After spending Monday night camping out in the Atlanta airport, we arrived safely in Port Au Prince, Haiti on Tuesday afternoon!!!
My team, as well as 3 other teams from my squad, are working at Mission of Hope this month. (Check out their website here: http://www.mohhaiti.org) The mission statement of Mission of Hope states that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they exist and seek to bring life transformation to every man, woman, and child in Haiti. They do this by running 4 schools, multiple churches, an orphanage, a health clinic, and a prosthetics lab, by providing food to Haitians (90,000 meals a day!), by building and providing homes, and by building relationships with and ministering to people in the nearby villages. Mission of Hope is a strategic and Gospel-centered organization that is truly making a difference. They focus heavily on indigenous mobilization, meaning their programs are primarily run by Haitians that are employed by MOH. Though started by Americans, there are Haitian teachers, doctors, orphan mommies, village champions (liaisons between MOH and each village), translators, builders, water purifiers etc. They even have all of their village mapped out and they know who is employed, who is sick, who is a christian or not, etc. so they can intentionally help these people.
Here’s our living situation: We are sleeping in bunk beds this month and we have mosquito nets! We have two rooms of about 11 girls each and then a room for the guys. We have showers and I don’t even realize they are cold because of how hot it is here. (We’re talking sweat running down my leg when I’m sitting still eating dinner). We have clean water provided for us to drink, which is a huge blessing, but we can’t drink the water that comes out of the the sinks. Three meals a day are even hand-prepared for us and for all the other volunteers. We’re seriously being spoiled this first month!
A little recap of our daily life so far: Breakfast is served at 7am every morning and I’ve been waking up around 6am to go to the roof of our building to spend time in the Word. Then at around 8am we are off to work until about 3 pm. On Wednesday, our first day of ministry, my team was assigned to go to the Village of Leveque to talk with people there and pray for them. Leveque is a refugee village, mainly of people. After only talking to one lady in Leveque, we got the call that we were needed at another site to prepare a conference center for a conference that afternoon. Dressed in our skirts that were appropriate for village ministry, we shoveled, carried cinder blocks, and passed buckets of cement down assembly lines. On Thursday, we went back to the same site to continue construction, this time spending the day passing hundreds of heavy clay tiles down a long line of us across the whole site. Today, Friday, we spent the day in Transformation Village. In the morning, we split up into our teams of 6-7 to visit homes in the village, get to know the Haitians, and pray for them. Through a translator, we asked questions about family, what they like to do, if they go to a church, what they think about Jesus etc. In the afternoon we played with the kids in the village, picking them up, spinning them around endlessly, singing songs, jumping rope, and playing games with them! My arms are sore, but my heart is full.
One of my favorite parts so far has been hanging out with the orphan children that live on our site, playing basketball, soccer, and football with them on the basketball court. I’ve spent a lot of my free time before dinner playing with these kids and getting to know them. They are the sassiest, cutest kids ever! They pretend they know less english than they really do, I stumble through the few phrases of Creole that I’ve learned, they destroy me at basketball, and friendship is born.
All in all, I’m loving Haiti!! There are so many different ways we can be involved in their ministry here and I’m so excited for what else is to come this month!
Much love to everyone back home. 🙂
