Hudsonville pastor Steve Igo's e-mail details rescue, heartache in Haiti

By John Agar | The Grand Rapids Press

January 14, 2010, 7:24PM

Rev. Steve IgoHUDSONVILLE -- Hudsonville pastor Steve Igo likely thought his trip to visit missionary friends in Haiti would be more lighthearted.

But hours after this week's devastating earthquake, Igo was working with his bare hands alongside other exhausted rescuers at the site of a collapsed four-story school in Port-au-Prince.

"By God's mercy, we surged upon the building with a generator, power tools, shovels, sledge hammers and fresh bodies," Igo wrote in an e-mail to a fellow pastor, who forwarded it to members of Igo's Hudsonville's Cedar Presbyterian Church.

"The Haitian men rallied. All morning, we listened for voices, drilled holes, sent workers down into the belly of death and the grave, and lifted young girls to the light of God's new day for their lives. In mercy and grace, God gave these exhausted, dust-covered girls a second chance."

Igo and his son, Jon, 16, went to the island as part of the Haitian American Friendship Foundation, led by Eric Hausler, the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Grand Rapids. Hausler brought his boys, Joey, 16, and Daniel, 15. All but Steve Igo left Haiti on Monday. He decided to stay another week.

Now it's unclear when Igo will return.

"It turned from a mission trip into a relief effort," said Donna Hausler, Eric Hausler's wife.

Igo wrote of the rescuer's joy in rescuing 10 girls from the school's rubble, but it was tempered by the deaths of 12 others. Some were found sitting at their desks, with pens and notepads still in their hands.

"How sudden God can take any of us home," Igo wrote.

As the death toll mounted in the crumbling capital city, Igo had a dim view of the number of survivors that will be found in coming days.

"I fear that (Thursday) will permit us to rescue few -- if any -- from the rubble. The building infrastructure is woefully unsafe in Haiti. When buildings collapse, they 'really' collapse. Cement is low-grade, and metal reinforcement scandalously thin.

HOW TO HELP

• Helping Haiti: West Michigan charities providing earthquake relief • Photos from Haiti • Complete coverage

"I don't expect many stories of 3- and 4-day rubble survivors like we sometimes hear of in the U.S. I hope I am wrong."

In the first hours after the earthquake, Igo -- staying 20 miles north of Port-au-Prince -- could not imagine the destruction under way in the cramped city.

He felt the ground shake, but didn't think it was a harbinger of disaster. "Other than being scared a bit, we are OK," he wrote in an early e-mail to his Hudsonville church.

But Igo, staying with missionaries Ben and Heather Hopp and their children, soon began receiving e-mailed reports of death, injury and destruction that were overwhelming.

"I am sad to say that the reports from Port-au-Prince get worse by the hour," he said.

It's not Igo's first rescue experience. He traveled to New Orleans to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.