The day-in-the-life-of-a-Racer thing won’t be normal for this month. We spent our first week or so deep in Port Au Prince, then we moved to the Global Outreach compound for the last three weeks; which was not a normal “World Racer in Haiti” experience.
For the first few days of the month, Team Z’man and Team Eruption were both staying with Pastor Forge in a home in the middle of Port Au Prince. We attended a Haitian church service. They are so excited and passionate about praising God! We experienced some authentic Haitian food, which was interesting. But the thing that will probably stand out most in my mind about our time there…
It was hot.
As in, fall asleep and wake up in a pool of your own sweat, not much relief from the heat unless a breeze is blowing at that very moment, kind of hot. The only time that I thoroughly enjoyed the creation around me was one night with a clear sky when we all slept on the roof. There was a constant breeze blowing all night and we fell asleep under the stars. It was glorious.
So staying at Pastor Forge’s didn’t work out. We couldn’t stay there without severely breaking our budget. We needed a new contact. Team Eruption had a place to go, so they left. AIM tried to find one for us, but to no avail, so they put in our team leader Joshua’s hands. After lots of prayer and searching, Joshua remembered that there was a place that his grandfather had stayed and worked years back. He got in touch with Judy Heady, and that’s how we got to the Global Outreach compound.
My weekdays would start at around 6:55, when I’d wake up (unless it was my day to help make breakfast, in which case I’d have to wake up sooner). We’d have breakfast as a team at 7:00. Then I’d work until 12:00, take an hour for lunch as a team, and then work from 1:00 until 4:00. We’d have dinner at around 5:00, then we’d have free time until bed.
Most of my time was spent working with Kevin and Susan Brun and their kids, a full-time missionary family that lives on the compound.
For the first part of my month, the guys to work with Kevin, who is the foreman of the construction projects on the compound, to do some good old-fashioned manual labor. My first day of hard labor was good, but I felt really off all day: lots of fatigue and my throat was sore. I thought it was dehydration, so I chugged water like nobody’s business, then lied down after lunch and unintentionally took a three-hour nap. The next day I was laying on the floor of my room after lunch and could barely move, I missed the afternoon’s work again. The third morning we were getting ready to start the day’s work, and I’m chugging my water when I notice a black residue on my water bottle. I ask myself, “What’s this black stuff?” Joshua looks over and says, “That’s mold. You’ve been drinking mold!”
In case you didn’t know I’m very allergic to mold. I took some Benadryl and sorted medication for the rest of that morning, then crashed in the afternoon. It took a couple days to get it all out of my system for good.
After the mold incident passed, I got into a good routine. The work was hard, but I enjoyed it. About a week into that routine, I had another incident: I was moving sheets of tin roofing material when they shifted and sliced my wrist open. I’ve never seen so much blood in real life before. I was out of manual labor for a week, which led into the next part of my ministry.
I started helping Kevin and Susan’s kids with their home school lessons. It was a blessing for me to be able to do what I love and what I’m good at, and it was a blessing for Susan as well. With me teaching, it freed up a lot of her time to work on other things.
From that point, my normal day was home school with the kids from 8:00 until 12:00, then an hour for lunch with the team, and then I’d work on lesson stuff and/or sort medication until around 4:00.
God blessed us with tons of the creature comforts that we are used to in America, but the working experience was definitively Haitian. Overall, it was a strange mix of the familiar and the new, the comfortable and the challenging, and because we were generally comfortable physically, God was making me extra uncomfortable spiritually. There’ll be more on that when I get to Part 3.
To close up, here’s a video that shows some of the work I was doing with the guys in the early part of the month, plus a guest appearance by Franklin Graham (to be candid, before this month I knew nothing about him except that he was Billy Graham’s son):
