It was late Sunday evening in Haiti. We had finished devotions. Our team leader had shared from Max Lucado’s book, “Safe in the Shepherd’s Arms,” a commentary on Psalm 23. Now our team of teachers was doing last-minute preparations for our sessions with Haitian teachers scheduled to begin in the morning. I glanced at the clock. Almost 11:00 p.m.
Thony, our Haitian country director, stepped outside the only entrance to the guesthouse to check on the vehicle we were using. Suddenly three men with handguns surrounded him. They threatened him, one holding a pistol to his forehead and another thrusting a pistol into his side. They claimed to know him and to know that the team had brought $50,000 into Haiti. They demanded this money.
Thony had no choice but to bring them into the guesthouse. I looked up from the materials we were working on as three scraggly looking characters entered the room with Thony. I immediately thought that these were sure skuzzy looking characters for guards at the seminary where we were staying and holding the seminars. Then I heard one of them say, “Stay cool! Stay cool!” At the same time I noted that he was waving a pistol at us and I instantly knew these men were not connected to the seminary!
From the look on Thony’s face and his words, “Just do what they say,” I immediately knew that we were in trouble. Thony approached the table and sank to his knees at the corner across from me and to my right. Although his body language betrayed his concern for the situation we were in, he remained composed and translated what two of the men were saying to us, or at least what he knew we needed to hear.
The apparent leader of the threesome, dressed in a green striped shirt, in his late 20s or early 30s, approximately 5’10” or 6’ tall, thin with a long narrow face and black bushy curly hair, pointed the gun toward me and said something in Creole. The only word I caught was “Madam” and I knew he was singling me out. Thony translated, “He says that he knows you. He has seen you at the airport. He says that he knows me too.” This was possible since I had been in and out of Haiti several times. I noted the tension in Thony’s voice and knew he was terribly frightened too, although he was staying outwardly calm.
“And He will give his angels charge over you to keep you in all your way…” I silently prayed, “Show me, Father, what to do!” This was an oft-repeated prayer during the ordeal.
The second man, bald-headed, with a heart-shaped face, very sour expression, and a wart on his bald head demanded that we take off our rings, watches, and even our glasses and put our heads down. I tried to pull my wedding ring off, but there was no way to get it over my arthritic knuckle. He nodded at me and demanded, “That ring too.” I shook my head. “I can’t get it off. My joint is too large to let it come off my finger.” He looked disgusted, but his attention was diverted to something else momentarily.
Then Thony spoke up. “They say that they know that we have $50,000. They saw it in a black case at the airport.”
“We don’t have $50,000 and would never carry that into any country,” I exclaimed.
Thony translated again, “They want money.”
“We’ll give them what we have, but it isn’t nearly $50,000,” I said.
“They say that they have to report back to the airport what they get,” Thony said.
At some point, Ben* came to the table and sat down on the opposite side from me and to my left. The second man suddenly whopped him on the side of his head, making such a loud cracking sound that I feared my team member might really be hurt. He demanded Ben get his head down. At that moment I realized these men were not beyond using violence to get what they wanted.
With the demand for money, Ben took out his wallet and laid some bills on the table. “If we find you are holding out on us, you will be in trouble,” the gunman warned him menacingly. It may have been at that point that he hit Ben a second time. Ben suddenly remembered that he might have more in a hidden compartment in his wallet. He told the gunman this through Thony, took out his wallet once again, and found some more bills that were hidden in it. None of the rest of us had any money on our persons.
The third man stayed in the shadows. I never did get a good look at him. “Is this everyone?” they demanded.
“No,” Thony told them. “There’s another couple who have already gone to bed.” By this time the third man was opening the door to the bedroom next to the entrance of the guesthouse. The couple had only been married a few weeks, and so we had given them the privacy of their own room.
When the thug entered their room, he demanded that they come out with the rest of the team. The Haitian husband’s fear was that his wife would be a target for rape. He knew of a recent incident when a man broke into a Haitian pastor’s home and raped the wife. He kept his arms wrapped protectively around his wife as they came to the table and sat across from me. Then he pulled her onto his lap.
Sue* feared that as they riffled through our things in the dorm rooms and found more money, they would come back to torment or harm us. She begged to be allowed to go get money that she knew was in her suitcase. I didn’t want her to go alone into the bedroom with the leader of the gang, fearing for her safety. Finally they gave in to her insistence. Things were already strewn about, but she managed to find the money and bring it back to the table.
Then a couple of the men spoke up. They each had more money in their room. They too were allowed to leave the table and go to their dorm room. Things were tossed about, but they managed to find their funds and bring them back to the table. Again the gunman demanded my wedding ring and again I told him I couldn’t remove it. Before the event was over, they demanded it a third time. I thought that maybe they would grab a knife from a set that was in plain sight and chop off my finger. But again the Lord protected each of us from physical harm.
While the second man stood guard, his gun pointed at us, the other two continued searching through our things and tossing them into a duffle bag, a backpack, and a computer case. They picked up cameras, cell phones, a CD player and CDs, two laptop computers and five wedding bands among miscellaneous other items. The wedding rings were the most distressing loss to the group.
Finally, the trio seemed to be in a hurry to move on. They demanded that Thony come with them. My heart sank as they took him to the door at gunpoint. They turned back and warned us to keep our heads down and not to talk. I knew throughout the time that I needed to keep alert to what was going on, so instead of burying my head in my folded arms, I put my chin down but kept an eye on things. I was at a good vantage point, sitting directly in line with the door plus able to see either side of me and observe the rest of the team and the gunmen.
My mind raced to ascertain what the gunmen were up to. Were they going to take Thony outside and beat him? Were they still determined that we had $50,000 and they were going to hold him for ransom? Since he could identify them, would they simply take him outside and kill him? Later we learned that when they got to the door, two of them began to argue. One said he had to go with them. The other said they needed to tie him up and leave him behind. Finally the latter won out and they escorted him back to the table. They had tied his hands behind his back.
“Stand up!” they demanded the Haitian husband. As he moved to meet their demands, his wife began clinging to him and crying out, “No! No!” I realized the situation was quickly escalating again. I knew something must be done to calm her and get her away from him.
“Let her come over here to me!” I said firmly. Thony, although bound by the strap, still had to serve as the translator. The leader looked at me and nodded. As soon as she was beside me, I held her hands tightly as we watched anxiously to see what was next.
One of the men took the end of the strap and tied the husband’s hands behind his back. Now he and Thony were linked together. “Get face down on the floor,” they demanded. It was another tense moment as both men fell face down on the floor. Were they going to shoot the men in the back of the head? But the gunmen quickly gathered the bags they had loaded and left with another warning to the team to keep our heads down and not say a word.
I later wrote down fifteen tense moments when the situation started to escalate, but “the angel of the Lord was encamping around us and delivered us each time.” My paraphrase of Psalm 34.
We waited several more minutes, heads down, everyone silent. Again I prayed, “Lord, show me what to do and when.” Finally, I felt that I needed to go as quietly as possible to the door and get it locked. On my way, I looked at the clock that had been behind me. Midnight. They had been here an hour!
Quickly I made my way back and knelt by Thony and began untying him. As I worked to get the knots out, I heard the other man quietly start to sing, “You are Awesome Mighty God in this place, You are Awesome Mighty God, Abba Father…” Slowly, quietly one by one the rest of the team joined him. Ben came to my side and took over untying the men.
Once we knew we were safe, we began discussing what had happened. “You all did exactly what you needed to do,” I commended the team. “If any one of you had reacted differently, the outcome could have been so different. Preparation for this kind of thing doesn’t happen in orientation or even prior to coming on the trip. God has been preparing us for some time to go through this.”
Later during Critical Stress Debriefing, I was asked what God was saying to me through this experience. I thought hard and long about that, but I felt it was more what I was saying to Him:
You are faithful to Your promises!
You are my Rock. My life is built on a Solid Foundation that is not shaken by circumstances that come into my life.
You truly are my Shepherd, and I know Your voice!
Probably more so than that any other point in my life, I “knew” what to do and say moment by moment.
This is what the Lord says— your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. Isaiah 48:17 NIV
* Some Names have been changed to protect privacy.