One might be tempted to call 2010 Steve Mossburg’s year of living dangerously – in Haiti.

First came last January’s devastating earthquake – which the Columbia City man rode out at a guest house in Port-au-Prince, watching the landscape heave up and down, he says, “like waves on an ocean.” Then came a hurricane scare, a deadly cholera epidemic, and, by year’s end, gunfire-spiked riots spurred by the contested result of a presidential election.

Mossburg, 63, witnessed them all – all while trying to get his feet under him in his first full year as head of Project Help Haiti, a Christian mission group with Fort Wayne ties that has been aiding people in the impoverished Caribbean nation for more than 40 years.

A veteran of a decade of mission experience in Haiti, Mossburg says 2010 was punctuated with surreal moments – such as seeing bodies of earthquake victims laid at curbside while the living slept in the street nearby. But perhaps the most surreal, he says, came during a drive ferrying some U.S. relief volunteers back to the airport on the first day of post-presidential unrest in December.

Mossburg had just detoured around a blockade on the main road – protesters had hijacked a box truck and parked it across traffic, he says. Knowing he was in a potentially unfriendly village, he suddenly found himself looking at a public transport vehicle called a tap-tap blocking his forward passage – and a protester with rocks in both hands running up behind him in his rear-view mirror.

In all his time in Haiti, Mossburg says, it was one of the few times he felt fear.

“It was like something in a movie,” he says. “It could have turned into an ugly situation.” But he calmly gunned the pedal and put the tap-tap between his vehicle and what could have been harm’s way.

“The thing about Haiti is you can never predict it. We do feel safe, but you learn never to let on there’s any danger at all,” says the bearded, gently spoken missionary. “You always have to have a Plan B.”

Plan B for retiree

Mossburg says his life in Haiti amounts to a Plan B God has mapped out for the second half of his life.

He first went there in 2000, after retiring from a factory job with General Electric and hearing a talk at his church about Project Help by its co-founder, the late Dr. Vic Binkley of Markle. A surgeon and missionary with the Churches of God General Conference of Findlay, Ohio, Binkley had been taking teams of local doctors and nurses to work in Haiti since 1967 and needed help building a hospital.

Mossburg was persuaded to donate his carpentry skills for a couple of weeks. He ended up spending the better part of two years on the project in Pierre Payen, a small town about 80 miles northwest of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

Then, feeling transformed in his calling as a Christian, he says, he formed his own mission group, John 15:16 – G.A.P. (Go and Produce) Ministries Inc., to set up trips and work projects for other Christian groups. He and his wife, Shirley, built a second home in Haiti and began spending more time there.

In the summer of 2009, Mossburg’s life changed again. Binkley told Mossburg he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and would no longer be able to run Project Help, which was founded in 1967 and now employs 200 Haitians. It consists of a surgical hospital and maternity clinic, 17 schools, 34 churches and a retreat center in Borel, also north of Port-au-Prince.

Binkley said he hoped Mossburg would succeed him; Mossburg accepted the job in November. Binkley died in February.

On Jan. 10, 2010, Mossburg flew to Haiti to start work, with ideas about beginning a rural youth evangelization program, a course for training nurses, a microfinance initiative for small businesses and a sustainable agriculture program.

Not quite two days later, he was at the guesthouse, watching what he calls “this big cloud of dust” rise on the horizon after the heaving stopped. Like most Haitians, he slept outside that night, while more than a dozen tremors followed, one every few minutes.

New priorities

Plan B got under way. “The earthquake really helped us reshape and refocus our mission,” Mossburg says.

Within days, he says, Project Help’s long-time medical volunteers were organizing themselves and chartering private planes to get boots on the ground to deal with victims.

Because the teams were known for handling orthopedic cases, and the hospital in Pierre Payen had a specialized X-ray machine, some of the severely injured – people with crushed limbs and spinal fractures – were sent to Project Help. New medical workers from around the United States arrived weekly until around April.

Most of Project Help’s facilities were well north of the quake’s epicenter in Port-au-Prince, so damage was minimal, Mossburg says – although a school and a church in the city’s northern neighborhood of Bon Repos were destroyed.

While Project Help did not work in the capital’s tent camps, it helped provide food and shelter in Bon Repos, Mossburg says, and some of Project Help’s facilities in Borel were pressed into service to house people leaving the capital for their home villages in the north.

By summertime, the situation had calmed enough that Mossburg felt comfortable enough to invite a U.S. mission team for a routine project – working on a church in a remote mountain village. But the calm didn’t last.

Just before Hurricane Tomas sideswiped the western coast, cholera broke out near Borel. Mossburg had been in the United States, but two days after the announcement, he was back in Haiti and had alerted an incoming medical team to bring treatment supplies.

Plan B again: Project Help’s maternity clinic in Pierre Payen was pressed into service to treat cholera patients.

The disease is highly curable, Mossburg says, but can be fatal within hours if untreated. Last week, the epidemic was reported to be waning, but the United Nations estimated about 4,000 people had died.

Mossburg says teams at the clinic “were seeing 20 or more people dropped off a day.” Patients numbered more than 100 on some days, he says.

Meanwhile, Project Help also joined efforts to distribute sanitation supplies and teach people about hand-washing and other precautions against the disease. Mossburg at one point found himself rushing a stricken relative of a Haitian staff member to a hospital 40 miles away for treatment; some staff members had relatives die.

“It was a very sad time,” he says.

Political tensions

As the election approached, political tensions ran high, Mossburg says, spilling into the streets for several days afterward when people felt popular candidates could not have lost.

But when it became clear there would likely be a run-off election, Mossburg says, things quieted again, and he was able to return to Columbia City to spend the Christmas holidays with family.

But the political situation remains potentially threatening, he says. Haiti’s former dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, returned unexpectedly earlier this month and was promptly arrested, and rumblings are that exiled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide wants to return.

Run-off talks were grinding to a standstill last week, and the U.S. State Department issued a warning against all but essential travel to Haiti because of the risk of violent crime, including kidnappings and murder, especially in the capital. The latter situation could affect travel by mission teams.

It’s unlikely that the political situation would get bad enough for Project Help to leave Haiti, Mossburg says.

“We’re used to working in a politically unstable country. Things were much worse before,” he says.

“The biggest battle” now, he adds, “is to keep the (international) interest up, especially if the disaster and other things go away and Haiti fades out of the international news.”

Smaller organizations like Project Help involved for the long haul bring progress a person at a time, he says.

“You ask what motivates me, and to some degree, I guess it’s that I have an adventurous spirit. I like working in a Third World country,” Mossburg says, “and Haiti is a beautiful country and has beautiful, wonderful people.

“A long time ago, I said (to God), ‘If there’s something you call me to do there, I’m available.’ I’ve not felt yet that God has said, ‘I don’t need you anymore.’

“But yes, 2010 was a rough year for Haiti,” he says. “Let’s hope 2011 will be a better year.”

rsalter@jg.net