By Gary Fallesen, founding president, Climbing For Christ
Backpacks filled with notebooks, pencils, erasers, and crayons were handed out to school children in the Haitian mountain villages of Majon and Kalimet in late October. “This is the first time I’m seeing something like this around here,” parents said to one another.
Climbing For Christ’s New Generation (C4CNG) was delivering school supplies and taking Yolene Pierre home to her three children after eight months in the Dominican Republic for a dramatic medical procedure.
Yolene’s oldest son, Emille Watson, an 11-year-old in fourth grade in the school God used C4C to build, wept when he saw his mother. He told Gilbert Lindor he was crying tears of joy. Gilbert is our Kingdom worker and the medical school student who arranged for Yolene’s treatment and cared for her all those months in Santo Domingo.
Climbing For Christ has paid $7,200 USD for her treatment and to help her start a small business in her home village. Yolene is a 32-year-old single mother whose husband ran away because he couldn’t bear to look at the hideous disfigurement on his wife’s face. All that has been changed by the grace of God.
Yolene, right, with Gilbert and her three children. Yolene is a single mom who had a football-sized tumor removed from her face and neck after enduring the growth for 12 years.
Gilbert and his team – consisting of Pastor Delva Ixe, Ferline Victor, and Scott Jolicoeru – were delayed in bringing Emille’s mom home and carrying 250 backpacks and school supplies purchased with funding provided by God through Climbing For Christ. When Gilbert arrived at the Dominican side of the border with Haiti, it was blocked. Closed again.
They waited a full day. The next day, Gilbert convinced Dominican soldiers that his school supplies were worthy of being allowed through, but it was left up to the Haitians on the other side. “The Haitians refused to let us through,” Gilbert said.
But after more pleading, “God touched the hearts of the Haitians and they told me to bring my things.” Then the Dominicans changed their minds. “I had to talk and talk with them until after four hours they decided to let us through,” Gilbert recalled.
Multiple problems with motorcycles hired to get the team into the mountains ensued. This is why Gilbert has asked C4C to purchase two motorcycles (at $2,000 each) for transport. Every trip is a rental nightmare; it has always been that way in Haiti – since we started working there in 2005 and allowed C4CNG to take over activities in 2014.
The reward for all the challenges of reaching Majon and then Kalimet was a thank-you dinner provided by Yolene’s family and then two days of joyful faces and gratitude from students and parents. God’s Word was shared in both places. “I felt that the words (from C4CNG’s teachings) were penetrating the life of each parent,” Gilbert said.
A brother in Christ in Kalimet, quoting Jeremiah 29:11, declared to the parents: “If C4CNG has been able to bring school supplies to (your) children, this is a sign that God has plans for them.”
Gilbert saw the hope in the eyes of a beleaguered, impoverished people living in a country plagued by chaos and pain.
“I do not believe C4CNG is the only instrument used to relieve people,” Gilbert said, “but I am sure that it is one and perhaps the only one that God is using to bring His glory to the mountains through actions and the Word of God.”
Children in Majon with their new backpacks, above. Below, the new seventh grade in Kalimet has 10 children. “I was filled with joy when I saw our seventh-grade children,” Gilbert said. “I am very proud to see the growth of each of our children.”
Satan’s response
“Whenever we do something good, the enemy will come to stop our blessing,” Gilbert said. “After doing so many good things for God in the midst of so many difficulties, the hardest blow was (yet to come).”
The border had been closed again.
Gilbert called a Dominican border guard he knows to ask for help getting back into the Dominican Republic. But when the team arrived, they were stopped. Despite having proper documents, they were detained – unless they paid a $100 bribe to the person in charge.
“I wasn’t willing to give it,” Gilbert said.
They spent the night locked up at the police station, waiting for a superior to come. The officer looked at Gilbert’s passport and demanded $150 for previous border crossings he’s made. This time, he paid. He had no choice.
“When we arrived at immigration, everyone saw our documents and they all said, ‘If these people have their documents, why so much abuse?’” Gilbert said. “We had heard about the abuses, but we (survived) that night.”
Gilbert continues to lament the hardship of the Haitian people – on both sides of the border. In Haiti, gangs have overrun villages because “we do not have a responsible government.” There is really no government there.
In the Dominican Republic, Haitians cannot sleep “because they have to be watching all night to know when the military will come to break down doors and enter their homes.”
Deportation dilemma
Haitian men in a Dominican village stand watch, looking out for immigration, which “seems to like kicking in doors at 5 a.m.,” C4C member Russell Yandura reported. (Photo by Russell Yandura)
Russell Yandura, the Climbing For Christ member from Michigan who made the C4C documentary twentyfold: a two-decade story of God’s faithfulness (posted on our homepage), was in the Dominican Republic around this same time. He observed the way Haitians were being treated.
“Held at gunpoint, they had their life savings and business supplies stolen,” Russell said. “Some were arrested. The list of wrongs goes on. At 5 a.m. Sunday (Oct. 27), nearly everything was taken from these Haitian people.”
Russell was outside the northern Dominican city of Santiago. He didn’t expect to see deportations occurring there. “I didn’t think much of hearing the news: Immigration agents raiding villages to accomplish their goal (of deporting 11,000 Haitians every day), stealing everything along the way. For some second- and third-generation Dominican Haitians, they are being deported to a place they no longer know.”
Haiti is a hard place. It has always been difficult. Now, inconceivably, it is worse.
“Sometimes I think that rather than praying and waiting, God should act in His own way and say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Gilbert said.
Like the Haitians Russell saw being assaulted, Pastor Delva is a Haitian with Dominican citizenship, Ferline has Dominican residency, and Scott’s immigration permit is in the process of being renewed. Except there have been no renewals this past year. Which means these Haitians are not safe, either.
Gilbert has lived on the Dominican side of the border since we rescued him from the jaws of death in 2007, a young boy with a broken leg left untreated in a place far from any medical help. He had gangrene. We evacuated him to a Santo Domingo hospital where his leg was amputated, his life – and later his soul – saved. He graduated from a Dominican school and is in his final semester of medical school in, of all places, Santo Domingo. As the brother in Kalimet declared: God has a plan for him.
We hope to build a clinic in the mountains of Haiti in 2025. Gilbert will oversee this, along with the schools Climbing For Christ supports (three starting in January), and continue to lead C4CNG.
Soon-to-be Dr. Gilbert says these two excellent seventh-grade students, Vedith and Begena, are also future doctors. But we need to add an eighth grade to the school in Kalimet to help them. (Photo by C4CNG)
Gilbert has seen the hard Haitian life from both sides of the border on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Russell, who’d heard about it from us during filmmaking and in our E-News updates, witnessed it for himself.
“My heart broke seeing people picking up after early morning chaos,” Russell reported. “Rebuilding homes with broken-in doors, pointing out where all their money was taken from. To see people robbed of everything brings heartache. Children who lost sleep because of injustice need safety.
“God is a God of justice, and He sees and knows every person in this village. If my heart is broken at this then His breaks, too. Our world is broken. Greed, hatred, pride, anger, and so much more.
“Hope, peace, love, truth, and sacrifice are the signs of a soul that is won for the Lord,” Russell said. “I can only pray that some of these people feel a glimmer of that hope. What a life we live when we get to experience that hope in, with, and through Jesus.”
It is found in the smile of a child in a school on a hill where once there was no school. In the tears of a child filled with joy by the return of his healed mother. In a young man, once left for dead, on the verge of graduating from medical school and delivering the love of Jesus through a New Generation of Climbing For Christ members. God is good all the time – even amidst the chaos and pain. 
The final Word
“Patient endurance is what you need now, so that you will continue to do God’s will. Then you will receive all that he has promised.
‘For in just a little while,
the Coming One will come and not delay.
And my righteous ones will live by faith.
But I will take no pleasure in anyone who turns away.’
“But we are not like those who turn away from God to their own destruction. We are the faithful ones, whose souls will be saved.” – Hebrews 10:36-39 (NLT)