As you may or may not have heard… We are officially in Haiti. But to fill you in how we got here… we took the bus from Santo Domingo (Dominican Rep) to Port o Prince. At the border, we got stopped for like an hour. There was a protest and they did NOT want to let our bus come into Haiti. Our whole bus started praying and singing worship songs and after a while, we managed to cross the border without further incident. Then, we made it to Port o Prince and had some problems because we had our luggage and seven of our people on top of the bus rather than inside the bus. The police stopped us twice our our way to the hotel where we would be staying on the outskirts of Port o Prince. Fortunately, we managed to make it to the hotel without a ticket or anything serious.
Once at the hotel, most of us set up out tents in the parking lot and camped for the night. We were supposed to leave on another bus first thing in the morning to come to Cayes. Unfortunately, there were several delays and some glitches in the plan. Our local guy showed up a couple hours late and then took a few people to try to get money and credit for their cell phones. But, apparently there are only like two ATMs in all of Haiti and they are both broken. So, we had no way to get money. In the end (like 10 hours later), we ended up having to have money sent Western Union and picked up by 4pm or we would have been stuck for another day with NO money. So, we finally boarded our bus around 5:30pm (a little later than 8am, but still the same day) and were on our way to Cayes. There is nothing like off-roading on a practically broken down bus. It was quite the experience. Once posted, see Ashley Musick’s video blog for a better depiction of the situation. I will just say that at times, the bus was going so fast that I felt like I was in an action film with special effects where things just zoomed by on either side and at other times we were just getting roughed up in the back of the bus as we blasted through potholes and my insides cannot possibly be in the same place as they were before the ride.
Now we are currently staying at our local contact Louis’ house/mission base. Tomorrow we will leave here with all our stuff to set up camp at the orphanage where we will be working for the next few weeks. We visited a couple of orphanages today and then prayed about which one we felt God calling us to. I am glad that He was calling us to the first one as this is the one that I really wanted to go to. There are about 200 kids there as well as a school and a church all on a pretty good sized piece of property. We will be camping either outside on the top of this hill or in this building that is currently under construction/renovation. The good thing about staying in the building is that it is next door to the technology center which has internet hookups. It is not wireless, but I am guessing we will have some opportunities (or at least I hope) to get online while we are there. 🙂
It did not take long at all to discover that Haiti is totally different from the Dominican. Port o Prince (the captial) is a very DARK place in more ways than one. Honestly, it reminds me of a painting I saw at the Wichita Art Museum years ago. It was a painting depicting hell. It was very dark and chaotic and had just enough light or color in the form of small flames so that you could see what kinds of destructive things were going on. That painting is a picture of the real life situation I was seeing in Port o Prince. In a way, on some level, I felt like the bus was driving through hell. We are not staying in that city, we are in Cayes four hours away. But we are also only a few minutes from the Voodoo capital here in this part of the country. Spiritual warfare here is VERY real. I can tell you from being in this country only a short time that I have felt all kinds of things in my spirit. It is so different from anything I have known before. Pray for our team as we minister here. We will be staying in the orphanage and working with kids that come from homes with too many kids for their parents to support them, or kids who lost their parents in the hurricanes and tornados, and kids who have been sexually abused (estimated to be 60% – 75% of the children as child sex slavery and prostitution is big business here).
Looking into the eyes of these children breaks my heart. They are hurting. I don’t know their stories, but they have had a traumatic past and they need hope and love. This month will be challenging for us, this is for sure. During our prayer time today, I felt God very clearly say that our team needs to do intercessory prayer for one hour a day every day that we are in Haiti to pray for these children, the people here, and to pray against the spiritual warfare that is so predominant.
