PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The American Embassy has been shuttered for a week, and U.S. citizens have been warned to leave. But despite a spreading rebellion, one intrepid if dwindling group is hanging on, fired by their faith and a sense of duty toward ordinary Haitians.
"If we leave, we are saying that our trust no longer is in our God, and the needs of the people we are leaving are not important," said Susan Hill, a Buffalo, N.Y., native who is the office manager for Haiti's largest English-speaking nondenominational church, Quisqueya Chapel.
Among the 20,000 to 22,000 U.S. citizens who live in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, missionaries and laypeople involved in humanitarian work may make up the largest professional category.
Many have developed deep emotional ties to the people they serve as well as a philosophical appreciation of the risks they may now be running.
If she leaves, said Linda Counts, 63, as many as 90 children and adults could starve to death. Along with her husband, Tom, a retired Baptist and Methodist minister from Meade, Kan., she runs a free English-language school in the carport of their Port-au-Prince home. Like her staff, the young pupils receive free meals and medical care, which many would not get otherwise.
"What's keeping us here is knowing that if we walked out, things would just completely fall apart," said Counts, a resident of Haiti since 1994. Every summer when the couple close the school and take two months' leave in the United States, the students' health suffers. One boy almost died during their absence because he was reduced to eating dirt, Counts said.
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Judith Trunzo said Friday that there was no reliable way to know how many Americans remained in Haiti, where armed rebels have been steadily gaining ground against forces loyal to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The embassy, now guarded by a rooftop machine-gun nest manned by Marines, was closed Feb. 20, and nonessential staff and their dependents were evacuated. The previous day, U.S. citizens were advised by the Bush administration in the strongest terms to go, the culmination of weeks of State Department warnings.
"First we asked people to consider leaving, then we asked them to make plans for leaving," Trunzo said. "Then we told them to leave."
