On Monday morning, we said
goodbye to Pastor Moise and Francois as we loaded up to head to Léogâne.
While having a personal, parent-to-parent
conversation with one of the couples from our team, Pastor Moise shared a
personal testimony to God’s sovereignty.
He recounted for us the day of his oldest son’s death in the 2010
earthquake and his inability to do anything to even get to his boy let alone
help him.
Pastor Moise was heartbroken
to have money in his pocket and still be able to do nothing to overcome the
incredible obstacles and chaos caused by the earthquake.
In his heart, he was convicted deeply by
James 4:13-15, because he had said something in his communication as simple as,
“I will see you tomorrow”.
He said, “From
now on, no matter how trivial it may seem I will say, ‘If the Lord wills, we
will live and do this or that,’” and he encouraged us to do the same.
That thought, I arrogantly wanted
to keep in the context of challenging life in Haiti.
However, God made it personal to us when we
learned Wednesday that one of our friends from church died Monday evening, the
very day Pastor Moise spoke that truth to us.
So hear God’s truth about the mist that is our lives, here today and
gone tomorrow.
Hear it from Pastor
Moise, those on our team who know it to be true and hear it from us.
Our lives are in God’s hands, and only He
knows whether we will have a tomorrow, so treat each day as the gift that it is
and acknowledge that we get tomorrow, only “if the Lord wills” it.
We departed for
the southern peninsula toward Léogâne on roads we had not yet traveled and saw
some interesting sights along the way.
Burning dump, beautiful gulf, UN soldier for first time, police
checkpoint, lush green countryside.
Ironically, the most nervous I am the entire time I’m in Haiti is at the
police checkpoint. They decide to stop
us long enough to talk to our driver, and I start wondering what sort of
‘special’ treatment a vanload of ‘blancs’ will get. However we are on our way again soon enough,
and we learn from our translator the police were just advising we cover our
luggage rack on top with a tarp next time, because we are an obvious target for
robbers. We chuckle to ourselves a bit
to think just how disappointed the robbers would be to open our bags full of
hygiene products and lightly used shoes destined for the orphans in Léogâne.
Turning off the
main road toward the Eben Ezer Léogâne village, I detect involuntary smiles
starting to spread across several faces.
This area is so clean and green it is inviting, and as we start seeing
the colorful hand painted designs on the exterior of the village wall, we are
excited to be here, outside of Port au Prince (PAP).
We turn into the village and notice first a
youth-sized soccer field, covered in grass spreading out before us.
As we come to a stop the kids start
approaching the van eager to greet us.
We unload from the van, like clowns from a clown car and are each taken
by the hands and elbows and led around the village.
The children are more numerous at 90+ than we
expected, because recently 30-40 additional children came from another village
that could no longer care for them.
We
are greeted by Pastor Claude and Carline who directly take us on a tour.
It is a rather comical sight the lot of us
trying to walk some narrow paths and entryways with multiple kids attached, but
what we see and are told is so encouraging.
We see freshly
painted buildings with bible verses and cheerful murals on them.
One of the school houses has the nurse’s
station at the back, and we meet the nurse, Roseleine, who has teaching
responsibility also.
The children
eagerly point out the section of the school room that is their particular
“classroom”, and some of the girls explain to Cori in French that they are
studying reading, writing, math, French, science, bible, and civic (social
studies).
Especially as we have prayed
for this school, it warmed our hearts to see the kids so excited to show it off!
The cafeteria has reminders to pray
before eating and pray particularly for missionaries.
It is there I learn that Pastor Claude was
himself an orphan whose life was forever change by a missionary from Texas.
It is a personal charge from Pastor Claude
that the children pray for those who come to Haiti bringing Jesus’ love and
hope, because he is forever grateful to the one who came to him.
As we continue around the grounds, we see
children’s homes, mamas doing laundry, produce grown on site (coconut, bananas,
mangos, peas, and avocado), chicken coops,
a well, a new children’s home with
TV room upstairs, the church where children gather an hour before school starts
to worship the Savior by flashlight, colorful playground equipment and a new
construction which is to be a guesthouse.
Wait…worshipping God by flashlight an hour before school starts?
Oh, Lord, grow in us the discipline to love
and praise you with such dedication!
Following the
tour we spread out a bit and begin playing with the children each in our own
way, some sing, some sit and are smothered with children just wanting to be
held, some play games, but Derek tries to get a soccer game going.
He succeeds, but the first time he takes the
ball away from one of the boys, he is asked to leave…big bully. ;-)
Some of the team takes the bags of supplies
and shoes to a storage room for the staff to sort through later, and Carline
expresses much gratitude because we have brought “things of value” that they
needed greatly including shoes and school supplies.
Cori has a special moment singing with 3 of
the girls: Withlie, Ketleine, and Chilove. Withlie begins singing a praise song
in French, and Cori recognized it as “Here I am to worship” and began singing
along in English. The two voices blending in two languages with words praising
the same Lord will serve as a trip highlight reminding of God’s love for the
nations and how we are bound together as a family in Christ. The girls also
sing “Lord, I lift your name on high” in both French and English and “Every
move I make” in just English. We daydream of taking a guitar on a future trip
so that we might sing these songs and others along with the Léogâne kids.
After a little
more recreation, we call all of the kids together to tell them about Jezi’s
example of washing His disciples’ feet and then actually demonstrate it.
The foot washing begins orderly enough, but
as dozens of kids waiting in long lines to get their feet washed start seeing how
fun it is, the lines break down.
I’m
fairly certain we washed over 150 pairs of feet, especially since some kids
came back for seconds and thirds.
Shortly after washing feet, Cori gets to talk with Pastor Claude about
the school and explains why she is so passionate and interested in it. Pastor Claude lights up, with even more
excitement and runs/drags Cori over to where Derek is so he can talk to us both
at once. Our friends, family and
partners here is what GOD is doing through YOU, which is exciting enough to
make Pastor Claude run through the village:
1.
Pastor Claude no longer has to turn children
away from the school. He readily tells
struggling families in the community that their children can come empty-handed
and receive hope for the present and hope for the future.
2.
Eben Ezer
Léogâne can
afford to pay good wages, up to three times what some were making before, to
the teachers and staff.
The school
retains passionate educators, happily dedicated to inspiring the next
generation, able to care for their own families and help others.
3.
He quoted Matthew 25:37-40 and reminded me to
tell our partners that when we help with food, care, schooling, etc for these
orphans that we are doing it for Jesus.
YOU and GOD are
at work together with CAREGIVERS and EDUCATORS in Léogâne changing the daily
lives of struggling families and orphans TODAY!
YOUR prayers and gifts are making a difference DAILY! Thank you for your faithfulness, because
seeing the result firsthand was the experience of a lifetime!
Later on, Derek
and Steve, take enough rubber bands and chopsticks to teach a dozen kids how to
make fishtail bracelets and go looking for a table big enough to work on.
Finding one, they distribute the chopsticks
and start setting out the rubber bands, so the kids can pick their colors.
The rubber bands quickly disappear as these
children who have almost nothing to their name grab handfuls for themselves and
pocket them.
We manage to teach just a
few kids how to do half a bracelet each with the bands we can grab before they
are gone, several end up with ‘rings’.
The journal/notebook
with our kids’ pictures on the front continued to be a hit with the kids.
Our little Haitian friends liked to hear our
kids’ names and ages and then recite them back to us.
It helped with learning names and ages that
the bigger kids liked to write their own name and age in the book.
Now we have treasured pages with many of
their own names written in lovely cursive (and we added description of their
outfits so we can match names with pictures for years to come).
Before leaving, Cori slipped away on the
self-guided tour to capture the campus in pictures.
She saw kids helping with chores, met a Mama
named Darlinj doing laundry, and was awed by the humble and simple kitchen
where they manage to make meals for the 90 kids twice a day. In her encounters
with the Mamas, Cori tried to convey in French how much we admire their hard
work and heart in caring for the kids, how well-behaved and kind the kids are
and that we are praying for them.
Though
I’m not sure this all got through clearly, they did understand that we pray for
them.
Each village we
visited we connected with a few children and Léogâne was no exception.
Derek had Meddina by his side every moment he
wasn’t kicking the soccer ball, Shilov when she had something clever to say and
Kevins when Derek was doing something cool.
In addition to the girls she sang with, Cori often had Icile or Shalonda
by her side and enjoyed getting to know some of the older girls who spoke
French well. Leaving was hard each day, but eased by the prospect of keeping in
touch and seeing the kids again.
Those
smiles, smiles that belie a tragic past depriving them of parents and many
aspects of childhood, capture your heart.
The children’s smiles are a tangible reminder that there is hope and joy
found in our Savior, Jezi.
That hope and
joy is as real to the children as the breakfast I ate this morning is to me,
and it’s Jezi’s love and promise to care for them that sustains it.
These children know faith, because they
exercise it daily.
They don’t have the
luxury of putting it on the shelf when life gets ‘comfortable’, because that
isn’t part of their reality.
We were
challenged to believe afresh in the God who comforts the weak & weary while
patiently calling the distant back to Himself.
The drive from
Léogâne, southwest of PAP, to Jumecort Inn, in a region called Croix de
Bouquets, on the Northeast side of the city during rush hour was long and
tiring, lasting more than 2 hours.
We
continued to be saddened and affected by the living conditions in the city and
the masses of people that are just everywhere.
We were amazed at how many people could fit in
the back of a “tap-tap” which is a pickup truck turned public transportation,
painted brightly with benches along each side of the truck bed.
We were refreshed to be at Jumecort where we
could take a shower to rinse off the day (all cold but with good water
pressure), shoot baskets on the new hoop before dinner, and relax on the patio
with cold drinks.
We had a delicious
dinner of beans, rice, and red sauce (the staple of every meal), fried chicken,
cheesy potatoes, and a spicy slaw called “pikliz”.
We felt like our brains were still going a
mile-a-minute with things to remember from our special day, but our bodies were
tired and ready to just enjoy the moments of relaxing and bonding with our
teammates.
We had a team meeting where
we shared “highs and lows” and did our first bead ceremony which was a
meaningful way that we encouraged each other by recognizing moments of risk,
compassion, service, or leadership that we’d seen others exhibit.
Our team leader, Brandi, closed out the night
by sharing two poignant stories that reminded us to not hold too tightly to the
things God has given us to be good stewards of but to share them freely because
God often multiplies the effect way more than we realize.
