American missionaries trapped in Haiti pleaded for rescue on Tuesday, reporting constant gunfire around their hideaway and corpses rotting in the streets. The group’s leader said the only assistance they have received from the Biden administration was advice to “be safe.”
“Okay, well, that’s not really helpful,” Jill Dolan of the group Love A Neighbor said of the response she received from the U.S. Embassy when she asked for help getting her family out of Haiti.
“My fear is that we will be caught in the middle of something really dangerous. We’re already on the front lines of it; we’re in a bad area. It’s kind of depressing. The gunfire never stops,” Dolan told the New York Post on Tuesday.
Dolan and her family are holed up in a “makeshift motel” in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where the worst battles of Haiti’s immense gang war have been fought. She and her family founded Love a Neighbor — a nonprofit missionary charity, based in Washington State — to help manage a small orphanage for children abandoned or sold by their impoverished parents.
Dolan said she was on her way out of Haiti to attend a wedding in Florida with her husband and adopted teenage children when gangs attacked the airport, causing all commercial flights to be canceled
“We’ve contacted agencies to extract us out. They have just said, ‘It’s way too dangerous where you are; you have to stay put,’” she told CBS News on Wednesday.
The Post spoke to other American missionaries and charity volunteers who said they have been trapped in various parts of Haiti — few of them as completely overrun with violent anarchy as Port-au-Prince, but nowhere in Haiti seems entirely safe.
The other missionaries also spoke of being abandoned by the Biden administration, which seemed able to do little beyond evacuating staffers from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
“Nobody’s reached out to us or anything. And then, of course, when we saw the non-essential workers get picked up, we were thinking, ‘Well, maybe they’re going to come back and start evacuating Port-au-Prince and then have a plane for everyone else,’” said Miriam Cinotti, who came to Haiti on a mission to rescue young women from gang violence.
“We’re worried because we’re in a country where we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s unpredictable what’s going on; we don’t know,” said a missionary who used only her first name, Lynn.
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