9.21.11

We have spent the last week hosting Jeremy’s mom. With the help of her family and friends, she was able to bring 3 suitcases filled with clothing, shoes and toiletry items to bless the orphans and neighborhood kids. We enjoyed taking her to visit the orphanages and introducing her to the neighborhood kids. We are thankful that she had the opportunity to come and experience life in Haiti. Below is a picture of us at the Tree of Life.

Today marks the start of our last week here in Haiti. We return to South Florida next Wednesday. We will spend this last week finishing up several projects. We have gathered pictures and biographies from all of the orphans at Tou Tou’s and Saut D’eau. We are excited that sponsors will have the opportunity to be assigned to specific children in the future. We have gathered pictures and biographies from the majority of the children who will attend school at GCA this fall. We have grown to love many of these kids over the last several months. We have big hopes for their futures and we are so thankful that they will have the opportunity to receive an education. We are hopeful that the opportunity to be matched with specific kids increases the sponsorship for both programs. We will also be compiling our research and providing GCA with our recommendations on orphan care as they prepare to open an orphanage on their campus. We are glad to have been able to make contacts with other local orphanages.

If you are interested in more information regarding orphan or school child sponsorship, visit gcanet.org.

We have mixed emotions as we start this last week. We have been so thankful for the opportunity to spend the last few months here. At times, we are homesick and miss the luxuries of home (consistent access to water and electricity, food choices other than rice and beans, freedom to go where we want when we want). Other times, we dread leaving. We will miss those we have gotten to know, we will miss the simplicity of life here and we will miss the challenges that each day brings. Even on the bad days, we have felt confident that we are where we are supposed to be and there is something very comforting about that.

Please pray for us as we return to South Florida. Please pray that we will know how to best share our trip experiences with others. Please pray that we will patiently wait for God’s direction in this new stage of our life. Please pray for the country of Haiti, the orphans at Tou Tou’s and Saut D’eau, and the ministry of GCA.

Jeremy with the neighborhood kids.

Kallay at Tou Tou’s with two of her favorites, Rony & Dashley.

 

9.12.11

Our main focus last week was to take pictures and gather biographies of the children that will attend school this fall on the Boyer Campus. Approximately 50% of Haitians are illiterate. The enrollment for primary school is 67% of all eligible-age children and 20% for secondary school. Cost can be a prohibitive factor in children being able to attend school. GCA is in the process of building a school on their campus. Last year, they started a school that meets in a temporary structure. It was the first time many of the neighborhood kids had the opportunity to attend school. GCA has a school child sponsorship program that helps cover school related costs. For more information, visit their website at gcanet.org/help/schoolchild.

School was originally scheduled to start this month, but the start date was pushed to next month. This made the task of finding 60+ kids rather difficult. We decided to “employ” the neighborhood kids. They went out to track down the school children (and in some cases took us along) in the local village. They proved to be great helpers and were more than content with payment in poptarts. Jeremy had a great time walking throughout the village and talking with the children and families in their homes.

Last Friday, we celebrated our 5^th wedding anniversary. We went to downtown Mirebalais and enjoyed dinner at a local restaurant. Kallay enjoyed her ham and cheese sandwich that came with one thin slice of ham and a pool of ketchup and mayo and three slices of bread. She ordered a side of fried plantains and ended up with a three-layered sandwich of ham, cheese, and plantains. Jeremy enjoyed a plate of Haitian barbecue chicken. All in all it was a good meal. It broke the monotony of our daily diri and kabrit (rice and goat).

9.4.11

We were sitting on the porch one evening this week with Frank and Brian when we spotted this tarantula.

We made several visits to Tou Tou’s and Saut D’eau this week. We started taking pictures of the kids at Saut D’eau and it turned into a photoshoot. They loved looking at their pictures on the camera after we took them.

My Dad arrived on Thursday morning. We climbed to the Tree of Life with him that afternoon.

We took Dad to Tou Tou’s Orphanage.

The boys opted to ride in the back for the car ride home.

We’ve enjoyed having my Dad here this week. It was good for us to be able to share our experiences and what we’ve been working on with him. It’s crazy to think that we have been here for almost 2 months!

 

8.28.11

This week…

We had a very productive meeting with Melinda and Pat from Haiti Children’s Home (haitichildrenshome.com). They are a mother and daughter that have been caring for sick and orphaned children in Haiti for close to thirty years. They operate an orphanage in Mirebalais located just down the street from the GCA guesthouse. They have a wealth of knowledge about orphan care. They graciously shared their experience and knowledge with us. We are excited about the information that we gathered and how it will positively impact GCA’s ministry to orphaned children now and in the future.

We also returned to Tou Tou’s Orphanage to finish taking pictures and gathering biographies on each of the kids. Sarah (Nurse intern) provided medical care to a few of the sick children.

Jeremy’s highlight of the week was driving a motorcycle through the cow fields with Jerry. ☺

8.22.11

If your days are anything like mine, you have the rare luxury of waking up to clean, running water. I say “rare” because approximately 1 in 8 eight people worldwide lack access to safe water supplies. Stated differently, 3.5 million people die each year from lack of clean water. To you and I this is unfathomable. We wake up to a nice warm, full-pressured shower. We brush our teeth, make our coffee, and wash our clothes all with clean water. We even wash our cars and water our lawn with cleaner water than 884 million people worldwide. In Haiti alone, sixty percent of the 8 million people do not have safe drinking water. I have seen kids bathe and wash their clothes in water that you and I would never dream of touching.

In the town that I live in, locals walk up to 3 miles one way to the only water source in the area. A few weeks back I asked a neighborhood boy, Jimmyson, to take me to the water source. Thankfully, it only happened to be one mile from my house. When I arrived, I was surprised to see a small PVC pipe protruding from a rock, where the water flowed. A stick was jammed up in the pipe to act as a shut off valve. I remember thinking to myself; I guess as long as an animal doesn’t die in the creek up stream the water is probably fairly clean. Three of my friends arrived to fill up buckets of water. Valentine, a 6-year-old girl who attends our morning English class, was filling up three empty laundry detergent jugs. In pure Haitian style, she carried one on her head and two in her hand. Michelange, a 12-year-old girl and Ludmiere, a fifteen-year-old girl each carried five gallon buckets on their heads. I later did a Google search to discover that one 5-gallon bucket of water weighs roughly 42 pounds. I followed the three girls as they walked in the scorching heat, 1.5 miles up a dirt road to their house, while carrying their drinking and bathing water. On the way home, they told me they repeat this trek 5 times per day. I thought of how easy it is for me to turn on a faucet to wash my hands or shower. I wondered what it would be like to do so out of a five gallon bucket, not forgetting to share the water with your parents, siblings, and most likely grandparents, aunt and uncle and cousins. The need for clean water in Haiti is great. Every 20 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease, worldwide. The number one request that I get from children on a daily basis, other than “Bay mwen boul, silvouple!” give me soccer ball, please, is “Mwen bezwen dlo”, I need water. I can’t count the number of times I hear this each day. So the next time you go to the fridge to pull out a bottle of Aquafina or even flip on the garden hose to wash your dog, think of kids like Valentine, Michelange, and Ludmiere, because you are one of the rare few that have access to such luxury.

Below is a picture of the water source. The young girl is Valentine. The boy carrying the five-gallon bucket of water is Watson.

 

 

 

8.19.11

This week, we have focused on updating GCA’s orphan sponsorship program. GCA would like to improve their sponsorship program by giving sponsors the opportunity to be matched with specific children. We visited GCA’s orphanages, Saut Deau and Tou Tou’s, where we took pictures and gathered information to create small biographies for each child. This information will be added to GCA’s website in the future. We’ve enjoyed asking the kids questions and gathering their responses. Yellow dominates as a favorite color, the boys love soccer and the girls love jumping rope.

We encourage you to visit GCA’s website (gcanet.org) for more information on their orphan sponsorship program.

We were leaving Saut Deau earlier this week when our driver, FeFe, waved for us to follow him across the street and onto a path that appeared to lead to nowhere. We followed him through fields, dirt paths and over small streams (all while having no idea where we were headed). Jeremy said “On a scale of 1 to kidnapped in Haiti, I think we’re at about a 9”. We soon stumbled upon a sugar cane syrup “factory” surrounded by sugar cane fields. The pictures below show two steers tied together walking in circles around a grinder. A person feeds the stalk of sugar cane into the side of the grinder. As the steers walk in circles, the grinder squeezes out the sugar cane juice. A person scoops out the juice and takes it to a nearby hut where the sugar cane is boiled and made into cane syrup.

Pictures from the last few weeks