Haiti Day 2- VBS

Bonjour! Our team split into three groups, vacation bible school, working at the orphanage, and an eye glasses clinic. Our family worked with the vacation bible school. Our theme was Jesus Loves Me. Today's story would be about how important children are to Jesus and it is his desire for us to come to him and be blessed by him without fear.  I was super eager to get started!!

I had seen the church online, thanks to You Tube. So, I had already planned where activity would be more or less. It was a concrete open building. No doors or windows. It was painted yellow and white but didn't have any decorations. It was just empty with pews. We brought everything for VBS except music. Boy, was I glad they led the music. We had four translators that led the music and helped to share the gospel. They made it very obvious that they were on fire for Jesus. It blessed us like crazy!! They sang the same songs we knew but in Creole. How exciting to praise the Lord together in different languages! It really is hard to express in words what it was like. Most of these kids knew who God was and were excited to celebrate. They hadn't had VBS in years. Some had never been.  We sing the song, Jesus loves the little children of the world. We got to experience another part of our world first hand and the kids were very aware of it. One boy even commented, "we are black and you are white but he loves us the same." I said, "absolutely!".

We split the children in two groups. One group started with story time and the other with crafts and then we switched. We did not run on a time schedule. That does not exist with Haitians. Olivia, Cindy, Derek, Georgia, and sometimes Josh (he was split between vbs and the orphanage). JD, Grace, and I did story time. JD was our story teller, Georgia illustrated the story on posters. I was thankful that we kept the stories super simple. Telling it with a translator takes longer. Our translators shared with the joy of the Lord, literally. I am challenged to have the same joy when I am praising. These people praise without holding back. What holds me back? Forgive me, but you don't see many Lutherans praising God like that. You would think that we would be jumping up and down praising God for all his blessings of resources and the "stuff" we have. These kids have nothing. At the end of the story we opened it up for questions. When JD asked what they were afraid of, most of them said Satan. One little girl admitted she was afraid of God. Some asked questions that I called Aaron over to answer.

During crafts, the children were asked to draw pictures of what they were afraid of or something they were thankful for. We used a mosquito net as a demonstration of God's protection and desire to bless us. Little did we know, they knew exactly what a mosquito net was for. More on that later. We kept the cards for us and our congregation to pray for them.

When we were done everyone gathered on an open lot behind the church to play games. Duck Duck Goose was fun. But the big hit was balloons. We didn't even play the game we planned. They just wanted a balloon. We couldn't blow them up fast enough. While everyone played with the balloons Olivia and Georgia made lots of friends. The girls were in awe of their white skin and blond hair. They just kept petting them and holding on to them. It was very amusing.While we went back to get the snack, Lophaine and I welcomed a whole new set of kids we were not expecting. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said,"let's do it all again". So we did. :)

Let's get started!

The church

Story time

just getting started

Crafts

I was impressed by how well they listened
and how well they behaved!

Thankful for Jesus

The mosquito net we clipped the prayer
cards to.

Story time

Praise and worship

duck duck goose

The girls were quite star struck by
Olivia

Star struck by Georgia as well

Derek- some just wanted to be held

Once the kids received their snack they were on their way. Some went back to the orphanage and others, well, I don't know. But we all relaxed and tried to take in all that the Lord blessed us with in just a few hours. We didn't expect to be blessed so much!

Haiti Day 1

Greetings! After a couple of weeks I finally feel like I can somehow put into words our expirence in Haiti. As I looked at our pictures I realized there is no way I can sum it up in one post. So, I will break it up into days. Some of our supporters are in town and we have had an opprotunity to share but I know lots of you living out of town would love to see how God worked through your prayers and financial gifts. Thank you so much. This was truely a "church" event. By that I mean a the body of Christ as a whole.

So, we got up bright and early at 4:00 a.m.! We flew in to Dallas and then to Miami. When we arrived in Miami we met up with Helen and John. Helen is the mission and project coordinator. They are part of Mission Haiti. They partner with Faith Lutheran Church in Haiti. They would be our guides through the trip. They gave us helpful instructions on what to do when we arrive.

We arrived at an airport in conditions extremely different than ours. It was like a warehouse. Going through immigration and customs was pretty easy. When the bags came in I noticed a huge difference in the people. Everyone dashed and grabbed the luggage like they were diving for gold. Weird. Once we were ready with all are bags we began to head out. As soon as we stepped outside all I saw was tons of poor people mostly beggars or police. We had to say "no merci" over and over. We had helpers already paid to help us. We had police officers escort us to the guest house (3hrs away).

We met our translators that would be staying with us. Enock and Lophaine. They both are very committed Christians. Enock lost his Dad in the earthquake. Anyway, our driver for the week Noel, loaded us up and we headed out. The guest house was only 93 miles away but it took us 3 1/2 hours to get there. The roads are terrible and there were some bad cities that we literally sped through. We even got pulled over! Thank goodness we had a police officer with us! The traffic was insane. There didn't seem to be any rules but nobody had a problem. Everyone seemed to get around on buses or motorcycles. They have what is called a "tap tap". you tap when you want to get on or off.

The streets were lined with poor housing and people young and old just standing around. Trash was EVERYWHERE! They seldom have trash pick up. So, it is everywhere.  The standing around and doing nothing was just something we saw over and over. I kept thinking, what are they waiting on? They literally had nothing to do. The unemployment rate is 80%! I did notice that the people that did have a legitimate job worked very hard. Others just focus on surviving. There were tent homes and homes made from concrete blocks. Usually only two rooms. Tons of homes with no electricity!! They will use oil lamps at night. Also roaming the streets were goats, chickens, and cows. The cows usually had a rope as a leash. Some goats had these wooden triangles around their necks. It was made big enough to block them from going inside the home. There were NO CATS. I will leave that to your imagination as to why... The average Haitian eats a full meal every other day. The water was very dirty. They will use this water to bathe, cook and drink. Enock told me they boil the water to clean it or some have filters. Some sold things out of there homes, children running around playing. Some had clothes on and some didn't. We even saw two young guys JD's age naked. Women were everywhere with huge bowls of all kinds of things on their heads. After about two hours Derek finally admitted to needing to use the bathroom. Our translator told our driver in Creole that we need to stop to go "wee wee". The whole van got a good laugh at that. Thankfully the toilets were standard toilets but the restrooms were not clean.  Once the sun went down you could smell the campfires everywhere. They were cooking or burning trash.

Killing time in the airport

Customs forms

Helen with our police escorts

Tent housing was everywhere but it was worse after the earthquake

An average street outside the capital

The van was a tight fit

This was a very big day and she was tired!

streets in Port-au-prince

Trash was everywhere

tap tap

our van for the week

A very welcomed meal

We finally reached the guest house around 11:00. It was big, clean, and air-conditioned!!We were very tired and hungry. We had very dedicated kitchen ladies that served us very well. We ate pumpkin soup and had fried plantains. Our water to drink was bottled water the whole time. They used it for our cooking and it is also what we used to brush our teeth. We divided into girl/guy rooms. After a devotion and debriefing we went to bed.