This week, American missionaries who were stranded in Haiti begged for help, citing ongoing gunshots near their hiding place and bodies decomposing in the streets. The head of the organization said that the Biden administration had simply offered them advice to “stay cautious” rather than any actual help.
Jill Dolan of the band Love A Neighbor stated the reaction she got from the US Embassy when she begged for assistance in moving her family out of Haiti, “Okay, well, that’s not very helpful.”
“I worry that we’ll end up in the center of something really hazardous. We’re in a dangerous place; we’re already on the front lines of it. It’s a little melancholy. “There is constant shooting,” Dolan stated to the New York Post.
In the heart of Haiti’s massive gang war, in Port-au-Prince, Dolan and her family have taken refuge in a “makeshift hotel,” where the heaviest fighting has taken place. She and her family started Love a Neighbor, a missionary organization with headquarters in Washington State, to assist in running a tiny orphanage for kids whose parents could not afford to care for them.
Dolan said that gangs assaulted the airport, forcing the cancellation of all commercial flights, when she was leaving Haiti to travel to a wedding in Florida with her spouse and their adopted teenage daughters.
“We’ve made contact with organizations to get us out. “They’ve basically instructed you to remain put because it’s just too hazardous where you are,” she stated to CBS News on Wednesday.
While not all of them were as completely engulfed in violent chaos as Port-au-Prince, no area of the country appeared to be completely secure, according to other American missionaries and humanitarian workers who communicated with The Post.
The other missionaries also talked about how the Biden administration had failed them, unable to accomplish much more than evacuate staff members from the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
“No one has contacted us or anything else. Then, naturally, we were thinking, ‘Maybe they are going to return and start evacuating Port-au-Prince and then have a plane for everyone else,’” stated Miriam Cinotti, who arrived in Haiti with the intention of rescuing young women from gang violence.
We’re concerned because we live in a nation where we have no idea what will happen next. We don’t know what’s going on; it’s unexpected,” a missionary named Lynn, just by her first name, stated.
Lynn also mentioned that, because of the security situation in Haiti, her husband, who has diabetes, is unable to get his medicine.
Kim Patterson, a lady, has been attempting to save her father, Boyce Young, a 75-year-old veteran of the Marines who landed in Haiti on February 16 to assist with humanitarian aid. He believed that this would be his final chance to lend a hand and contribute because he has been making these journeys to Haiti for over ten years.
“He views helping others and Haiti through the lens of a purpose-driven existence, and I’m sure that’s how the Marines felt as well. His goal in life was to have a purpose, according to his daughter.
According to Patterson, Young is now taking refuge in a comparatively secure area in the southwest of Haiti, but she is unable to arrange for his exit from the nation.
Like the others, Patterson claimed that her attempt to get help from the U.S. Embassy “was not a lot of help.”
“I weep every single day. I’m a woman from southeast Georgia trying to get my dad out of a third-world nation that’s in the middle of a civil war, and I’ve never felt more powerless than I do right now,” she said.
In response to a request for comment about Young’s situation, Stars & Stripes claimed on Tuesday that the State Department had not responded.
Republicans in Congress are growing more critical of Biden’s passivity in the face of the Haitian catastrophe, particularly in light of the fact that individuals not affiliated with the multitrillion dollar administration are once again organizing rescue efforts, as they did after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
