The Social Conscience of a Missionary

Away from the airport, you can smell the culture shock. The air blowing through the van's open windows stinks of smoke, coconut milk, diesel fuel and dirt. The road to Port-au-Prince is Haiti's only national road — and it was the only paved strip in the country when Dan was a kid, he says. But the project's still unfinished, with potholes big enough to bathe in and no lane designations. Traffic travels both ways in both lanes as cars weave in and out and drivers use horns instead of turn signals.

Garbage is everywhere, lining the road like leaves in Denver in the fall. There are piles of it — some burning, some smoldering, some being feasted on by pigs and goats. There's more garbage in the canal system that runs through the city. Around almost every corner, grown men are urinating in the street.

Kids are all over, too, some in clothes, some naked, some with one shoe, some with two, some barefoot, many selling dirty plastic bottles filled with what they call "juice." Everyone's thirsty, but no one buys any. The street is littered with plastic bottles. One skinny boy is running alongside a dirty truck, wiping off dust with an even dirtier rag every time the truck pulls to a stop, trying to squeeze a few pennies out of the driver and refusing to abandon his task until he gets paid.

Between unfinished construction projects stand squatters' shacks thrown together with wood and concrete and metal. There's no water, no electricity. The construction projects don't look like they'll ever be completed.

After about an hour or so in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the van reaches the compound. A security guard armed with a shotgun waves the friends through the gate.

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Danny grew up in a compound like this one in Carrfour, a ghetto outside Port-au-Prince.

Each morning he'd wake with the sun and the roosters on the compound, where his father, an evangelical minister, and mother ran a church, a medical clinic, an orphanage and a school. But Danny went to an American school, one where the children of missionaries and U.N. workers sent their kids.

At school, Danny heard other students talking about Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, and he'd bring those stories back home to share with the orphans and neighborhood kids. He'd never seen a game — soccer was the sport in Haiti — but Danny became obsessed with basketball. His father wanted him to focus on the Bible.

Pastor Joel, who later became Bishop Joel, was famous in Haiti. He had a television show that was broadcast throughout the country. Danny would tune in for the last few minutes, hoping he could keep the TV on so that he could watch Kung Fu. But that wasn't a suitable pastime for the son of a preacher who was himself the son of a preacher.

When he was little, Danny would pile into the family car with his mother and father and three brothers and take the long trip up unpaved mountain roads to visit that preacher, Rameau Jeune.

His grandfather told Danny stories. About the time when he was a fisherman traveling back and forth between Haiti and Cuba and got lost at sea for two days. About how when he was a young thug, he killed two men in a machete fight and then fled into a sugarcane field. While he was hiding, Rameau told Danny, he heard a preacher in a nearby church claiming that God would forgive even a murderer if he accepted Jesus. So Rameau walked into the church, took God into his heart and found salvation. And over the years, he built 35 churches across Haiti.

And then there was the story about how, when Rameau was off on a church-building mission, his two-year-old son, Joel, fell ill and died. Although it was taboo to bury the boy without his father present, the body was beginning to decompose, so the family started for the cemetery. But then Rameau Jeune appeared. He ordered that the casket be put down and everyone pray for the child. Within a couple of hours, they heard a sneeze from inside the box: Joel was alive. So early on, Danny's father knew that it was his destiny to serve God, too.

But he went about it differently than Rameau had. He studied everything in English he could find, and as a young man befriended the American missionaries who'd come to Haiti. Seven times he applied for a visa to visit the United States. Seven times he was refused. But then he and his wife did some work for the captain of a medical ship, translating their native Creole into English for the doctors on board, and the captain helped them secure a visa. While they were in the U.S., they give birth to their first son, who was automatically awarded U.S. citizenship. The couple made sure to plan speaking engagements or missionary work in America that would coincide with the birth of their next three children, too. Danny was born in Florida thirty years ago.