Trading Baptists for Bucket Showers

Erika Dyson

May 8, 2004

"Two security people from the church have analyzed the country and they feel pretty good about it," explains Curtis Giles, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission president in Haiti, in a phone interview. "They say it is as good as it has been. There are always risks in living in an underdeveloped country."

"As good as it has been" may not be a ringing endorsement, considering Haiti's recent unrest. But it may be enough to allow 56 missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to return to their work among the Haitians.

The Church announced it was pulling its non-Haitian missionaries out of the country on February 23rd of this year, as the violent rebellion against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide grew. The young men, aged 19 to 26, scattered to new assignments in order to finish their two-year stints as teachers of the Latter-day gospel. But most, according to Giles, are eager to be called back.

"Almost every missionary who has left, who we sent to the West Indies, Canada and the United States, has written and said they wished they could come back," says Giles of his former charges. "These guys were taking bucket cold showers, working in really rough conditions. But they miss the people. The people here are genuine, really good people."

During this year, which is both the two-hundredth anniversary of Haitian independence from colonial control and the twentieth anniversary of the Church's mission in Haiti, President Giles and his wife Irene, known a Sister Giles, have seen the political situation in the country erupt, as heavily-armed rebels from the north, led by Guy Phillipe, clashed with Aristide's supporters. The Giles are ten months into their three year commitment, after which they will return to their jobs in Utah, his as the president of a small credit union and hers as an office manager at Brigham Young University.

One of the mission president's prime responsibilities during this conflict has been to keep the Church's 130 missionaries out of harm's way.

"We've had our ups and downs," remarks President Giles, dryly. "We moved some out of Gonaïves in the fall of last year, where the rebellion started. Some of our friends in the area sidled up to our missionaries and said that it is getting a bit rough and that they might think about leaving. Just around the first of the year we pulled all of them out of the north."

When the call came from Church headquarters in Salt Lake City to evacuate all non-Haitian missionaries from the island, the Giles and three other married couples chose to remain. These days, President Giles supervises the remaining 66 Haitian missionaries who continue to proselytize in the southern and western sections of the country. The others coordinate Church humanitarian efforts and educational programs and keep the mission office running.

"We had an option to stay or go but I felt called here to do this, so we stayed," he explains simply. Neither he nor his wife Irene found this decision difficult to make.

"It was that matter of fact, really. In fact, if we'd have been told we must leave we would have of course, but we were given the option and we really never considered going," agrees Sister Giles. "It was kind of like the captain and his ship -- at that point we had 66 Haitian Elders and Sisters (male and female missionaries) still here. To have just left would have been made things even harder for them -- things were pretty hard as it was having had 56 of our missionaries pulled out that quickly."

The younger American missionaries who worked under Giles were not given the option of whether to stay, as the older couples were. Young men and women, called "Elders" and "Sisters" respectively, who volunteer for missionary service in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agree to go wherever they are assigned, or re-assigned, by Church leaders for two years (older couples serve longer). During this time, they work 60-70 hour weeks and are expected to adhere to a strict code of conduct. The code regulates such activities as contact with the opposite sex (keep at arms distance, please) and the exact time they should leave to start their rounds in the morning (usually 9:35 a.m.).

According to 2003 Church figures, over 60,000 missionaries knocked on doors in 141 countries and taught Church doctrine in 46 languages. This yielded 242,923 converts in 2003, bringing total Church membership worldwide to just under 12 million.

In Haiti, the Church has grown steadily, increasing from one member in 1977 to 24 congregations and 11,330 members in 2003. Catholics still made up 80% of the Haitian population in 2000.

Elders Ryan Skipper, 24, and Spencer Dispane, 21, flew out of Port-au-Prince on February 24th, five days before Aristide himself left the country. They ended up together in Charleston, South Carolina, where they now missionize among Bible Belt Christians.

"(Our missionaries) were on the very last flight to come out of the country. We stayed after everyone. Even the Peace Corps had left," says Skipper, who served only for three months before being evacuated. Skipper and 46 others left on the 24th, with the remainder leaving over the next two days.

"(Someone at) the embassy had something really awesome to say about that though," Dispane adds. Dispane worked for the Church in Mariani, a southern suburb of Port-au-Prince, for five months before the call came for him to leave. "They said all the unnecessary personnel had been taken out of the country. And they said that missionaries are deemed necessary personnel because when the missionaries leave, the people lose hope and the situation gets worse. So they keep the missionaries in for as long as possible."

This sentiment does not reflect official State Department policy, according to an American embassy spokeswoman in Haiti. The embassy regulates only the movement of government employees and issues advisories for everyone else.
To Skipper and Dispane, however, this sentiment does reflect their belief in the tangible good of their work in Haiti, and their continuing concern for the well-being of their Haitian neighbors.

"It's something I'm always concerned about," says Skipper. "I just want them to have peace, because there are so many good people there they don't deserve [unrest]. They deserve to have a good leader who loves them and cares about them, and wants to make a difference."

According to news reports from Reuters and The New York Times last week, the situation in Haiti has deteriorated recently, although the absence of American missionaries likely is not the root cause. The police force, once 6000 strong in a country of 8 million, has been reduced by half. It is still outgunned by the rebels, who have made only symbolic gestures at disarmament since March. Mountains of trash clog the streets of Port-au-Prince and humanitarian aid workers have been robbed while trying to transport supplies to outlying areas.

When talking with the missionaries about their daily lives in Haiti before the rebellion, the picture they paint is not much better. To get around, they relied public busses, called "taptaps," which were crammed with people and animals ("It was like a 24 hour petting zoo," observes Skipper) and sped around treacherous mountain passes and highways pocked with wide open drainage ditches. Walking also had its hazards.

"There's always big ditches on the side of the road and they're always full of trash. And manure everywhere," Skipper says. "When it rains the ditches are always so full of trash that it can't drain to the ocean. So the rainwater fills up and people just fall in."

The missionaries' concrete block apartments had irregular power, no doors, and no hot water.

"It wasn't nice but it still was nicer than anything else in the countryside," Skipper says of his apartment in the remote mountain town of Jeremy, on the far north-west coast of the country. "I still felt like I was coming home to something nice."

"Bucket showers, man," Dispane laughs ruefully.

When the fighting began, the Elders saw some "manifestations," or violent protests, and heard gunshots outside their apartments. Men in rusting pick-up trucks drove around waving guns and shooting them into the sky. Sometimes these men were the police and sometimes the rebels, depending on the area. In Mariani, they called themselves chimères, which means "wicked" in Creole and, according to Dispane, refers to anyone who wants to cause trouble. In Jeremy, it was the police.

"The cops with their big guns would drive around and they'd have all their gear on. They'd have helmets on -- they'd just get it from baseball equipment -- they'd have catcher's shin guards and baseball catcher's vests. They might have football shoulder pads on, whatever they could find to protect themselves," Skipper describes.

"There were a couple of missionaries who were shot at," says Dispane. "They were right in the middle of Port-au-Prince. [In Mariani] we really didn't see a whole lot."

But politics, power-outages and rebels do not dominate the Elders' talk of Haiti. As their mission president predicted, it is their memories of the people that make them long to return.

"They're nice. Right when you come to their door, everyone in the town knows who you are, and most people know your name," offers Skipper. "We'd go to people's houses and they'd be getting a chair for us before we even said anything. If you ever ate with them you had the best fork and the best plate. You had the best glass and you'd get your first choice of the food. And that would always touch me. That they didn't have anything and it was a real sacrifice for them to have some of the food that they have. And they would give it to us."

Not all Haitians lived up to this exuberant description the Elders admit, but they found that the people usually were happier to joke around with them than to remain hostile toward them for long.

"It's true," agrees Dispane, who left college in Idaho to go on his mission. "All the people down there love you. And it is so hard to be in a place where people don't want you around. I think it was a big shock for me coming back. The thing is, down there (in Haiti) they aren't closed minded as far as, 'I've already heard what I need to know. I'm happy with my life.' And what you've got down there was, 'I've read the Bible, and you believe in the Bible, then you're a good Christian person too.' A lot of what we teach is from the Bible and so that was a big plus. People already have their preconceptions about us up here."

The Elders find "proselyting," which is short for proselytizing in Elder-speak, to Southern Christians especially difficult because of these "preconceptions." Two of the most common reactions to their teachings they encounter in the south are that Mormons are not Christian and the church is a cult.

Several evangelical denominations, most notably the Southern Baptist Convention, actively teach these messages to their American congregations. For example, in 1998, the same year it held its annual convention in the "Mormon capital" of Salt Lake City, the SBC produced a video and study guide entitled "The Mormon Puzzle: Understanding and Witnessing to Latter-day Saints" detailing its arguments with Latter-day doctrine. Over 30,000 of these videos have been distributed to church congregations nationwide.

"It seems that Mormonism is like a complex puzzle. It's beliefs and practices, to most people, are difficult to fit together in a coherent system," reads the study guide introduction. "In fact, evangelical Christian scholars who have studied the doctrines and teachings of the LDS have found that Mormons, though they present themselves in a Christian veneer, have radically different beliefs and practices from those of the historic, biblical Christian faith."

The video and study guide outline six other sticking points, among which are different views on the nature of God or of sin. It also offers pointers on trying to convert Mormons to "biblical Christian faith."

The SBC's anti-Mormon message may not have reached Haiti yet, but it has found a receptive audience in the southern United States where Skipper and Dispane say they encounter it "every day." The resistance they experience trying to evangelize to evangelicals makes them miss their work in Haiti all the more. Even the language difference doesn't seem to diminish their desire to return.

"I struggled with the language, I mean, everyone struggles with the language," says Skipper. "We met so many families [in Haiti] that we had the opportunity to baptize, and they would help me so much. They would never get mad at me, just make sure I said it right. They would slow things down so I could understand them. When someone really helps you and they really see your growth and your progress, you just love them for that."

Skipper, who grew up in Atlanta, views his transfer to South Carolina as part of a divine plan, but one that he wishes he didn't have to endure.

"Heavenly Father knew I didn't want to go to the South and the next thing I know he takes me out of Haiti and reassigns me here. So, he does things to humble us and I definitely have grown from this," says Skipper.

Skipper and Dispane may be reassigned yet again, if conditions improve in Haiti sufficiently before their two years of missionary work end. Even with lower living standards and the difficulties of communicating in another language, Haiti seems to be a more hospitable environment than the Bible Belt for spreading their Latter-day message.

Mission president Giles predicts that missionaries will be called back to Haiti within the year, although this depends on the monitoring reports of Church security agents. The final decision rests with Church headquarters in Salt Lake City.

"When I started here, we had 120 young people here. We're now down to 66. We'll be up to 120 in another year," he assures me. "They give their everything to it."

As for Skipper, "If I don't get to go back while I'm on a mission, I'll definitely go back there for a while. You know, even for six months or whatever. I feel like I didn't get enough."

(Updated May 10, 2004)