LARENCE: Lawrenceville church hosts service to mark Haiti quake

By Lea Kahn
   ”Just about all of the lights are out in Port-au-Prince. People are still screaming but the noise is dying as darkness sets in.”
   ”The hospital in Jacmel also seriously damaged and turning people away.”
   ”It has been, I can say, a long nightmare for all of us.”
   Those Twitter messages, plus photographs of the devastation left by the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, were strung across the sanctuary at the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville Sunday night to serve as a reminder of the first anniversary of the disaster.
   About 200 people gathered at the church on Main Street in the village of Lawrenceville — members of the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville as well as members of Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, Kingdom Church in Ewing Township and Kaighn Avenue Baptist Church in Camden — for a service of remembrance, punctuated by gospel songs sung by a gospel choir that was formed on the spot.
   For congregants of the Lawrence, Ewing and Trenton churches, the anniversary is meaningful because a delegation consisting of members from each one was in Haiti on a medical mission to help Pastor Luc Deratus and Harmony Ministries when the earthquake struck. The group escaped harm.
   Sunday night, the Rev. JeffreyVamos, minister of the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville, called the group’s attention to the photographs, Twitter messages and quotations from articles about the earthquake, noting that “we want to be in solidarity with the people of Haiti.”
   The Rev. Dana Fearon III, the pastor emeritus of the Lawrence church, told the congregants that Jan. 12 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville’s first mission trip to Haiti to help Pastor Deratus and Harmony Ministries, with whom it had forged a relationship several years earlier.
   Dr. Fearon acknowledged that on his first trip to Haiti in 1988 —prior to the first medical mission trip — he was “not prepared for what I saw. The poverty and the death.” But there was the power of faith and Dr. Fearon told the congregation about what he had observed.
   After Dr. Fearon returned home, congregation members said they wanted to go to Haiti, and a medical mission trip was planned. The group included doctors and nurses, and medical clinics were held to treat the Haitians. It was an eye-opening experience.
   ”We realized that in the middle of all that poverty, there was a richness we did not have,” Dr. Fearon said. And now, many years and many mission trips later, “we have become receivers, not just givers, of Pastor Luc in this blessed endeavor,” he said.
   The Rev. Darrell Armstrong, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, spoke to the group and told them that “in this time of sorrow and sadness, we rejoice to stand here one year later to remember the shaking of the ground.”
   Reflecting on the medical mission trip, the Rev. Armstrong noted that the group — men and women, black and white, young and old — represented “an interesting, unique assembly of God’s people.”
   ”As we remember Haiti, never forget ‘why’ — ‘why them and not us,’” the Rev. Armstrong said. “Their lives were not in vain. Three hundred thousand people died and we should have been among them. I thank God we were able to be in a place to minister to (the earthquake victims).”