Pam Carter hugs a child during a May 2009 trip to Haiti – one of many she has made. She wants to return to the island nation in the future. A UMNS photo courtesy of Ken Carter.

One seat was available on the cargo plane leaving earthquake-ravaged Haiti, and Pam Carter took it.

“They came in and said, ‘If you can take just a bag that will fit on your lap and leave, you can meet us’” and get on the plane, she said.

“I looked at Patti (Kaufman of the Wyoming Annual Conference Haiti Partnership) and I said, ‘Patti, I can do that, and I’m ready to go home,’ and she said, ‘Please go home.’ ... I felt kind of bad leaving her, but I felt like it was a choice we were both making, and she was in a safe place.”

Carter had been in Haiti to do mission work and attend a conference in Port-au-Prince on behalf of her church. The Rev. Gesner Paul, president of the Methodist Church in Haiti, had invited churches and United Methodist missions staff to discuss work in his country. Carter’s church, Providence United Methodist Church of Charlotte, N.C., has a decades-old Haiti initiative.

The meeting had ended for the day and Carter was at the Methodist Guest House when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Jan. 12.

“After the shaking stopped, I ran downstairs and outside,” she said. “The building next to us had partially collapsed, but our building was left standing. There were glasses on a cart downstairs that remained intact where they had been.

“Everybody’s first thought was seeing if we had e-mail so we could contact our families,” Carter said. “We did one group e-mail for fear of losing power or Internet. We listed everybody’s e-mail address we could think of and typed furiously.”

Chaos and heartbreak

Since the guest house wasn’t affected “the folks there immediately started trying to help wounded people in that neighborhood,” Carter said. “The courtyard became a place for people to camp out and get medical help – as much as we were qualified to do.

“Through the day, we realized we still had electricity and water. Unbelievably, the next morning the guest house staff came in to make coffee. It was so surreal given the carnage around us, but it was almost like sanctuary.”

Outside that sanctuary, chaos reigned.

“We saw the Hotel Montana and how awful that was,” Carter said. “We saw people who were hurt and couldn’t be helped. It was just heartbreaking. At night, you would hear people wailing with grief and singing, and if there was an aftershock, you would hear the cries of fear.”

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In the ruins of the Hotel Montana, three mission executives with The United Methodist Church were trapped, along with other mission partners. All were found, but two of the mission executives– the Rev. Sam Dixon with the United Methodist Committee on Relief and the Rev. Clinton Rabb with Mission Volunteers – died from their injuries.

As members of her group tried to evacuate the country, Carter was able to secure a seat on a cargo plane. She returned home Jan. 15.

“I wanted to be like the pope and kiss the ground,” Carter told the Charlotte Observer newspaper about her first thoughts upon arriving home.

Two other women from North Carolina who had been with her in Haiti, as well as Kaufman from the Wyoming Conference, also made it home.

Long-term need

Carter said she is concerned that “people understand how much Haiti needed us before this and how they ought to multiply that a hundredfold now.”

“Haiti is such a hard place,” she added. “You could pick anywhere else in the world for this to happen, and it would be easier to get help to them. The runway’s too short and the roads are horrible, and there’s hardly any communication.”

She hopes the outpouring of aid and donations will last long after the story filters out of the news cycle. “Haiti needed long-term commitment before this ever happened. I hope people put their commitment in to do more than just a one-time gift.”

Providence Church, led by Carter’s husband, the Rev. Kenneth Carter Jr., has scheduled another trip to Haiti in March, but she said that might be postponed. Whenever the trip happens, she plans to be on it.

“When the time is right, I will go back, and there will be many more people wanting to go help.”

*Butler is a content editor for United Methodist Communications in Nashville, Tenn.

News media contact: Joey Butler, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

Audio

Pam Carter: “I said … ‘I’m ready to go home.’

Pam Carter:“Haiti needed us before. Multiply this a hundredfold.”

slideshow

Photos from team in Haiti

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