TITANYEN, Haiti -- Rain has begun to fall on Haiti, heavy evening showers that hammer tin roofs and coax pink and purple blooms from the stunted crepe myrtle and bougainvillea clinging to the rocky soil.
In the village of Titanyen, something else is sprouting: tiny, bright blue houses built of treated 2-by-4s and plastic tarps.
"The reason we're here is the earthquake," Scott Daughtry told a dozen new volunteers for the N.C. Baptist Men before they began a week of building the shelters and running medical clinics. "But the purpose we're here for is to fix people's souls."
The group of men and women, mostly from the Triangle, are staying in a house leased by the Baptists on a mission compound that is also the temporary home of Boone-based Samaritan's Purse. Both groups came to Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake to provide medical care for the injured and have stayed to help with long-term rebuilding.
With rains coming more frequently, that means providing shelter for some of the hundreds of thousands of people whose homes collapsed or were damaged in the quake or who were so traumatized by the experience that they are afraid to sleep indoors, though their houses have been deemed safe.
Aid continues to pour into Haiti from governments and large and international organizations such as the Red Cross and the United Nations. But in places like Titanyen, help comes from smaller, less-heralded groups such as the N.C. Baptist Men, whose volunteers pay their own way, $1,100 each, for a week of work in Haiti's stifling heat.
The group finished four shelters Monday, in a nation where it seems like everybody needs one.
"I don't see the big picture at all," Daughtry said. "But I do see the individual lives that we make a difference in. And they add up. Eventually, the big picture will change. And the alternative is to give up, and say, 'Let's go home.'"
The construction teams, with their piles of wood and their tool belts, attract attention as soon as they arrive at a building site. Haitian men come to help, and women and children gather to watch.
The children tug at the workers' clothes and ask for gifts.
Once they get into a rhythm, a team of workers who can aim a hammer can raise and nail the frame, screw down the corrugated metal roof and wrap the structure in reinforced plastic sheeting in a couple of hours. Each shelter comes with a set of plywood shelves that run the length of one wall and can be used for storage or as bunk beds. The 12-by-12-foot buildings cost less than $1,000 and are designed to last two years. Together, the groups hope to build 8,000 of them.
What one man can do
Larry Kingsley of Cary, who assembled this construction team, is a land developer, not a builder. But when there is a catastrophe somewhere, especially one that affects poor people, it's not enough for Kingsley to make a donation. After Hurricane Katrina, he made the 15-hour drive to Mississippi to help four times.
Daughtry, a retired state park district superintendent, came to Haiti with his wife, Janet, in February to coordinate the work of the Baptist volunteers who rotate in and out each week. Together the couple, who live in Johnston County, have done mission work all over the world and across the U.S., but Daughtry says they have never seen any place like Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
"You have to ask, how can a place be so pretty and so poor?" he said.
When they first arrived in the country, Daughtry was overwhelmed by the need.
"I wrassled with it a long time," he said. "I didn't know where to go or what to do, there was so much that needed to be done. I finally figured out you just start where you are with the first one you can help.
"For many a morning," he said, "I talked to God about how big the mountains were. Then I started telling the mountains how big God is."
A chance to evangelize
The fixing of souls, as Daughtry puts it, comes with the hammering and building, even in a country that is already overwhelmingly Christian - 55 percent Catholic and 28 percent Protestant, according to the U.S. State Department.
Dieuner Joseph, a Haitian who now lives in Cary and made the trip with the Baptists, used Monday's work as an opportunity to evangelize. As the team finished one of the shelters and handed it over to its new owners, Joseph asked one woman, in Creole, whether she had accepted Christ.
She told him she did not have clothes to wear to church, he said later, after returning to the mission house.
"I'm not talking about going to church," he told her. "I am talking about, if you die tonight, do you know where you will go?"
"OK," she told him. "You can pray for me. I accept the Lord."
"It's been a good day," Joseph said.
Out the back door of the mission house is a distant view of the Caribbean Sea, as blue and beautiful as at any resort in the Caymans or Jamaica. But the mission compound is wrapped in concertina wire and has guards with sawed-off shotguns who walk the perimeter to keep thieves and thugs away.
Trucks and vans take the volunteers through the gates in the mornings and deliver them to their jobs for the day.
In Titanyen, the Baptists hired Haitian drivers to negotiate narrow, winding, gravel paths with no names. These are lined with concrete-block houses that were broken into pieces by the earthquake, and others that are still under construction. In a process that can take years, residents gather stones, then buy cement and rebar as they can afford them, and build a little at a time.
With so many partially built and broken-down homes, and so much rubble underfoot, the village looks like ancient ruins with people living among them.
Life in a place of death
Titanyen has a sad history as the place where murder victims' bodies were dumped during the regimes of dictators Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude. More recently, it is where most of the bodies of the 200,000 people killed in the earthquake were buried in a mass grave.
But it is home to Timothe Pierrelouis, a 32-year-old with no job and six extended family members to house. For months, they have been sleeping under the sky.
Tonight, if it rains, they will be dry.
