Heather Pipkin Gray wanted to know was that her family was OK. That’s all. “I would be happy to just have an e-mail that said, ‘We’re OK,’ that they signed themselves,” she said. “It’s like they’re ghosts right now.”

John and Joyce Pipkin boarded a plane in Miami, Florida, bound for Haiti on the morning of January 12. The flight had become routine for the couple. The Pipkins have been actively coordinating outreach ministries in Haiti since 2001. While Joyce visited partner church communities in Les Cayes, John, a retired pilot, worked with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) as a volunteer pilot assisting the on-site missionary staff in Port-au-Prince.

But this mission trip to Haiti would be like no other over the last nine years. The Pipkins landed in Haiti, made the short drive along the mountainside, before finally settling in at the Church of the Nazarene missionary compound, outside of Port au Prince.

At 4:53 p.m. “…the coat hangers in the closet started shaking and swaying,” remembers John. “Then, the walls started shaking.” “John, why are you shaking the bed?” asked Joyce. “I’m not shaking the bed,” John replied. “This is an earthquake. We need to get out of the house.”

They ran into the front yard, stood and watched as a parked car bounced like a rubber ball in the driveway. Moments later the wall that surrounded the compound collapsed into the street. Thirty-eight seconds later it was over.

A woman raced down the street, her hands in the air, screaming, “Praise God!”

Praise God? In Haiti, “faith is all they have,” explained Joyce, who witnessed the passionate act of worship as the woman’s homeland collapsed around her. There is comfort, peace, in the Christian faith. Hebrews 4:16 reads, “Let us approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace in our time of need.”

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the media was unable to avoid testimonies from survivors and relief workers who invoked the praise of God. Unlike other recent natural disasters – Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in India – the response to Haiti’s earthquake has placed God center stage.

Incommunicado >

David and Heather Pipkin Gray, Charleston Southern University alumni, live in Germany. David, who graduated in 2001 from CSU, was deployed to Ramstein Air Force Base in October 2008. Six hours ahead of U.S. time, the news was just breaking in Germany as Heather, a 2002 graduate, was tucking her three children in bed. The depth and breadth of the devastation was not realized until the next morning.

There is no cable television in the Gray home in Germany. All their news and information is obtained via Internet and Armed Forces Network (AFN), which David was listening to on the way to work. After hearing the reports on the radio, it was clear that this was more than just a tremor.

“It’s all over the news there was a massive earthquake in Haiti,” David told his wife on the phone. Before she could get to the Internet, the phone rang again, only this time it was Heather’s sister, Denise, calling from Georgia.

“What are you doing calling me?” Heather asked, realizing it was the middle of the night in the States.

“Daddy and Joyce are in Haiti,” said Denise.

“It took me a while to put it together, and, still, I hadn’t seen anything because we don’t have CNN or anything,” said Heather. “But then, when it did indeed hit me, that they were in Haiti, I spent the first 12 hours praying … and waiting … and waiting and praying.”

Heather reached out using the one communication tool she had: Facebook.

About an hour after the initial quake John and Joyce Pipkin sent an e-mail to their daughter Denise to let the family know they were alive. The e-mail never reached its destination. Less than one hour later, Heather posted a second message on Facebook:

Don’t Look >

Communication with friends, relatives, family and loved ones in Haiti was cut off by the effects of the earthquake. As news broke and images surfaced on television and the Internet, the world reached out but no one replied.

“It was very frustrating not to have a television to turn on, but then again, it may have been a blessing,” Heather said. What was coming out of CNN and other world news sources was nothing less than horrific. The images revealed more than necessary at times. They resembled an apocalyptic event.

“My sister called me and said, ‘Heather, don’t get on the Internet. Don’t do it. Don’t look at it,’” she said. “Every five minutes I am calling my sister saying, tell me you’ve heard something, because all I keep seeing are these horrible images.”

Seeing arms and legs, watching blood-covered men, women and children wailing in the rubble on the streets of Port-au-Prince was heartbreaking. For Heather, it was frightening. This was more than just a tragic earthquake. It was personal. John and Joyce Pipkin were part of it. But where were they? A photo of a collapsed building, begged the question, “Are they trapped beneath that rubble?”

A third entry from Heather came in 26 minutes later:

Morning passed; no news. Afternoon came and went too. Heather called the State Department and sat on hold for four hours. “When they finally picked up to take my information, we got disconnected because the battery in my phone died,” she remembers.

Accounted for >

Michael Broyles, a member of the MAF, was able to get an intermittent Internet connection. He used those precious moments on Facebook to communicate with worried families across the world.

“The only words he said were that my parents were ‘accounted for,’” said Heather. The vague, yet important, communication left many questions lingering. What does “accounted for” mean? Accounted for, as in, alive? Accounted for and seriously injured? Accounted for their bodies?

“We were praising God, but all night we’re thinking, what does that mean?” said Heather. “Does it mean, OK, we see the bodies? Are they walking around helping? Did they spend the night on the street, in the rain? Where are they? What are they doing?”

“My heart goes out to these people who are unaccounted for and all they have are these horrible images,” said Heather. “What if this is all I had? This random CNN footage, seeing people in Haiti walking around in the streets, lifting up sheets of the dead people to see if that’s a family member. Even people in that country can’t find their family.”

Two days after the earthquake, Heather and Denise, her sister, were instant messaging on Facebook when Denise wrote, “I just want to hear their voices.”

“While it is comforting to know they’re alive and OK, it was a little disheartening because you don’t know what that [accounted for] means,” said Heather.

Status Updates >

Grim is right, as John Pipkin later recalled those initial hours after the quake, “If you remember after 9/11, the smoke that was billowing, that’s what it looked like. You could hear people crying and wailing in the village from the mountainside. Then, every time there was an aftershock you’d hear the crying start again.”

The last time Heather saw her father and stepmother was during the Thanksgiving holiday. By the first week of December Heather, her husband David and three children were on a flight back to Ramstein Air Force Base. Now, all Heather could do was hold on to those last hugs – and pray she would see them again.

Heather’s “voice” fell silent on Facebook. There were no status updates for almost 24 hours. Friends and family waited and prayed. “Sunday is my sister’s birthday,” said Heather. “So we’re praying that she’ll have a great birthday present, and we’ll hear from them.”

Then, at 3:12 a.m. on Saturday, January 16, just hours before Denise’s birthday, Heather logged on to Facebook and sent the following message:

“The majority of the world had written off Haiti,” John said. But the Pipkins believe the spirit and faith of the Haitian people, despite their abject poverty, will help in the restoration and lead, as Joyce Pipkin noted, to the fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that “the last shall be first.”

Happy Birthday Denise.