Upon arriving at All of God’s Children Orphanage in Fedja, Haiti, our home for the next month, we met two American missionaries who have been working here for the past two and a half months. One of their first pointers was an explanation of ‘Haitian time’. It went something like this: ‘So, breakfast is usually between 8:00 and 9:30 a.m., lunch is sometime between noon and 3:00 p.m., and dinner is served by 6:00 or 8:00 p.m. Church is Sundays, sometimes around 9 or 9:30 a.m., and usually Monday and Thursday sometimes around 6:00 p.m. or so. But since the earthquake sometimes we have church Wednesday, Saturday, or Tuesday.’
Flexibility is a requirement for the Race. You can not get by with just that, you need a large helping of Patience, Grace and Love. Heck, let’s just throw in the all the Fruits of the Spirit and call them necessary. I love our contacts here. Markes, Jude and Wilfred are GVCM staff who were born and raised in Port-au-Prince. Their families all still live there, but they choose to stay an hour and a half away at the orphanage to spend all of their time with the children. They sometimes are able to go home for two to three days a few times a year.
These men are angels. In Haitian society it is a disgrace for grown men to play with children. They are not respected outside the walls of the orphanage because they spend their days caring after, disciplining, teaching and loving all of God’s children. This makes it easy for me to be patient and have grace with them while trying to pin down some sort of a schedule for my team while we are here. They are constantly busy taking care of individual needs of the children. You see them with a child in one hand, a cell phone in the other, flocked by six or seven children behind them shouting requests, and they simply move about handling business with a smile on their face. These children are their passion. They requested our team be awake by 5 a.m. to play basketball with the children. We settled for 6 a.m. and they love to see us out there making sure the children are exercising during the coolest part of the day.
They not only have the 69 children at the orphanage to care for, there are still several refugee families tenting on the front of the property, displaced from the earthquake. Already the stories I’ve heard…. There is a full-time, armed security guard on the compound, but the orphanage pretty much has an open-door policy as to who can spend time here during daytime hours. We have met several villagers, refugees, and ‘hill people’ who wander over for company, food, whatever the orphanage can spare. We are staying on the central plateau of Haiti, an area that was untouched by the earthquake. Our whole team is genuinely in awe of the beauty that surrounds us. We are in the country with mountains and banana trees around us in all directions. This is not at all the Haiti I have heard of, or expected to see.
We have spent our first week getting to know the children, planning a three week summer camp for them that will continue English lessons they have been learning and VBS’s, and digging a 15 ft, by 15 ft, by 15 ft hole down from the mountain to serve as a dump. We have been busy, hot, usually always covered in sweat, knats, and children who are covered in the same. We are embracing the experiences and asking God to have an impact on this mountain this month. The second night here I was asking God for a word for myself and my team. This is what He gave me:
‘On this mountain He will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; He will remove the disgrace of His people from all the earth.’ – Isaiah 25:7-8
And, ‘He will bring down your high fortified walls and lay them low; He will bring them down to the ground, to the very dust.’ – Isaiah 25:12
Amen.
