My birthday started with a bang.
On the 8th, my team had our first day off. Talk about a blessing. We traveled to a BEAUTIFUL beach in Dominican Republic to spend the day sun bathing, sailing, and swimming. Not too much sun bathing because most of our team is taking doxycycline to prevent malaria. The day was absolutely wonderful.
That night my team decided to surprise me with 2 of my favorite things: cereal and cupcakes. After a lot of rice, cupcakes and cereal are AMAZING! How thoughtful my team is.
The next morning we woke up to get on the bus for Haiti. We were supposed to leave around 9:30am. The bus finally rolled up at 11:30. Time is not of importance in DR or Haiti.
We were finally on our way….
I want to give you a solid mental picture of our travel day. Picture a small greyhound. Pink Curtains. 31 people in 16 seats. With 30+ backpacks smushed in. It was a very interesting experience for me. In the best way possible.
When we finally arrived in Haiti, after a CRAZY experience crossing the border (you can read more about that experience on my teammate Stacey’s blog: staceycompton.theworldrace.org), we stayed the night at Haitian Christian Mission. It was so beautiful. After we had been there for a while and had dinner we found out we could go on the roof. While on the roof all of my squad mates sang an amazing happy birthday for me when I turned 21 at 12am.
The next morning we woke up and realized that not only we were across the street from the ocean, but we were also in a valley of beautiful mountains.
Travel day number 2 started that morning. We took a big yellow school bus to our ministry location, which was about 4 hours away. When we got to our first ministry location in Port Au Prince, Haiti we were greeted my many, many people with smiles on their faces and love in their hearts for us.
There are 5 children who live at Pastor Jean Claud’s house with us. THEY ARE SO ADORABLE. After a couple hours of setting up our things at the house two of the little boys sang happy birthday to me in English. It was such a blessing hearing their sweet voices.
All in all I had an amazing, unexpected, 3-day birthday extravaganza.
