American missionary in Haiti: ‘I feel like a sitting duck ready to be shot’

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Private security guards watch the premises and a 12-foot wall protects the sprawling solar-powered Miracle Village in Fond-Parisien, where a self-defense citizens’ brigade patrols the town’s blocked and booby-trapped streets, day and night.

Still, Bobby Burnette and his wife Sherry, who run an orphanage, birthing center and medical clinic on their 100-acre property at the foot of a mountain range leading to Haiti’s highest point just a few miles southwest of the Dominican Republic have never felt so helpless.

“We have 498 employees and they’re scared to death,” said Burnette, who runs Love A Child, Inc., a Fort Myers-based Christian charity they founded in 1985 to help Haitian families. “For these gangs to come here and then try to hurt our children, rape our children or run them out, and hurt these poor people and take over this beautiful place that has helped so many people, I can’t conceive how evil people are.”