Nothing about the commercial real estate business is easy. Planning it, building it, selling it – all difficult. It looks simple, though, compared with the nightmare that comes when buildings shake, shatter and tumble to the ground, the way they did when an earthquake struck Haiti a bit more than a year ago.

The world has gone through its usual run of crises and disasters since then, and now Japan has pushed Haiti even further toward the back of the line. The Caribbean nation remains in desperate straits, though, and this weekend a group of 13 people heads off to follow the same path taken by Central Iowa commercial real estate broker Bob Stewart last summer.

The travelers are members of The Gateway Church, which spun off from the First Assembly of God and is led by Paul Stewart, Bob’s son. They’ll spend eight days helping rebuild an Assemblies of God church, one of about 30 of that denomination’s churches destroyed or seriously damaged by the earthquake.

When Bob Stewart arrived at the capital of Port au Prince last July, “nothing had prepared me for what I saw,” he said recently. Haitians with shovels and wheelbarrows took on massive piles of rubble – and couldn’t know that a hurricane and a cholera epidemic awaited them in the following months.

Stores and hotels had been destroyed, along with national symbols including the Presidential Palace and the National Cathedral. A tenth of the city’s population had been killed.

At the end of his stint, Stewart experienced the strangeness of modern air travel, with its power to take us effortlessly from misery to comfort. “We take off, and 45 minutes later we fly into Fort Lauderdale,” he said. “Later that day, we got back to Des Moines, flying over the balloon festival in Indianola.”

Stewart has seen more than his share of such contrasts, and the world in general. He has visited 43 countries, sometimes for pleasure and about half of the time on mission-related trips. In 1995, he visited Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as part of an Assemblies of God project to build a Bible school. “I was hooked,” said Stewart, 58. “I knew it was my calling.”

Since then, he has taken on similar tasks in Ethiopia, Colombia, Venezuela, Kenya, El Salvador, Latvia and Bangladesh, among other nations. Not exactly the usual tourist stops. He helped raise $20,000 to build a church in Cuba – which is illegal under the regime of Fidel Castro – and was welcomed “like a rock star” along with his companions when they attended the dedication. It fell to him to speak at the occasion, and he was required to include thanks to the government, “which had fought the project tooth and nail,” Stewart said.

In 1997, he helped raise $150,000 to help build a Bible school in Colombia, and visited the resulting facility years later in 2008. “Four hundred students had graduated,” he said. “That was one of the most rewarding moments of my life.”