Volunteers from Sandpoint church caught up in Haiti’s political crisis after president’s assassination

When nine volunteers from St. Joseph Catholic Church in Sandpoint left for Haiti on Monday, they were looking forward to learning about the Caribbean nation while lending a hand at an orphanage outside the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Instead, the group found itself caught up in a chaotic political crisis and unable to leave the country after gunmen assassinated Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, early Wednesday morning. Soon after, the country’s interim prime minister declared a state of emergency.

“Yesterday was a very eerie day,” Dan Rodriguez, a Bonner County prosecutor and one of the volunteers, said by phone Thursday from a hotel near Haiti’s main airport where the group had been under lockdown since the day before.

“Port-au-Prince is normally a very active place,” he said. “Yesterday was, according to all the locals, the quietest day anyone has ever seen.”

Flights to and from the country were canceled after the assassination, and Rodriguez said he heard only one airplane take off from the nearby airport Wednesday. That flight was likely carrying First Lady Martine Moïse, who was also shot in the attack and taken to a Miami hospital in critical condition, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S. said Wednesday.

The Idahoans are shaken but safe, Rodriguez said, and include Sandpoint residents Lisa Kassa and her daughter Holly; Sandy Babin and her grandchildren Isaac and Madison; and Ryan Dignan and his daughters Sadie and Stella.

The group planned to volunteer with Haiti 180, a U.S. nonprofit that runs an orphanage, school, elderly home and medical clinic some 50 miles west of Port-au-Prince. The weeklong trip had already gotten off to a rocky start when Hurricane Elsa, then classified as a tropical storm, battered the island nation over the weekend and delayed their arrival.

When they touched down at Haiti’s main airport Tuesday, they learned the helicopter that was supposed to take them to the orphanage was grounded, the result of a ban on flights within the country after a passenger plane crashed July 3, killing all six people on board.

The pilot eventually secured permission to fly the following day and the travelers went to the nearby hotel, but they awoke Wednesday morning to the news that Moïse had been killed after 1 a.m. local time at his home by armed men who falsely identified themselves as agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, surveillance footage shows.

On Thursday, Haitian officials said they had arrested six people in connection with the attack, two of them U.S. citizens of Haitian descent. Seven other suspected assailants were killed in a gunfight with police, the national police director said.

The assassination came after months of growing unrest in the country, where protesters had taken to the streets calling for Moïse to step down.

After Haiti’s 2015 elections were annulled, the former businessman and political newcomer won a do-over race the next year. Moïse didn’t take office until February 2017, but opponents argued his five-year term began when he was elected a year earlier.

While he had promised to leave office next February, Moïse was also engaged in an effort to rewrite Haiti’s constitution that led to accusations he was becoming a dictator, a serious charge in a nation with a history of authoritarian leaders.

Rodriguez said while he has traveled extensively, this trip was the first time the rest of his group had been in a country with the kind of poverty and insecurity that has stricken Haiti for much of its history.

“Having traveled in the third world, I know that you can’t count on anything,” he said. “I think what I’m going to remember the most is watching the rest of these guys learn that. … You can be very sheltered in the U.S., particularly in a place like northern Idaho where everything is very stable and very good.

“But they’ve been amazingly resilient. I was expecting panic and tears, but they have been unbelievably brave and steady. I’m very impressed with the families, and the kids in particular.”

In 1804, Haiti became just the second independent republic of the colonial era, after the United States, when enslaved Haitians revolted against French rule.

But starting in 1825, under threat of a naval invasion, France forced the newly free people of Haiti to compensate the French government and French slaveholders for their lost “property” – effectively reparations for the Haitians’ own freedom.

Haiti continued to pay this “independence debt” to France until 1947, totaling roughly $21 billion in today’s dollars.

To make matters worse, although Haitian troops had helped U.S. forces defeat the British during the Battle of Savannah in 1779, one of the bloodiest periods of the American Revolutionary War, the United States refused to recognize Haiti’s government until 1862, isolating the world’s first Black-led republic for nearly 60 years.

After the last assassination of a Haitian president, in 1915, the United States invaded Haiti and occupied the country until 1934. U.S. troops intervened in Haiti again in 1994, after the nation’s first popularly elected president was ousted in a coup.

President Joe Biden, on the verge of ending America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, is unlikely to favor military intervention in Haiti, but his administration may be forced to play a bigger role in the country of 11 million that lies only about 600 miles from Florida.

In a statement Wednesday, Biden condemned the assassination, wished Martine Moïse a swift recovery and said his administration “stand(s) ready to assist as we continue to work for a safe and secure Haiti.”

Back home in Sandpoint, Rodriguez’s wife Stacy kept in close contact with the church group on Thursday and reported that group’s youngest members, aged 15 to 17, were keeping busy by helping the shorthanded hotel staff bus tables. The hardest part of the trip, the teens told her, had been the quarter-mile trip to the hotel.

“Moving from the airport to the hotel was quite scary for a lot of them, who I’m sure had never been escorted anywhere (by armed guards),” Stacy Rodriguez said. “We live in northern Idaho. Arms here aren’t uncommon, but in that circumstance they are.”

Dan Rodriguez said the group hoped to return to the United States on the first available flight and said he, along with other parishioners and clergy from the church, had been in touch with the State Department and Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Thursday evening, the U.S. embassy in Haiti announced it would remain closed at least one more day but said airports “may reopen for commercial flights” as early as Friday.

Stacy Rodriguez said her husband has remained “Mr. Calm,” but one of the parents in the group from Sandpoint was “just overwhelmed with the way that things have gone down.”

“She had such high hopes that this experience for the children would be something they would remember all their lives,” Stacy Rodriguez said. “They will, but not for the reasons that she anticipated.”