Washington Terrace woman's faith prompts her to help Haitian orphans before and after earthquake

WASHINGTON TERRACE -- No one who hears Chareyl Moyes' story of her adventure to the heart of Haiti's earthquake epicenter doubts it was her life's trial of faith.

It started with a prompting she'll never forget.

"I just had this feeling come over me and it said I need to go get the kids," she said. "I had to go to Haiti and I had to go when I did."

It ended with about 75 Haitian children -- orphans long before the shaking started -- traveling to the United States to be with their new families.

"I don't care how religious you are or aren't," said Moyes, a case worker with Wasatch International Adoption Agency in Ogden. "You have to know that someone else was guiding that. ... It would be difficult for me to ever deny."

And the Washington Terrace woman asks that no one call her a hero.

She's seen her true heroes. They were born with nothing and they made do with what they had.

"They rise above in the midst of so much."

While it usually took more than two years to get a Haitian child through the adoption process, something told her that would change in the wake of disaster.

With an army of volunteers around her, she went to Haiti with no physical evidence her presumption was true.

"I don't want to minimize anyone else's help," she said. "I was just one of a lot of people who made it all possible."

She can rattle off a long list of politicians from Utah and Washington D.C., volunteers from her church and elsewhere, a businessman, an Air Force colonel and a pilot who risked arrest for not moving his plane until the orphans were aboard as among those who joined her in being in the right place at the right time.

Before Moyes left for Haiti Jan. 21 on a plane chartered by members of the Scientologist faith that had extra seats available, she worked around the clock for two days to get the paperwork completed for the children associated with her agency.

Over 10 days, the rules had changed drastically for taking children out of the country because of rumors of human trafficking.

"We were caught in the middle of all of that," Moyes said.

Her prime focus each day in Haiti was to do whatever it took to get the prime minister to sign travel papers for the children.

"Our kids were the first to be in this process," she said.

Orchestrating a miracle for about 75 children for whom Moyes was responsible meant sleeping on the ground outside an overflowing orphanage that had taken in children from another facility destroyed in the quake.

Her days were spent lobbying for signatures on documents that would allow the children to leave.

Each child's paperwork had to be reviewed and signed by people who had been displaced by the quake. Officials were sometimes hard to locate.

Right up until the last day, some government officials had eluded her. And rules at the small airport required that the planes could only stay on the ground for two hours at a time.

A plane that brought in members of the Utah Task Force would be able to take the children back to the United States but it seemed impossible for Moyes and others to get everyone lined up who needed to be involved in legalizing the documents before the plane would have to leave.

Moyes sent the children to the airport with name tags and matching T-shirts even though she needed more signatures.

But at the last minute, all the necessary people just seemed to appear at the right place in order for the paperwork to be signed.

With the clock ticking down to the last two minutes before the ride home was lost, Moyes boarded the plane to Miami, where she could deliver her heroes into the loving arms of their new parents.

"Every time we hit a road block, things just seemed to work out at the last minute," she said.

But Moyes left Haiti Jan. 29 in a heart-wrenching drama. One boy particularly close to her was among 16 who had to be left behind for a time. Others under her watch had left earlier with their new parents.

"He fell down at my feet," she said. "He sobbed 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' He thought he had done something wrong."

The 7-year-old did not understand the complications of his lost paperwork in the disaster-ridden country.

An Air Force colonel promised Moyes he'd do everything he could to get the boy and the others home so Moyes left to serve the 50 orphans and others on board with her that day.

She returned to Miami two days after she got home to Washington Terrace to greet that boy personally and deliver him to his parents and his newly adopted Haitian sibling.

Looking back on her life, Moyes said she recognizes the exact moment when her Father in Heaven began preparing her for this adventure.

She was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Philippines. She recalls that she was paralyzed with grief at the state of poverty she found there.

Moyes remembers praying with all her heart to understand why there were those with so much while others had so little.

"It doesn't really matter what you have in this life," she recalls the Lord telling her in her heart. "It's how you live your life."

Moyes became so overjoyed by her mission that she extended her stay for two months after her mission was over.

Originally from Portland, Ore., she visited Ogden to see one of her mission companions shortly returning. That's where she met her husband, Darren, who is a cousin of that companion.

After the two were married, Moyes was mostly a stay-at-home mother for 17 years, although she ran a day care for a time.

Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Moyes announced to Darren that she'd accepted a job as a case worker at Wasatch International Adoptions.

"I didn't know you were looking for a job," she recalls him saying.

That was six years ago. At the time, the agency didn't have much of a relationship with Haiti.

But Moyes fell in love with the people there and began to grow the program.

So much so that shortly after she started working with that country, her family, which already included five children, adopted Robert Frantz Andre Moyes, or Robbie, now 6.

"You think 'I will rescue a child,' But they rescue you. He is full of life, full of joy," she said.

"When you have a little boy from that country, it's a reminder to give back."

Moyes' faith is ever clear in her actions.

It's only through seeing her faith that one can understand why she and others have made detailed arrangements to ship a 40-foot container full of supplies to Haiti a week from Monday even though they don't have the money to send it.

She's got stacks of tents, water filters, first-aid supplies and detergent in her garage and tells of other stacks in other garages.

She tells of plans to label the items and about a precisely orchestrated course the container will have to take to avoid heavy taxes from going straight to Haiti.

But she can't name the source of the nearly $10,000 Wasatch International Adoptions and the Haitian Roots agency will need to get the container there.

She just knows the money will come. It's because her faith already was tested.