A month from today I was at launch excited as ever. Today I’m sitting in a hotel at our first debrief. We’ve had about five days to rest, recuperate and recenter in the lord before we move onto our mission site in Haiti.
This past month at our mission site “Hope for the DR” exceeded every expectation that I had going into the race. Our hosts were absolutely incredible and the Dominican culture in general is unbelievably hospitable and kind. We were located in Lajas, which was about an hour drive up the mountain. For the most part our ministry consisted of working on our hosts property and doing outreach projects in the community.
For outreach my team got to drive down the mountain and help at one of the children centers our hosts run. Our job was very simple. To love on those kids and play with them as much as possible. That day consisted of lots of broken spanglish (as does any other day) and many many piggy back rides. Other days of outreach were geared toward our immediate community as we did long prayer walks and handed out cornbread with bible verses to everyone we saw. After the hurricane hit everyone in Lajas and all over the DR were very shaken up. So the cornbread was something to offer love, peace and comfort during that time of sadness.
Manual labor happens to be one of my favorite types of ministry. (Shoutout to Robby Wells for ingraining “embrace the suck” deep into my brain). For I do embrace the suck of hard manual labor… in fact, I kinda love it. The Dominguez family had acres of property for us to continually work on. This included chopping down banana trees with machetes (yes I did that), passing cinder blocks in a fireline, cleaning the walls of the backyard waterfall, shoveling gravel into a wheelbarrow, picking weeds, cutting off every dead branch on the fruit trees and dragging them down a ginormous hill and last but definitely not least catching fruit from Jaison who was up in a tree picking and throwing it down to me as he laughed and yelled “trabajo americana!!”. Funny. Very funny Jaison.
Hospitality was another ministry we got to do at hope mountain. We cleaned the dorms where we stayed, bathrooms and pool deck. On hospitality day we also got a chance to do our laundry, which was super fun because we got to wash it by hand in the waterfall! We also helped Elva and Margo, the amazing women that cooked all our meals for us. Serving them in the way that they blessed us everyday was definitely something we all wanted to be apart of. With chopping up heads of lettuce, peeling lemons and limes, washing dishes and serving food, the giving hands never grew short.
The last ministry my team got to do was admin. In my last blog “19 in the DR” I go into detail of what it entailed, so go check that out too!
After the last few days of rest I am SO ready to go spread the love in Haiti. Some ways that you could be spreading that love from the states is by prayer. Recently there has been a lot of us battling in spiritual warfare. From awful nightmares, sickness and more the enemy has been attacking. I’d love for everyone to join us in prayer for our next month, especially because Haiti is an extremely spiritually dark country.
Pray for protection over our squads minds and hearts. Pray for our host homes and the people we will come in contact with. Pray that my team will continually listen to whatever god is putting on our hearts.
I also would like to ask for prayers for funds. I am not fully funded for my entire trip yet. If I don’t raise the total amount for my trip I will not be able to continue on the world race as we venture into other countries. So please please pray that a few thousand will trickle in soon(:
Love you all!! Thank you for all the amazing support and encouraging words!
HAITI! WE’RE COMING FOR YA !!
Kay
