They were such a beautiful young couple. He was tall, athletic-looking. She had that shy newlywed look. They were in their early 20s, married in 2022. Davy and Natalie Lloyd had fallen in love doing the work of ministry in Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere. Davy’s first language was Creole—he’d wanted to be a missionary in Haiti since childhood.
A 2023 Christmas greeting photo from House of Compassion in Haiti. Davy and Natalie Lloyd are in the top row, second and third from left. Photo via Facebook @Missions in Haiti
Then one night in late May, after a youth group meeting at the couple’s Haitian church, three pickup trucks full of young men carrying automatic rifles rolled up and took them. Security guards for the church were unable to help. At the couple’s house, they watched as gang members tore through their home looking for anything valuable.
The two were beaten severely but were able to escape to a nearby building along with Jude Montis, a 47 year-old Haitian who had worked with their mission group for two decades.
Details are confusing on what happened next, but some reports said a rival gang rolled up and shooting began. Gunfire penetrated the walls of the building where Davy, Natalie and Jude were hiding. During a brief lull in the action, Davy had reached his father in the U.S. by phone, begging for help.
“I did all I could, but I couldn’t locate anybody,” David Lloyd told CNN. The bodies of Davy and Jude showed signs of having been burned.
About a week later, more than 2,000 guests, and much news media, packed an Assemblies of God church in Neosho, Missouri, and lamented the violence that cut down this young couple in such a faraway place.
What news reports haven’t talked about is what it means right now to do aid work ministry in Haiti, a place where it seems the only law is that of the gun—weapons, violence, fear. This couple knew the danger, yet chose to stay and work in a place where gangs were part of the very atmosphere. Davy had been kidnapped as a child, though returned to his family soon after.
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Their deaths raise new questions not just about the safety of missionaries and aid workers in countries with unstable governments, but about new challenges of bringing compassionate care into places where nonprofits and aid groups seem to be the only stability in the absence of government control over lawbreakers. Should they stay or should they go?
Haiti is not the only place where the questions and answers are elusive.
Ministry where guns are everywhere
“There is an armed security guard at every Dunkin’ Donuts in Honduras,” wrote Patrick Gothman in America Magazine in 2018. “When you enter a pharmacy, the guard with a shotgun slung across his chest will considerately hold your pistol while you wait for your prescription to be filled.” Gothman had come to Nicaragua to help care for orphans. He ended up leaving after one of his friends was raped by men wielding machetes.
Interaction with gangs is part of the relationship-building that some ministries do in violent places. “The gang leader in our area controls one of the ‘nicer gangs’ in Haiti,” said the Missions in Haiti website in May, weeks before Davy and Natalie were killed. “This gang works to keep the ‘bad guys’ out and we pray that they will continue to be strong to keep some semblance of peace in this area.”
Guns have been flowing into Haiti over the last 18 months in numbers nobody can accurately track. Most of the armament comes from the U.S.
Guns, purchased usually in small batches, get hidden in barrels of food, under seats and inside doors of cars, or in parcels on freighters.
It’s not just handguns. Gangs have become so plentiful in Haiti, perhaps 300 now, that they compete with each other, trying to gain status through YouTube videos and Hip-Hop music—and weaponry. Some seek an aura of paramilitary prowess, buying .50 caliber sniper rifles, belt-fed machine guns, and AR-15 assault-style rifles, according to reporting by Juan Forero and Jose DeCordoba with the Wall Street Journal. Sales of weapons is a source of cash for the gangs, as is ransom from kidnappings.
Local leadership: one key to success
One U.S.-based mission leader, who requested his name be withheld for safety reasons, grew up in Haiti. His parents began missions work there and in the Dominican Republic in the late 1980s. His group, he says, has found success over the years relying on street-smarts of Haitian leaders.
That means not ignoring what he calls “the ecosystem” of Haiti.
A mistake of too many U.S.-based groups doing ministry work and providing aid has been trying to strategize from their air-conditioned offices far from the realities of the island. “You need advocates,” he says, people who will speak into your plans who know Haiti’s culture, how things work.
Mission work and aid in Haiti faces danger differently depending on the location. Rural areas are somewhat safer; much of the most horrific violence on the island has been urban, centered in Port-Au-Prince, where an estimated 80% of the city is gang-controlled.
But gangs and people willing to steal or harm are everywhere. A former student of a rural Haiti mission school, now in the U.S., says he remembers being awakened in the middle of the night about gangs coming near his family’s home.
Gang relations as cost of doing the work
Do missionaries and aid workers have to pay off gangs to get their work done? It’s difficult to get people on the record to talk about that. If it happens, it’s rare. One missions-based study in the mid-1990s argued that depending on the cultural context, what American call a bribe might be in order.
It’s less about the money demand than the relationship, noted one scholar. Gospel work and the providing of aid happens in intimate community. People recognize you. They watch you. And if you show you care about them, asking how their day is going (and really caring to hear), telling them you’re praying for them about needs you ask about—all this makes negotiation of entry and passage of goods easier. And “at holiday times, a gift might be in order,” Klotz says.
Gana Ti Zile, who has a nickname meaning “small island,” has helped aid groups navigate Port-Au-Prince. “Once you have a connection, and you meet with us” he told The New Humanitarian, “we consider you a friend.” An aid group that’s been helped by Zile said they work with “community facilitators” who come from gang backgrounds.
Mission leaders in Haiti say that when considering work in as volatile a place as Haiti, one has to consider a simple concept: risk. Christina Wille, of Insecurity Insight, says that for some nonprofits—particularly those with limited budgets to pay for security guards—risk assessment will determine how much aid comes into a place filled with attacks, kidnappings and killings. She notes that when one has to “report to donors, or a board, or founders,” bad news can lead to a cut-off of funds.
The problem of effective aid in a dysfunctional place
That’s a problem in a nation where food, water or medical care from nonprofit groups and mission organizations has become the go-to for Haitians rather than government agencies. But without oversight of these groups, or any means of organizing what aid comes and how, the result is “waste, mismanagement, fraud and corruption” observed Margot Patterson in Jesuit Review in 2018.
One would think that nonprofits originating in the U.S. and offering aid to Haiti would be subject to oversight and scrutiny on ethics and fair practice: not necessarily. A ProPublica investigation of non-profits this month showed that federal agencies, even if they investigate fraudulent practice by nonprofit groups, rarely bring penalties.
“There is no enforcement whatsoever,” said William Josephson in the ProPublica piece. Josephson, a former head of the charities bureau of the New York attorney general’s office, said, “It’s just not a big enough issue for the IRS.” The ProPublica inquiry showed that many nonprofits and aid groups funnel much of the money they collect into administrative costs, marketing, and ongoing fundraising.
Meanwhile, gangs control the major ports in Haiti and the roads that ministries and aid groups use to get food, water, medicine and doctors to those in need. “The gangs will continue to rule for years,” predicts Vanda Velbab-Brown for the Brookings Institution. “The real question is whether the gangs can be shaped to behave less perniciously.”
So stay or go in a place as violent and unpredictable as Haiti? The answer will depend on the missionary, the aid worker, the NGO leader or staffer. But wisdom and a biblical perspective on the risk is crucial. God is good, but He calls us to wisdom about what we do in dangerous places.
“We’re not out here to just randomly let ourselves be killed,” said Anna Hampton, author of “Facing Danger: A Guide Through Risk” in a Christianity Today podcast. “We’re there to be purposeful about serving the Lord Jesus.” She said there is a misconception about a theology of risk—it’s too often conflated with a theology of suffering. They’re not the same. “Risk is situational,” she says.
So Just Pull Out All the Aid Workers?
What would happen if all external aid groups and NGOs pulled out Haiti? Probably chaos and the kind of economic instability that led to military dictatorships in previous generations, according to 2020 research by Australia’s Monash School of Medicine. Haiti, as a nation, has become so severely dependent on the aid provided by NGOs and even well-meaning ministries that a transfer of the burden of helping its people will be a slow transition.
“The people in Haiti don’t want to live in chaos,” says one long-time mission leader. “The people who are causing chaos are doing it for political advantage. They want control.”
Talks have been ongoing by the United Nations, nations in the Western Hemisphere and in Africa to help create a stable government in Haiti. The Caribbean Community, a 15-nation regional group, along with the U.S. State Department, have supported Gary Conille as interim prime minister in Haiti.
Matthew Miller, in a news release on May 30 from the State Department, urged Conille to set up a government that will “enable free and fair elections, and the provision of security and basic services for all Haitians,” which will be backed by what’s being called a Multinational Security Support Mission—guns and trained military to push back gangs who now control the Port-Au-Prince Airport and most streets and roads within an out of the capital city.
Ironically, that Kenyan-led force will be supported by private security (an aid group) based in Canada that has been accused by a whistle-blower of inflating its claims about training, according to CNN.
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