When Citizen photographer Beth Snipes recently considered an invitation to visit Haiti, she learned a few things about the Caribbean country.

Already one of the poorest and most primitive nations on earth, last year Haiti was further devastated by Hurricane Mitch. There's no electricity; roads can be literally head-deep in mud.

Sanitation is worse than the worst in the United States. Visitors have to take hepatitis shots and anti-malarial medication, and are exposed to bacteria for which they lack immunity.

Political unrest is high and national security almost non-existent. Airline tickets would bear this welcome: "WARNING Port-au-Prince does not maintain airline security!"

That's not all. Snipes would have to walk the last leg of the journey, carrying all her clothing and personal belongings in addition to her camera equipment, and she could wear only dresses. For a woman whose closest friends have never seen her in other than slacks, that may have been the biggest challenge.

Or perhaps it was the question, "Are you afraid of spiders? Big spiders? Oh, and bring a flashlight."

And yet, Snipes said she'd go.

Matthew Twenty-Eight, a mission sponsored by Fayette Presbyterian Church and other area churches and individuals, is visited two or three times a year by cofounders Hein Vingerling and Mark Hopkins. They take along anyone willing to bring skills to further the work begun ten years ago in some of the most remote and undeveloped regions of that very poor nation.

Those who go pay their own way for the privilege of living briefly among the Haitian people, healing the sick, educating the young, upgrading agricultural practices, providing basic technology, and caring for orphans.

Snipes' role would be to document the mission's work to help Vingerling and his team communicate to others both the accomplishments and the continuing needs of Matthew Twenty-Eight.

Her pictures are of smiling children, of neatly dressed women, of sick people waiting patiently to be seen in the clinic. Eric Hoffler, a Fayetteville pediatrician, treated patients all day long, mostly for parasites, dehydration, and malnutrition. He appears in Snipes' photos looking intently into the faces of his patients as he listens to symptoms and examines a child an important image, because Snipes said the Haitians put great stock in looking people in the eye. Her pictures capture Hoffler's effectiveness.

Snipes' impressions of Haiti and the mission ranged from her trepidation about living in the challenging conditions there, to the empathy she developed for the people, especially the children, and included humorous and often shocking incidents she witnessed.

Here are some of her observations, jumbled as she talked:

We climbed a big mountain, and I'm carrying all this equipment, wearing new boots, in a skirt, and I kept falling down hills and tripping over logs. Many of the people who live at the top of the mountain haven't been down in 10 years because it's too hard to get back up.

Here [the missionaries] are fighting voodooism. Someone had told these people [who are actually Roman Catholics] that they couldn't be Christians because they couldn't get down the hill to go to church.

One woman who lived there, they thought had Satan in her, and tied her to a chair and dug her grave in front of her and beat her. Someone saved her at the last moment, but that's the kind of cruelty you find there.

We were concerned about dehydration, [a serious problem in that climate]. Hein took a hand pump for water. It worked by reverse osmosis and even then they added iodine to it. I didn't think I could ever drink it, but by the end of my visit, I didn't even taste the iodine the water tasted good.

Despite unfamiliar foods and strenuous activity, I gained a pound. We ate lots of grapefruit, and pancakes with honey and molasses, one night a tuna-noodle casserole. These people define the term "dirt poor," but they are so generous!

On two outings we spent the night out, and I have bruises from riding in trucks, these little Ford Rangers. They carried 20 people and all our gear. It took us two hours to go 12 miles. The truck would tip and you could see the ground coming up at you. I honestly was afraid we were going to die.

[Going through one village,] on the other side of the market place we could see a crowd was gathering. A man was accused of stealing a pig, and the crowd had baseball bats. We don't know if he got out alive or not, but we were warned never to interfere in [incidents] like this.

We were in villages where they may have never seen a white woman. Everyone paraded by, while I tried to look boring. I was reading, and I'd look up and they're peering at me.

One little girl trying to get my attention had a chicken, and she's carrying it around, and she got up real close in front of me and suddenly whipped out a knife and cut its throat! I was trying not to look, but she didn't finish the job, and this chicken's running around bleeding all over everything.

[While on these outings away from the base village], I couldn't go to the bathroom they go behind bushes and there's no place with privacy. I held it all day until after dark, which was 11 at night. And since it was light when I woke up in the morning, I waited until afternoon when we were back at the village.

These people moved out of their house and slept on the ground so we could have their house. But three hours was the most sleep I got in a row for 10 days. Some nights, voodoo drums went on all night long. I could hear rats running on the top of the wall next to where my bed was, mice invading our bags, donkeys braying, roosters crowing all night.

In Haiti, roosters don't say, "Cock-a-doodle-doo." I finally figured out what they were saying: "Oh, Ro-bert-o!" over and over and over.

One day a 25-year-old woman died in the village, leaving a 9-month-old child. That night I heard a sound I knew wasn't donkeys or Oh, Roberto it was the women in the village wailing all night for the dead.

Mark [Hopkins, a plant pathologist] devised a weevil-resistant sweet potato a mainstay of their diet and they also grow red beets, peas, and okra. The pediatrician [Eric Hoffler] taught them to eat the greens too for the food value in them. They make such good bread.

One night they served us fried chicken the same one I saw slaughtered cole slaw, and mashed potatoes. I only ate the mashed potatoes. Couldn't eat that chicken, and I had watched the mayo [used for the slaw] get lower and lower in a jar that was sitting out in temperatures in the 80s.

I got used to being the entertainment. The kids play with a hoop and a stick, and I taught them to do the hula hoop. They hold your hands when they talk to you, look you in the eye, and have such quick smiles.

Everyone knows Hein he's been going there for 10 years, and they love him. We took [deflated] soccer balls. They were playing soccer with scrunched up balls of paper, and we pumped up the balls and tossed them out, and those balls never stopped moving all day.

The people are very neat, their clothes clean and pressed. They took care of wash for us, scrubbing every inch of the fabric. They use lots of lye and it dissolves the elastic in socks and underwear.

The pastors held seminars for other pastors, and 61 walked to be there, some for nine hours. They sent 8,000 Vermox pills [worm medicine] home to their villages.

[When they first arrived] the missionaries saw children in different stages of famine, with red-tinged hair that indicates severe protein deficiency. Hurricane Mitch destroyed farms, and unemployment is 90 percent, the average income about $250 a year. They can only buy one egg at a time.

At the feeding stations Hein and Mark set up, the kids get at least four meals a week, and that's the only food some get. But along with the Vermox, you can see results in a year, and it's beautiful.

Hein and Mark built this orphanage, and it's the biggest employer in this little village, with four women working full time, plus a groundskeeper and gate man. Paulice [Lucien, a Haitian] is in charge when they're not there he's a good accordion player. For income, the women of Buhoc embroider and the men make bricks. The cash is the gourde, because once actual gourds were used for currency.

[The missionaries] also built a grist mill, and each person donates one scoop [of milled grain] from a coffee-can sized container for the feeding stations.

When I came home, I left most of my clothes and things there. They loved sunglasses and my mirror, so I left them.

[In a postscript later, Snipes e-mailed the Citizen:]

After reading about the Haitians that lost their lives trying to reach Florida, I realize the stories I told you [about myself] are so unimportant and frivolous. So much is happening in that country...

I want to tell you more about what these guys are accomplishing. Hein and Mark believe that the future of the country depends on the youth of course. The children in the orphanage are full of promise. They go to school in Bohoc but are out at noon, so Hein has started an after-school program. A teacher comes to the orphanage every afternoon to work with the kids. There's also a plan to build a school on their property that would open next year. All this is with the hope that one of these kids will stay in their country and become a leader and help to turn things around. Since there had been a seminar for the pastors, a stage and podium were set up.... One afternoon I heard the kids playing on the stage. I peeked out and watched them taking turns speaking at the podium. I think Hein is well on his way to having that leader.

Another thing is how hard their lives are every day. It was easy for me to get through 10 days of no electricity or any conveniences. I didn't have to worry where my next meal was coming from, but so many Haitians do. It must be horrible to look at your child and not know how you'll feed him.