Hill Country Bible Church Northwest was one of several organizations to organize efforts that will send 13 tons of medical supplies to Haiti

By Joshunda Sanders

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

About 3 p.m. Tuesday, the staff at Hill Country Bible Church Northwest received a phone call from Haiti. Todd Milby , a pastor at Summit Life Church in Florida who had gone to Haiti after the earthquake, called from Port-au-Prince to ask for help from the Austin church, where his friend Tim Hawks is the senior pastor.

Milby said Mission of Hope Haiti , a faith-based mission group based in Port-au-Prince that operates a school, an orphanage and a hospital, had already provided Haitians with 700,000 meals in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake and was about to be featured on NBC Nightly News. But Milby said the mission had no way to set up a phone bank to handle donations if people wanted to give money after they saw the broadcast.

Within hours, the church had the phone bank operation under way. And in the days that followed, the church led an effort that has grown into a series of medical missions to Haiti that will send a team of doctors and nurses and 26,000 pounds of medical supplies on two private planes.

In two hours, staffers called several church volunteers who agreed to help, said Amy Baker, the church communications director. They found a room on the church campus and set up a phone number through AT&T to put on Mission of Hope Haiti’s Web site so that anyone who searched for the organization online could call, she said. They gathered as many phones as they could find.

“Someone even wrote a script in that time so that volunteers could know what to say to callers,” Baker said. “When the NBC Nightly News signed off at 5:59 and Brian Williams said, ‘Call this number,’ our 21 phone lines in Austin started ringing, and we were able to take calls and answer questions for people who saw the news spot.” The phone bank raised $120,000, including a single donation of $10,000 , she said.

But the church wasn’t done. The medical mission came together in four days, global outreach pastor Chris Merrell said.

When representatives with Mission of Hope told pastors in Austin that their teams of volunteers were exhausted from feeding more than 100,000 people a day, they decided to try to help. On Wednesday, a church member who did not want to be named offered the use of his planes and then took the lead in coordinating access to the Port-au-Prince airport.

That night, the church staff held a conference call between local doctors and medical specialists and the Mission of Hope medical team in Haiti to determine the biggest needs, Baker said. The mission team said it needed food, medicine and doctors, and those who had been working in Haiti since the earthquake needed a break.

The church — part of the Hill Country Association of Churches, a network of 19 nondenominational churches in Central Texas with about 6,000 members — assembled a team of pastors and volunteers from its member churches with contacts in the community. They started making phone calls to pastors in the Hill Country’s network of churches, like Hill Country Bible Church Pflugerville, as well as the Seton hospitals and the Watermark Church in Dallas.

“By the end of the evening, we had assembled our first medical team, and by Thursday morning had a second team assembled,” she said. Several Central Texas doctors called people they knew to gather medical supplies, Baker said. Some paid cash to order medical supplies from drug and equipment representatives they usually work with. Other supplies like bandages, portable toilets, soap and tissue were donated.

At 6:30 a.m. Thursday, four doctors and a counselor from the church flew to the Dominican Republic. By Friday, they had bought vehicles to drive to Haiti so they could use them to distribute supplies. In Austin, volunteers with the Hill Country church loaded trucks that took the medical supplies to the planes at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

Today , 18 doctors and nurses — including two orthopedic surgeons — will fly to Haiti in the two planes with 26,000 pounds of medical supplies the church has collected through its partnership with several churches, hospitals and medical groups, including Grace Covenant Church and the Travis County Medical Society .

As of Friday afternoon, the planes were scheduled to land 80 miles north of Port-au-Prince in Cap-Haïtien .

Baker, a former Dell executive, said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. … It was nothing short of a miracle.”

After today’s team goes to Haiti, the church will begin planning to send additional teams as needed, Baker said. “We’ll remain in contact with Mission of Hope Haiti to help them meet long-term needs for building and recovery,” she said.

Dr. Joel Hurt, an orthopedic surgeon making the trip with Dr. Scott Smith, a Hill Country Bible Church member — they practice together at Texas Orthopedics, Sports and Rehabilitation Associates — said that between Wednesday evening and Friday, the doctors had gotten an “incredible outpouring of help,” from Austin’s medical community.

“Our biggest issue is that we could take another plane with just equipment if we had the funds to send it,” Hurt said. The fuel for each round trip costs more than $20,000.

Hurt said the images he’d seen on television made him eager to lend his skills to the people of Haiti.

“I know that they’re suffering and God has given us the ability to help,” Hurt said. “If this isn’t a time to utilize those gifts, I don’t know what is. How could we stay here and watch TV? Not everyone can go, but we have to try.”

jsanders@statesman.com; 445-3630