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Weyburn couple safely evacuates from Haiti

A Weyburn couple, Wade and Marilyn Fitzpatrick, were safely evacuated from Haiti to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday, and are now back in Weyburn.
Wade and Marilyn Fitzpatrick

A Weyburn couple, Wade and Marilyn Fitzpatrick, were safely evacuated from Haiti to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday, and are now back in Weyburn.

The couple spends half of each year in Haiti with the mission, Haiti Arise, and had returned there in December to resume their work, but were forced to leave when grassroots protests against the government shut the country down, with every major road and highway blocked or closed.

Wade explained that the situation in Haiti began to worsen last summer and fall, and things exploded on Feb. 7, the anniversary of the day when dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was ousted from government in 1986.

The Haiti Arise compound is located in a town, Grand Goave, which is 65 km west of Port-au-Prince, the capital where most of the violent protests have been occurring, along with other major centres in Haiti. There weren't violent protests in Grand Goave, but there were roadblocks and large boulders on the roads, making them impassable.

“Their primary goal was to shut down everything, shut down the entire economy. … They’re very efficient at what they’re doing,” said Wade.

Explaining how the situation arose, he noted that in a country that is one-25th the size of Saskatchewan, they have a population of 11 million people, half of whom are 16 years of age or younger, and many of those young people are angry and very poor. The protests are calling for the resignation of President Jovenel Moise.

“It's a bit of a revolt against a corrupt government by the masses and the poor. They're very poor people who are very tired of the corruption of the very rich. Democracy is not working in Haiti,” said Wade.

A group of 24 volunteers from Alberta were visiting at the compound when all of the unrest exploded, and after the Canadian embassy in Port-au-Prince was closed on Wednesday, the Haiti Arise group decided on Thursday to get everyone out of the country, particularly as it was getting very difficult to find food supplies. They also cancelled the future plans of any incoming teams, which included a team from Weyburn that was planning to go later this spring.

“We thought it might be best to leave for a while,” said Wade.

“Since Tuesday, we'd been working on a plan to get them out. On Friday, we got a call from another mission group here, Lifeline, and we worked with them to get a helicopter company to airlift us out to the airport,” said Marilyn.

The helicopter came on Saturday morning, and transporting nine people at a time, it made three trips at a total cost of $6,200 US to airlift a total of 26 people from the Haiti Arise compound.