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Bosie, who worked as an interpreter in the clinic pharmacy where a Westminster Presbyterian medical team volunteered last fall, is listed as dead.

The Catholic nuns, Sister Carmelle and Sister Symone, who helped run the medical clinic in Fondwa, Haiti, where the team provided medical care the year before, are missing.

The force of this week’s monumental 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti left death and destruction in its wake — and personally affected members of local mission teams. Many in the Triad’s faith community, who were once a part of medical work there, can recall the faces of people confirmed as dead or yet to be found.

“It’s really devastating,” said the Rev. Butch Sherrill of Westminster Presbyterian.

Westminster partnered with the Durham-based Family Health Ministries, which is constantly updating its Web site (www.familyhm.org), with pictures and reports on people who were in harm’s way.

Westminster is holding a prayer service at 6 p.m. Sunday at 3906 W. Friendly Ave.

Faith communities are drawn to Haiti, among the poorest of the developing countries, because of the ability to immediately make a difference.

Sherrill, who was there with medical mission teams the past two Octobers, worked as a lab technician performing blood and glucose checks.

“Older people in their 70s would walk three or four hours to get there,” Sherrill said.

In 2008, the team saw 700 people in just over four days. This past year, it was 500 people in 31/2 days.

It’s not the makeshift homes — the hood of a car as part of a wall with tin, cardboard and plastic making up the other walls — that put a lump in Sherrill’s throat his first time there. He had been on numerous mission trips to poor countries.

“But that’s all you would see for miles,” Sherrill said of leaving the airport in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti and the epicenter of this week’s earthquake.

“I have never seen poverty like I’ve seen in Haiti,” he said.

But what has been an encouraging touch of humanity for Sherrill is the extent of the aid being offered.

“One of the first reports I read was that Mexico was immediately dispatching supplies and that Mexico understood this because they’ve experienced destruction,” Sherrill said. “Their compassionate response was out of their own experiences. They understand we are in this world together.”

While controversy swirls over whether some people of faith believe the earthquake is an intentional act of God’s wrath, Sherrill thinks differently.

“I think we would like to believe that God is in control of everything that happens but earthquakes and tsunamis and floods and hurricanes — that’s what happens in life,” Sherrill said. “Not for an instance, am I thinking God is up there thinking, where are we going to have the next catastrophe?

“My sense is that God’s heart is breaking like all of ours.”

Contact Nancy McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com