As Haiti marks the second anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people, the country and its economy are slowly being rebuilt with the help of tens of thousands of temporary missionaries, including 10 of us from Morrow Memorial United Methodist Church in Maplewood.

Our delegation went to Haiti over Thanksgiving weekend, with a charge to help rebuild a church in La Tremblay, a small enclave south of the capital of Port au Prince. The work was as humble as the surroundings: To move piles of rocks and dirt from the ground to the second floor of the church, where local construction workers could turn it into concrete.

Our task illustrated the halting, often frustrating nature of rebuilding Haiti. With machines — with capital to buy machines — work like this could be done in a day by a handful of workers, rather than over a week by the 10 of us and crews of up to 27 Haitian day laborers making about $10 a day.

Private investment in Haiti is modest, but increasing: Marriott announced a new hotel in Port au Prince last month, and a Best Western is under construction. You can count things like office buildings and street lights in the capital on the fingers of one hand — we drove all day and counted four lights. Garbage is all over, sewage common on the street, and concrete dust pervasive in every urban breath.

Indeed, economists often question whether American missionary tourists are doing any good — a question we debated ourselves.

Haiti needs roads, electricity, a functioning local police force, and it has barely any of these. We worked on generator power all week, and couldn’t drink the water. It has no real export economy to speak of, extremely high unemployment, and half a million people still living in tent cities — down from a million last year at this time.

Thanks to free trade deals, the grocery store is filled with sacks of rice from the US, Thailand and India – and rice, along with sugar, used to be Haiti’s cash crop.

Economists like Michael Clemens and Tyler Cowen argue that the best way for Haitians to lift themselves up is to leave. And I found myself in a schoolyard, looking at kids I know have no jobs waiting for them, telling my translator he should hop on a plane, not worry about overstaying his visa, and come paint houses in New Jersey.

Together, our group of 10 decided that we could make a difference in small ways, helping at the margin as people in La Tremblay put their own hometown back together. We went to a Sunday service in a Methodist school with the congregation that will worship in the church we so modestly contributed to rebuilding. It’s safe to say that their voices will blow the roof off that dump when some later group of missionaries helps complete the last work on the new church.

Through meeting these folks, and hanging around with the children and staff at the church school, what we saw was the joy, hope and courage that corruption, poverty and the earthquake have not killed in Haiti. Being able to honor and maybe foster that courage, and to help give La Tremblay’s community a place to be joyful again, was a blessing. It was plenty of reason to go there.

We certainly didn’t fix everything. Our work won’t even feed the children who hung around our job site. But the people in that service told us that the church is one of many things they need. And we did at least that.

It was enough. Amid Haiti’s huge challenges and near-total lack of money to meet them quickly, it has to be.

Tim Mullaney is a freelance writer living in Maplewood.

Rev. Chris Heckert is Senior Pastor at Morrow Memorial United Methodist Church. For more of Heckert's beautiful pictures from Haiti, visit the gallery here.