Missionaries return to Haiti to rebuild.

Haiti (MNN)–Haiti’s former rebel leader calmly walked into a Haitian police station April 22nd, and surrendered to police.

Before surrendering, Louis-Jodel Chamblain told onlookers he was allowing the Haitian justice system opportunity to work. His display was intended to show confidence in the country’s judicial system and help restore democracy. Under Haitian law, he will be retried on the charges.

His surrender comes nearly two months after he led a coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In the wake of the President’s exile, the country settled into a tension-filled routine.

Aside from trying to repair the damages from mulitple riots, for the average person living on less than a$1 a day, it was a routine of survival. Bleak conditions are now punctuated by ruined buildings and by the trauma etched in the people’s faces.

As the situation slowly improves, missionaries begin to return. But they are returning to a different chaos. Men For Mission’s Warren Hardig says their teams were finally able to return to Haiti just four days ago. “We’re getting ready to complete those two projects at the new downlink sites. I think we’ll be moving toward the third and fourth quarter of this year to try to get another one or two up. When we get the next one on the air, we will have expanded the listening audience of Radio 4VEH to over a million people.”
The people have shown openness to the hope of the Gospel following a time when all other hope was absent. Hardig asks prayer for the possibilities. “We’ve got a new radio, a new AM/FM solar powered radio that will go back and forth between AM and FM on Radio 4VEH. We have 500 of those that will be going in on May 4th; we have another 2000 on order, and we’ll be ordering several thousand more in the coming days.”

Perhaps the non-political stance of Radio 4VEH, and certainly God’s protection, spared the station thus far from violence and physical damage.

Radio 4VEH remained on the air during the crisis and apparently had a calming influence and a sense of stability on its faithful listening audience.