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ATLANTA (ABP) — The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will focus its rebuilding efforts in Haiti in the city of Grand-Goave, a place near the epicenter of the Jan. 12 earthquake that had about 95 percent of its buildings destroyed, leaders said Feb. 19.
Rob Nash, CBF's coordinator of global missions, told the group's Coordinating Council that Daniel Vestal, the Fellowship's executive coordinator, planned to travel to Port-au-Prince March 15 with representatives of American Baptist Churches USA and the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention to jointly assess needs.
"We are not cooperating with anybody on Haiti," Nash said. "We are collaborating with other groups on Haiti. There is a big difference. In cooperation people join you in what you are doing or you join them. Collaboration is when you figure out who can do what but nobody owns it."
Harry Rowland, the organization's director of missional church ministries, said while CBF is typically not equipped to be a first responder to disasters in terms of removing rubble, the group was on the leading edge of emergency medical relief coordinated by a missionary doctor jointly appointed by the CBF and ABCUSA.
Rowland said CBF churches have donated about 9,000 pounds of medical supplies. Rowland said the Fellowship would stop shipping medical supplies Feb. 28 in order to avoid a backlog.
"Now we are moving from the relief stage to the recovery and development stage," Rowland said.
Rowland said Scott Hunter, a former CBF field worker on temporary assignment in Haiti, worked with the Haitian Baptist Convention to establish a base camp for future mission volunteers at Grand-Goave. Rowland said Haitian Baptist leaders listed the city high on a list sent to international partners needing help to rebuild.
"We've kind of helped identify that area because in collaborative fashion that allows most of the people who are kind of looking to CBF to help point the way to really do the work well," he said.
Rowland said CBF leaders hope to have the first engagement team in Haiti during the first or second week of March. "This will be a team that will have to be very self-supportive, take in all their own food and things, and their job will be really just to build a base camp," he said.
Rowland said their job will be to set up shelter, electricity and water systems so other groups can come in behind them.
"The first two or three engagement teams will do that," Rowland said. "Then we will start sending teams as far as engagement, medical as well as rebuilding this area."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.