When I was a child growing up in Haiti, my parents were idol worshipers. One night my dad took me to the cemetery where his father was buried. At the gravesite, he prayed to my grandfather, asking him to guide and protect me. Then he gave me a lit candle to place on the grave. We returned home before dawn so that no one would know that we had been out.

Later, the Lord sent an elderly Christian man to our house to share the Gospel with us. My mom was at the market, but the man spoke with my dad as I listened. My dad said that he would wait until his wife returned to make a decision. When she came home, they both agreed that they wanted to come into the Gospel. However, my parents had a concern. Their house was built on my grandmother’s land, and she was an idol worshiper. In Haiti, children are expected to follow the path their parents take. This could have been a major obstacle for them, but the Lord laid it on the elderly man’s heart to give my parents a portion of his land. Within just a few days, my dad built a little house on that land without my grandmother’s knowledge. Then we fled our home during the night and moved to the new location. After we were in the new house, my parents gave their hearts to Christ.

When I was fourteen years old, God helped me realize that I needed to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. He saved me, and from then on, He kept His hand on me for guidance, keeping me from doing wrong things as I grew up. Truly, God protected and loved me. Later, I was water baptized and also received the experiences of sanctification and the baptism of the Holy Ghost.

When I finished school, I became a tailor. Then in 1973, I married my wife, Rosita, and the Lord blessed us with seven children.

Eventually I became a Sunday school superintendent at the church where I attended. One day, I was very ill. A group of people from the church came to spend the night praying for me. While they were praying, I fell asleep and had a dream that the pastor of the church came and offered me a plate of sweet potatoes. As he did, he said, “Brother Rolland, the Lord has sent this to you. Take it and eat it.” I ate what was on the plate. Then the pastor said, “Your work is done, but God has something extra for you to do.” He showed me a plate with a sweet potato on it that was bigger than any I had ever seen. He said, “The Lord says that you will eat around it, but you will never finish it.” When I awoke, I shared my dream with those who had been praying. One of them said, “The Lord has some bigger responsibility for you.” A few months later, I became the pastor of the small church that the elderly Christian man who first witnessed to my family attended.

After becoming a pastor, our financial situation suffered, and I began seeking God’s help in prayer. In 1980, He opened a door for our family to move from Haiti to St. Maarten, where I found work as a land surveyor.

We attended a church there for five years, but eventually felt we had to leave because they were doing some wrong things. For a time, we were not attending church, so I started a prayer meeting in my apartment. The first meeting was attended by sixty-four people, and within two months, we had built our own meeting place.

We did not have a name for our church, so we prayed about it. During this time, I met a man who shared with us the teachings of the Apostolic Faith Church. Through our conversations, I realized that I had not understood all the true doctrines of the Bible before. I began meeting with the pastor of the Apostolic Faith Church in St. Maarten to study doctrine, and I have not regretted that decision for one day.

In 1986, Reverend Algernon Blyden came from the Apostolic Faith Church in St. Thomas to visit our group and to share with us a greater understanding of the Bible doctrines. He was a mentor to me and taught me how to seek God’s favor and draw closer to Him.

While we were living in St. Maarten, the Lord continued to speak to my heart about the spiritual needs in Haiti. I wrote a letter to the leader of the Apostolic Faith work in Portland, Oregon, asking him to establish churches there. He wrote back that the leaders of the church would pray about it, and if it was God’s will, it would be done. Then he passed away. When his successor made a trip to St. Maarten, I brought the needs in Haiti to his attention, and he agreed to help me carry the Gospel work there.

We started the Apostolic Faith work in Haiti in 1995 and dedicated our first church there in 2003. Our second church was dedicated in 2010 and our third in February of 2012. The Lord blessed and continued to prosper the work, and in time we grew to about thirty churches.

Meanwhile, God has had His hand over me personally, sparing my life many times. In January of 2003, as I was working on our first church building, the brakes went out on a truck I was driving. I was at the top of a hill, so I began looking for the best place to die, but the Lord told me to shift into first gear. I did what the Lord said, and the truck stopped in the middle of the hill.

In recent years, the political situation in Haiti has declined drastically as armed gangs have gained more and more control of the country. Consequently, for around six years we have not been able to contact the leaders and believers in about twelve of our churches which are in the eastern side of Haiti. It has been impossible to travel safely across the country to see them. Then in 2024, the gangs took over the capital of Port-au-Prince, which made everything even more unsafe.

My hometown is Mirebalais, and we had just completed the construction of our headquarters church there. Then at six o’clock in the morning on March 31, 2025, while I was in my home sleeping, I heard somebody call, “Pastor Rolland, you’d better wake up because those gangsters are taking over the city!” The police station had been taken first, and then the gangsters broke into the jail and let all the criminals out.

Thank God, my wife was already safe in the United States with our daughter. I also thank God that I had a car, so myself and the four other people who were in my house at the time quickly put what we could into the car and fled for our lives. We chose the road to Cap-Haitien, the second largest city in the country. That trip is 144 kilometers (90 miles) and would normally take about four hours to travel, but that day it took us until 10:30 at night.

When the armed gangs come into an area, they burn houses and property, take everything they can get, and kill people. So the people in the cities, including those from our churches, scatter. Now we have no way to find out where many of them are or how they are surviving. Many are existing in the bush and starving. Please pray for Haiti and God’s people there.

I thank God for miraculously sparing my life that day. The gangs took my home, but one thing they cannot take is my testimony. I know victory is mine and I will continue with God to the end. My heart is, and always will be, consecrated to God. We are trusting Him to help.