A Long Commitment to Northwest Haiti

In 1977, a young preacher from a small town in rural Indiana took his first trip out of the country. Alfred Helms joined a group of others from nearby churches to visit Northwest Haiti on an evangelistic mission trip.

Once in Haiti, they drove north from Port-au-Prince in a blue Volkswagen van, working their way through Gonaives to Port-de-Paix, where they began assessing the potential for ministry. They preached there and bought land to build a small church.

They were overwhelmed by the physical, spiritual, economic, and social poverty they found. The trip was hard — at times, Helms thought he would never return to Haiti again.

But in 1978, he returned again. And he did it again in 1979, and nearly every year after that.

Helms and the group grew in number, and together they made a commitment to ministering to people in Northwest Haiti. In 1979, the group formed Northwest Haiti Christian Mission, and many of them would continue to serve on the board of directors for decades.

From the start, NWHCM’s mission was to establish churches and reach communities for Christ by helping meet human needs through humanitarian aid and education.

The group named Larry Owen, then a preacher from Calhoun, Kentucky, as the mission’s first executive director.  It began with a small orphanage in Port-de-Paix (Chalet) and a fledgling church nearby in La Pointe. But within a few short years, the mission had grown rapidly to include primary schools and multiple churches, and it was attracting increasing numbers of visitors from North America.

In 1989, Pat Hamilton joined the mission as its first full-time, residential missionary in St. Louis du Nord, a few miles to the east of Port-de-Paix. In 1990, the mission added a feeding program for children and the elderly. The program’s enrollment grew exponentially, and visits from crowds of people in desperate need of medical care quickly gave rise to the addition of a free clinic in St. Louis du Nord.

By the early 21st century, NWHCM’s ministries encompassed multiple primary schools, nearly two-dozen churches, multi-faceted surgery programs, a 24-hour maternity ward, a Bible college, and residential programs for orphans, special-needs children, and indigent seniors. The organization employed more than a dozen full-time missionaries and staff, and more than 100 national staff.

In 2007, Janeil Owen succeeded his father, Larry, as executive director. Under Janeil’s leadership, NWHCM has greatly expanded its work in the “Far West,” the region of the Haiti’s northern peninsula that lies west of Port-de-Paix. That area is among Haiti’s most impoverished and unreached.

Through dictators, civil unrest, famine, droughts and economic crisis, NWHCM has remained steadfast in its commitment to doing the work of the Church in Northwest Haiti.  NWHCM believes that the good news of Christ is for all people, regardless of race, gender, religious affiliation, or remoteness of where they live.

NWHCM is a certified non-governmental organization, or NGO (French: organisation non gouvernemental – ONG).