Member Spotlight: Patrick and Barb Lataillade

The April 2010 Member Spotlight in Samaritan Ministries Christian Health Care Newsletter featured missionaries Patrick and Barb Lataillade, who both were injured in the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti. You can follow updates on their progress at their Trauma Treasures blog.

When the ground began moving violently shortly before 5 p.m. January 12 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Barb Lataillade thought it might be Jesus.

“All of a sudden, everything was falling from beneath my feet,” Barb says. “Everything was shaking.”

The missionary to Haiti was on an elliptical exercise machine, and her husband, Patrick, was relaxing in the family room of their Living Word Ministries quarters. When the half minute of quaking was ended, Barb was partly covered by rubble from the two-story, cement structure, her right leg in pain. Patrick was trapped in a sitting position, his right arm crushed by ironworks and his neck bent so that he couldn’t straighten his back.

But the Lord was with both of the Samaritan Ministries members and continues to see them through the most trying time of their lives. After weeks in intensive care, the amputation of Barb’s right leg between the knee and ankle, and the amputation of Patrick’s right arm, the missionaries are visiting churches to briefly tell their story but mainly to praise God and give Him glory.

Immediately after the earthquake, though, touring churches was the last thing they expected to be doing in the near future.

Trapped for 18 hours under chunks of concrete, Patrick sang “God Is So Good” while rescuers handed him small bags of drinking water to keep fluids in him, an action which doctors later said probably saved his life.

“I had never suffered in my life like that,” he says, adding that the pain and discomfort were worse than suffering from malaria 12 times while growing up. It was so bad, Patrick says, that at times he prayed that God would take his life to end the pain.

While he was in “the hole,” Patrick says, he listened to others “singing, praying, screaming” in the neighborhood. “There was death all over the place.”

After the sun came up, a team of men with sledgehammers and jacks from the Lataillades’ vehicles began working to remove the rubble trapping Patrick as he guided them. He eventually was pulled from the pile, his black hair coated with concrete dust.

Meanwhile, Barb’s initial impression was that her right foot had been cut off. She made a tourniquet out of her shirt for her leg because she knew the bleeding was bad. Someone nearby said that if she crawled in a certain direction, he could help her get out.

It worked.

Those coming to her aid set her on a sidewalk just as an aftershock hit. Someone with a car took her to two clinics, but no help was available there. One of the clinics, besieged by more than 2,000 injured people, had only one doctor and a damaged operating room, Barb says. She lay in the parking lot of the clinic the rest of the night, being kept company by a girl from the mission. Eventually, she was moved to a cousin’s house near town, but had no way to contact Patrick or know his condition.

Eventually, a very sick Patrick, suffering from loss of fluids, was brought to the same house. As the day went on, Barb says, Patrick was getting sicker and the toes of her right foot were turning colors.

“I was moving along with this dangling foot and two puncture wounds in my leg,” she says.

Ultimately, they were taken to an airport where they received treatment from a Canadian military unit and then to a trauma center in Miami.

“We almost lost Patrick I don’t know how many times,” Barb says.

After surgery in Miami, Patrick was in the intensive care unit for two weeks. Barb had three operations in five days. While they were in that hospital, their children, Rachel and Agape, joined them. The two had flown to the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and then were en route to Port au Prince to find their parents when they received word Patrick and Barb had been taken to Miami.

Since then, Patrick and Barb have moved to a friend’s home near Tallahassee, where their son, Agape, lives. Rachel is staying with them as well.

Barb is waiting for her leg to heal well enough so that a prosthesis can be fitted and will soon have surgery on her left eye for nonearthquake-related causes. Patrick is already in the process of getting a prosthesis, with a mechanized one expected to be donated. In fact, Barb says, they haven’t had to submit any bills to Samaritan related to earthquake injuries yet, as all of the care has been paid through grants or has been donated.

That’s a blessing and testimony for the couple, who have been doing the Lord’s work in the spiritually lost country of Haiti for more than a quarter of a century.

Patrick was a 19-year-old atheist when God captured him through His Word and turned him into an evangelist. Barb was a missionary, having felt the Lord’s call as a young girl. Finding herself in Haiti, she soon met Patrick.

“Finally, we realized that God wanted us to work together,” Barb says.

This month marks the 29th anniversary of Barb’s presence in Haiti and the 25th anniversary of their wedding.

They started Living Word Ministries in 1989, with a focus on planting churches in unreached villages. They’ve done so in five villages, three of which have schools and one of which has a medical clinic. A center for pastor and church conferences was opened in 2009. They’ve also started a Bible school to train future leaders and run a sponsorship program for children in the schools.

Their efforts are bearing fruit even in the midst of the tragedy which so far has claimed at least 230,000 lives. Barb says she and Patrick have been told by pastors at their churches there that “the mission is going on.”

“They’re working in the church, they started the Bible school again, the clinic is going,” Barb says. “They’re doing the work even though we’re not there.”

She says that they received a report in early March of 48 Haitians coming to the Lord, most of them young people.

“One young man’s mother was persecuting him to the utmost because of his stand,” Barb says.

Another believer, she says, brought his voodoo idols to the church and wept as he burned them.

Patrick was planning to go to Haiti and check on the churches with his son, Agape, in mid-March.

The Lataillades need continued prayer, though, for their recovery. Both continue to suffer from “phantom pain”—pain which seems to be coming from parts of their limbs which no longer exist. It typically hits them at night, Barb says. Patrick has found one exercise that helps it to ebb, but Barb says she is still looking for one. She is hoping that an exercise bike that can be used with one leg will do the trick.

“It’s unreal,” she says. “It’s a weird pain for something that you don’t even have.”

But the couple has found joy in the midst of their suffering.

“When we look at our house (in Haiti), it’s like, why are we here? Why are we alive? Our greatest sadness is to know there’s been so much destruction in Haiti.”

Their zeal to return to Haiti to preach the Gospel has only intensified, Patrick and Barb say.

“God is calling us to serve Him better,” Patrick says. “I feel a great sense of urgency to reach out to Haitians in Haiti and Miami and New York, all over the world. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”