After the seven-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January, Orchard Grove Community Church in Walled Lake, Mich., sent a group of 25 people to spend a week in Haiti. In the humid heat of July, Horman stayed at the Mission of Hope compound in Titanyen, a village north of Port-au-Prince.

The group visited three orphanages, painted the inside of a church and provided basic medical care in the tent cities, but Horman said the country needed much more than what the group could offer.

“We were not prepared,” she said. “Everything was 10 times worse (than expected).”

In a tent city alongside the road in Titanyen, she saw Haitians making dirt cookies. They packed the dirt together, laid it in the sun to bake and sold a cookie for a dollar. The cookies looked like cement, she said.

An 18-year-old mother in the tent city offered her baby to Horman to hold. The mother asked her, through an interpreter, if she wanted to keep the baby because the mother wanted her child to have a better life.

Group leaders from the church briefed Horman on what to expect in Haiti, encouraging the right mindset, but it could not fully prepare Horman for witnessing the real thing. The group members had to remember that although they were there to help, they could not help everyone, said Scott Cornell, group leader and outreach trip coordinator.

When Cornell visited Haiti two weeks after the earthquake, he saw a destroyed Port-au-Prince and smelled the decomposing bodies trapped under the rubble. Many people he interacted with were missing limbs.

“We go away to where we see severe poverty, and we bring happiness to them,” he said. “Then we leave and come back to a country blessed with so much.”

The living conditions of many of the orphanages were sub par with children living in tents with no sources of clean water.

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