Samson, a friendly Haitian boy with a big smile who hung around the building sites, showed up one day with a huge laceration on the ball of his foot. So the construction team from Minooka Bible Church cleaned it up and sent for Dr. Rita Hart.

Hart, a Morris Hospital pediatrician working in the Minooka Healthcare Center in Channahon, was able to disinfect and suture the wound and then inject Samson with antibiotics ­all thanks to generous donations from individuals back home.

Several days later, the foot was pink and healing nicely, Hart said. Another little boy did not fare as well.

He had come to see Hart with a badly infected knee joint, swollen, red and hot. A missionary associated with the House of Hope in Haiti, where the Minooka Bible Church team stayed from Jan. 2-9, asked Hart how she would ordinarily treat it.

Hart said, “I would call the hospital and admit him, start IV antibiotics, order a CT scan and consult with an orthopedic surgeon.” Hart said the missionary replied, “Well, you can’t do that here. What else have you got?”

“All I could offer,” Hart said, “was high doses of oral antibiotics and ibuprofen. I felt horrible and wished I could do more. But the missionary said, ‘That’s more than he had yesterday and more than if you had not been here.’ ”

This was Minooka Bible Church’s second mission trip to Haiti, said Dave Jankowski, the church’s former senior pastor and current associate pastor, who began the adult mission program three years ago when he semi-retired.

Years ago, Jankowski had organized an adult mission trip to a Christian publishing house in France. The response from team members was so positive, Jankowski wished he could have offered a second trip, but until recently, the church didn’t have staff available to do it.

In 2012, through Don Shire ministries, Minooka Bible Church took its first trip to Haiti. Those 15 team members stayed at Haiti Faith in Action Orphanage and renovated its bathrooms and showers. They also built a church for the orphanage’s director, Pastor Lineus Cenor, as the 2010 earthquake had destroyed his.

In 2013, Minooka Bible Church hosted two mission trips. One was to the Bahamas to assist in constructing a Christian youth center. The second was to Nicaragua to drill a well through Living Water International. In November, again through Living Water International, church members will travel to Guatemala to drill a well.

For many adults, Jankowski said, these trips are the first time they’ve left the country. They return with knowledge in two areas.

“They have an understanding of how badly the gospel is needed in other parts of the world,” Jankowski said, “and they recognize that a person can be happy without all the stuff that Americans have.”

The original intent for this Haiti trip, Jankowski said, was to construct two cement block homes, one in the desert and one in the mountains, for two widows displaced by 2010 earthquake.

When Hart and two nurses signed up, although Hart had fully planned to “swing a hammer and slap some paint on,” organizers added the medical component. With three suitcases of donated medical supplies and personal care products, Hart treated the 500 adults and children that came to her via “word of mouth” for checkups.

Zach Vogt of Shorewood, a participant in both the Bahamas and Nicaragua mission trips and a mason with the family business of Piazza Masonry in Lockport, was the building foreman for the mountain house.

Construction in Haiti is more than lack of building codes and commercial inspectors, Vogt said. It meant working through interpreters and mixing up rocky concrete. It also included village children singing Christian songs at the site and watching Joseph, a young man who lived in a tent city at the former site of the Italian embassy, gift those children with free trinkets out of his duffle bag. Those “little bracelets and knickknacks” are his income, he said. Vogt and Joseph are now Facebook friends.

“He’s only on wifi once a month,” Vogt said, “but when he gets to a wifi zone, I’m able to stay in touch with him.”

Most meaningful to Vogt was sitting on House of Hope’s flat roof at night, when temperatures dropped from the 90s to the 70s, and reflecting on the day’s blessings. Allison Selk of Minooka, who assisted the prayer team, sifted rock on the construction team and helped with “crowd control” on the medical team, agreed.

“We had people crying, tough, grown men spilling their innermost thoughts, mothers getting choked up seeing the harsh conditions of everything and thinking how wonderful their kids have it and wanting to take those malnourished naked babies home and give them love, food and shelter,” Selk said. “People struggling in their faith rose up and said that there is no longer a doubt and friends comforted one another like brothers and sisters. It’s so incredible.”