Haiti

Here it is people, the post you've all been waiting for =P. I spent 9 days in Haiti last week and let me say before I get into this post too far, I would STRONGLY encourage everyone I know to go on a missions trip to a country like Haiti, if the opportunity ever arose. That is not to say that other missions trips are any less important, not at all! But there is something about going to a foreign country (especially one as poor as Haiti) and seeing how the rest of the world lives that just changes your perspective on your own life completely. I know for me personally, seeing the extreme poverty that is everywhere in Haiti is something that I will remember for the rest of my life. Haiti is not without hope though, quite to the contrary the people that we had the privilege to work with and serve with were some of the most hope-filled and joy-filled people I have EVER met. That in itself is a testimony to God's spirit at work in Haiti. That is another thing that God was challenging me with throughout the trip. See, when I thought of Haiti I thought that for some reason God's presence was not there as much as it was in the U.S. or in other places of the world. I saw Haiti as "God-forsaken", and God made quick work of showing me how wrong I was. The people and the children at the Boys and Girls home that we were working at had such a passion for worshiping and praising God. The one Sunday that we were there three of the men from our team (Jesse Philips, Derek Walley, and my dad) had the opportunity to preach at 3 different churches. We split up the rest of the team in three and sent some team members with each speaker. I ended up going to the boys and girls home for their Sunday service and Derek Walley was the speaker there. Before Derek gave his sermon though they had a time of worship by singing praise to our God. That time of praise and worship is something I will never forget. They sang half the songs in French and half of them in English, so there was a time when we (as stupid little Americans) had no idea what they were singing, but they just sang and sang and sang. They didn't know all the verses to all the songs in English so they just repeated one verse and the chorus over and over, it seemed like they could go on singing non-stop for the whole day.The joy and the thankfulness that they had in the way they sang was just unbelievable and it really challenged me to be more passionate in my own worship.


As far as the work that was done, here it goes. We mixed and poured 45 TONS of concrete over the course of 4 days. All by His grace let me tell you, God was so gracious to us in keeping us all free from injury and giving us excellent weather to work in. We also had one heck of a construction team working on this wall. We had 14 guys "officially" on the construction team, but the childrens ministry team ( made up of all girls) were made honorary members of the construction team after the first day. The childrens ministry team spent the first half of the day at the babies home and then the second half of the day came to help the construction team. They didn't do any mixing (except one batch =DDDDD) but they performed and invaluable task of filling buckets with rock and dirt so that we could keep mixing as fast as we possibly could. So you can fully appreciate how this all worked let me tell you how the mixing and pouring process went. First, there was 3 teams on our construction team: bucket fillers, mixers (WOLF PACK), and the pouring crew. This is how it went. The bucket fillers filled 12 buckets with rock and dirt then sent them to the mixers. The mixers poured out the buckets into a pile, then dumped a bag of concrete onto it. Then, they added water and mixed the pile with shovels till it was ready to be put into buckets and then lifted up to the pouring crew that was standing on the scaffolding. The pouring crew grabbed the buckets from the mixers and dumped the freshly mixed concrete into the wall. So yeah, that's what the construction team did in Haiti. I can't tell you anything about the medical crew, other than the fact that they also worked their butts off down there. They saw over 800 people over the course of 4 days. God was so good and so gracious to all of us through the whole trip. He is worthy of all praise and all glory. Thanks for reading.