It is common in Haiti to:
· Get cornrows even when you might not want them
· Paint a fence for days knowing someone will have to do it again next year
· Love the food at breakfast and hate it at lunch
· Play volleyball against a Haitian team and get completely schooled
· Play Dutch blitz more than you blog
· Look at the Caribbean ocean while you work, wake up, devo’s, all the time
· Forget you are in Haiti depending on your living arrangements
· Feel completely safe and loved just by hearing stories of the people
· Feel like you are on the surface of the sun by the heat of the Haitian sun
· See Sunday clothes look different than any other day’s clothes
· Notice there are more building projects started than actually finished
· Not have cellphone stores, instead have men walk around and sell minutes
· Use an old shipping crate for a local market store
· Drink water out of a bag
· Honk. Period. Lots of honking. It’s a good thing.
· Be a pedestrian on the bottom of the totem pole for road behavior.
· Call speed bumps “Sleeping Policemen”
· See nakedness differently…actually accept it, everywhere
· Make an income by smashing rocks from the river into gravel
· Not find any trashcans. Zero.
· Think you are in the deep south when you hear Creole for the first time
· See local transportation as brighter and uses more colors than a Kindergarten classroom
· Yell from the car to the people on the road as a common occurrence
· Shop at a “mall” which is a goodwill from home on steroids…on the street corner
· Swim in water that someone else used for a bathroom, a shower, and a laundry room.
· Stay inside for days during the rainy season
· Have a translator that doesn’t speak English
· Never once see an ATM or bank
· Have more carbs on one meal from 4 different ways to cook the same thing
· See God bring healing outside of what you know of healing
· Be rescued from yourself by depending wholly on the Lord
· Learn that ministry is meeting the needs of the people around you; it’s not a title.
· Get stranded by a hurricane only to see the blessings that came from it
· Sing “Let it Rain” to the Lord on the top of your lungs after you have stepped out of a torrential down pour outside
· Do your laundry simply to get a stench of rotten moldy water out of it…but all you do it replace it with a mixture of stench and flowery detergent.
· Find overwhelming peace in the mix of chaos, by leaning on the Prince of Peace
