By Courtney L. Anderson
NEW VERNON TOWNSHIP — A New Vernon Township couple feel called to help the people of Haiti and are preparing for a trip there in the coming weeks.
Tim and Michelle Mailliard will leave for the island once the airport is open to commercial planes, which they hope will be soon. They’re doing relief work with the International Disaster Emergency Service, a Christian relief organization.
Mrs. Mailliard is a nurse and her husband is a construction worker. They plan to put their skills to work in the earthquake-ravaged area of Port-au-Prince.
There’s a “desperate need” for medical assistance in Haiti, Mrs. Mailliard said. The couple is looking to help in any way they can.
Initially, Mailliard planned to go by himself, as he traveled to Haiti in 2006 with Northwest Haiti Christian Mission to install about 2,500 pews they built for churches. He noted the terrible poverty and how hard it was to see children who were hungry.
Life is much more difficult now, since a massive earthquake last month destroyed homes and killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Haitians.
It’s also not the first time Mailliard has seen natural devastation firsthand. He was with the Marine Corps mission that helped clean up ash in 1991 after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines and worked to recover bodies after a cyclone leveled part of Bangladesh.
While it’s hard to see people struggling and suffering, Mailliard said he felt he needed to help again this time.
“The Lord was calling me to go, no matter what I was going to be doing there, I knew I should be going,” Mailliard said.
Mailliard, a member of Jerusalem Church in Otter Creek Township, said he was at Bible study when a man who works with the mission mentioned he was going to Haiti. Mailliard said he felt the calling, too.
But after applying to go with the mission group, Mailliard found out all their trips were closed. So he talked with his father-in-law John Canon, pastor at Jerusalem, who got an update from IDES on the social networking site Facebook.com saying they needed volunteers.
“It just all fell into place,” Mrs. Mailliard said. “As one door closed, another opened.”
And while she didn’t intend to go at first, while Mrs. Mailliard was getting things in order for her husband and talking to representatives from IDES, they learned she was a nurse.
“It went from there,” she said, adding that it all happened very quickly for her.
The mission trip would have cost the couple money, but they asked their church families for support and members of Jerusalem and Emmanuel Christian Church, where Mrs. Mailliard is a member, came through.
“Within a week, we had enough for both of us to go,” Mailliard said.
Mrs. Mailliard said they wanted to thank everyone for their generosity.
In fact, donations exceeded what the Mailliards need for the trip and all additional funds are going to IDES. Canon said that 100 percent of money given to the organization goes directly to their mission. Nothing is kept for administration costs, he said.
“The only thing we’ll be out is time off work,” Mrs. Mailliard said.
Mailliard said they haven’t thought about being mentally prepared for what they will see in Haiti.
“We’ll just take what we get and deal with it when we’re there,” Mrs. Mailliard said. “You see stuff on the news but (being there) is going to be a whole different story.”
