Written by Blake Mathews
Some disasters are so significant that people can remember for years exactly where they were when they first heard the news. Many Harding students and faculty members were in front of televisions or computer screens when they first heard about the earthquake that devastated the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, killing at least 150,000 people.
Harding Missionary in Residence Oneal Tankersley, his son Karl and Harding student John Cannaday got the news from a rusty, broken handrail on a staircase roughly 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
“It was like a seismometer, and it started clanging,” Tankersley said, recreating with rapid-fire “dings” the sound of a broken handrail shaking frantically back and forth.
It was roughly 4:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 12. A 7.0 magnitude quake had just crippled Port-au-Prince and sent the impoverished Caribbean nation sliding into darkness. Somewhere in the Haitian countryside, Tankersely and his team were beginning to suspect that their mission trip was no longer going according to plan.
Six days earlier, on Jan. 6, Tankersley, his son and Cannaday landed in Haiti to begin their work for the Haiti Christian Development Project. Specifically, they would be traveling to the city of Gonaives in northern Haiti, where they would work with local community actors to produce mini-films. These 15-minute skits are designed to teach Haitians basic lessons about health and disaster preparation, “just simple things the poor could do to significantly mitigate the suffering they go through,” Tankersley said.
Tankersley has been performing this service for years, with seven trips to Haiti and 13 mini-films under his belt. Prior to his work with the Haiti Christian Development Project, Tankersley and his family lived as missionaries in Kenya and produced similar informational videos. The films were a hit with the Kenyan government, and the Project has been trying for that level of success and saturation in Haiti, he said.
Karl Tankersley, a homeschooled sophomore who still thinks of Kenya as “home,” was on his second trip to Haiti. Rounding out the group was Cannaday, a senior French major who acted as the team’s secondary translator. Cannaday had never been to Haiti, but Tankersley said he “fell in love” with Creole, the common Haitian language that mixes French with various African dialects.
The eight-day mission trip was going “beautifully” for the team. Over four days in Gonaives they had shot films 12 and 13 in Tankersley’s series, and on Jan. 12 they packed up their gear and headed south to Ouanga Bay. There, in a tiny hotel about 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince, the team would spend its last night in Haiti before catching an early morning flight out of the city.
Home to a third of Haiti’s 9 million inhabitants, Port-au-Prince is by far the largest city in the country, but Tankersley’s trips spend as little time there as possible. This is primarily because shooting video is more difficult in a densely populated urban area. But there are also safety concerns, as the abject poverty, corruption and violence associated with Haiti all come to a head in the capital city.
“Port-au-Prince is a cesspool, even in the best of times,” Tankersley said. “There’s obviously some good people there, and they’ve obviously got problems. Port-au-Prince is just a huge city of poverty.”
Keeping the team away from the city was a strategic move for Tankersley, though it may have saved their lives. The three missionaries were enjoying an afternoon on the beach when they felt the ground tremble and heard the rusty stair rail clanging.
“It just clicked instantly with me: this is an earthquake,” Tankersley said. He and his team hopped off the beach and ran for the water, yelling for everyone to get clear of the buildings. The quake stopped a couple seconds later without causing any visible damage. For the next few minutes, the team assumed it had been a minor tremor and nothing more.
Then, as reports from family members began trickling into Ouanga Bay, Tankersley and Cannaday said they noticed an ominous haze rising up from the buildings across the water. It was concrete dust. Many of the homes in Port-au-Prince are built from concrete and cinder blocks, which stay cool in the hot summer and are cheap to manufacture. However, an earthquake can quickly turn these concrete houses into tombs.
“Any of these concrete buildings are deathtraps if you have a serious quake,” Tankersley said.
The three missionaries began asking around for information, and what they heard confirmed their fears. Haitians with family in Port-au-Prince were getting reports of injury, death and destruction. The city had been hit hard.
Tankersley decided that the team should get in touch with their families as well. They climbed a hill to get cellular service and sent a message to a friend in the U.S., one they knew would be near his phone. The message said that the team was unharmed, but Tankersley received no reply. An hour after the quake, the country’s communication infrastructure had completely collapsed, effectively cutting off Haiti from the outside world.
The communication blackout was “one of the biggest frustrations of this whole event,” Tankersley said. Cut off from reliable information, the team decided to stick to their original plan to leave from the international airport in Port-au-Prince. They left before sunrise Wednesday morning, hoping that the airport would still be functional.
The rising sun gave the team a glimpse of the destruction as they hurried toward the airport.
“You would see 30 intact houses, probably with some structural damage but intact,” Tankersley said. “And then ‘boom,’ a totally collapsed house.”
They arrived to find the airport intact but completely commandeered by international peacekeepers and news organizations. No commercial flights were leaving anytime soon, meaning the team had to find another way out of the country. They parked their vehicle at the airport and waited for help.
The day wore on and people, some officials and some stranded missionaries like themselves came and went through the repurposed airport. At one point the consular general for the U.S. embassy arrived and took stock of all the stranded Americans, offering them empathy but not much else.
“He was saying ‘I was in the earthquake too. I’m hot. I don’t want to raise your hopes. I can’t say that we’ve got a plane coming in or anything like that.'” Cannaday said. The diplomat then said he would return to the airport later with more information.
“The moment he said that I heard a catch in his voice, because I think he realized he wouldn’t be able to hold up that commitment,” Cannaday said.
The team did not realize until later that the head of the U.N. mission in Haiti had been killed and the Red Cross headquarters had been devastated. Nearly every official organization on the ground in Haiti was reeling from the damage in Port-au-Prince, including Haiti’s own government. News organizations have repeatedly highlighted the lack of any police or government forces in the city after the quake, but Tankersley said he was not surprised at all.
“Their houses were destroyed too,” he said. “And those policemen and those officials are wondering ‘Where is my child? Is my wife safe? Where will I sleep tonight?'”
While meandering around the airport, the team struck up a friendship with a Californian by the name of Jim Brenner. Brenner was “just a stranger, an evangelical of some stripe,” according to Tankersley, and he was in Haiti supporting the work of a local preacher introduced to them as “Pastor Frank.”
Brenner identified with the team’s desire to find a way home as soon as possible, but the afternoon was getting old and flying out of Haiti looked less possible by the hour. So they decided to try their luck with the Dominican Republic, whose border with Haiti was an hour to the east. The border closes at 6 p.m., however, and it was 4:30 in Port-au-Prince. The four Americans jumped onto a bus and, with Pastor Frank at the wheel, sped off towards the Dominican Republic.
The traffic on the road was “exemplary,” Cannaday said, though Tankersley used the term “borderline chaos.” One section of the road was especially treacherous, paved with loose gravel and trapped between a cliff face on one side and a drop into a lake on the other.
“Pastor Frank is fishtailing all the way across this road,” Cannaday said, laughing.
As the team approached the Dominican Republic they passed eight trucks heading toward Port-au-Prince. The trucks were carrying Dominican volunteers with food and medical supplies, and Pastor Frank shouted, “Thank you for coming, thank you for coming!” as they flew down the road.
“Those are the most honest words I think I’ve ever heard,” Cannaday said.
“If I got anywhere close to tears during this whole event, it was seeing those eight trucks with people standing in the back, almost triumphantly entering the city to help these people,” Tankersley said. “The cavalry has arrived, the marines have arrived. It was that type of a feeling.”
The station wagon got to the border just as the gates were closing. Once on the other side the border guards “took us for all we were worth,” said Tankersley, an occurrence he said happens fairly often to “Americans running away from a problem.” Brenner could speak some Spanish, however, and the Cannaday credited him with “saving our necks.”
Pastor Frank, who had lost family in the quake but drove the Americans to the border nonetheless, was forced to turn back. The border guards had raised the cost for a Haitian to cross the border to discourage a mass influx of refugees into the Dominican Republic. Frank could not afford to cross, and so the team said their goodbyes and started their 6-hour drive to the Santo Domingo international airport.
Crossing the border had restored their cell phone service, and Tankersley immediately called his wife to tell her he was all right. His message from the hill in Ouanga Bay had reached her. They made arrangements for a flight out of Santo Domingo, and the team finally landed in the U.S. on Thursday, Jan. 14.
“At the same time, we felt like wimps to be leaving,” Cannaday said. “I’m afraid that, if the opportunity arises to go back shortly, I will go. I feel like I should be there.”
But Tankersley discouraged him from going back too soon. He said they left the first time because they did not have the resources or the training to help anyone. Until the situation in Haiti stabilizes, he said, most well-meaning missionaries would just be getting in the way.
“There are a lot of people streaming to Haiti right now that have no business being there,” Tankersley said. “They’re just going to be a burden to whoever their host is.”
As for what he plans to do, Tankersley said he would normally use his mini-film ministry to raise awareness and promote fundraising efforts for Haiti. This time, though, another organization beat him to it.
“CNN’s doing it for me,” he said.
Tankersley and Cannaday have both been raising awareness about Haiti at Harding since coming back to Searcy, while the news media and public figures have been advocating aid to Port-au-Prince on an international level. Less than three weeks after the quake, hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars and matching amounts of other currencies have been donated to help rebuild Haiti, but Cannaday said rebuilding alone will not save the nation, which was the poorest in the Western Hemisphere even before the quake.
“If our goal is to get them back to their pre-quake status, we’re not doing enough,” Cannaday said, paraphrasing a USA Today article he read shortly after the quake.
In order to actually improve the standard of living in Haiti, stability and long-term investment are essential, Tankersley said. This would require a sincere commitment from the international community, in concert with a strong, responsible Haitian government.
“If you wake up in the morning and you don’t know whether this government is going to last or not, you don’t invest. You don’t build businesses,” Tankersley said.
Haiti will bear the scars from this natural disaster for years to come, but Tankersley and Cannaday are part of a united international effort to heal the beleaguered nation.
