Ending Saturady 12th February

Prayer Requests

• Our Short Term Mission team have a blessed time here, this week.
• Our preparations for the Weekend visit and its activities continue smoothly and we are able to celebrate what the Lord has done for Haiti, through us and our partners.
• Our Satellite dish comes back quickly - it is being fixed in California.

Where does our time go?
It was good to have a real break in the Dominican Republic. We stayed at a resort where we could really relax, read our books, stroll around, eat at the buffet style restaurant and watch TV on the English channels. It was a break that we both desperately needed. The weather was perfect our only ‘complaint’ was that the swimming pools we unheated so a little cool for relaxing, so a quick daily dip was all we needed.

We came back to Grand Goâve ready to prepare for a busy schedule of volunteer teams and VIP guests, in February. We had some major problems to overcome. The first that our inverter at Siloe had ‘died’ and there was a need for 24 hours of electricity for the site. We needed a trip to Port au Prince to buy a replacement. We managed to fit this in with a meeting with Pastor Ronel at his church to tie up some loose ends for the VIP visit. We certainly learn patience here, although we arrived at the hardware store early and they had inverters in stock, the model we needed was at the warehouse so we would need to return at midday. That fitted in with some shopping we wanted to do and our meeting with Pastor Ronel, or did it? Although Pastor Ronel works in PAP he is a busy man and we took a while to arrange to all be in the same place at the same time. Our inverter also took somewhat longer than expected to arrive from the warehouse. Never mind we were able to sit in the car park and relax a while and as Mike had his laptop we could pick up and respond to emails. We ended up returning home by 3:30pm with no traffic jams to detain us and we judged it a successful day.

Our second major problem was and is internet access. Our satellite dish has a major problem so this week we finally took it to Port au Prince airport to begin its journey back to its makers in California to be checked and repaired. It went with MFI (Missionary Flights International) to Fort Pierce, Florida and will then go across to California. Whilst it is away, we were hoping to at least be able to pick up emails using a little ‘dongle’. Unfortunately the company who was going to supply us with one has run out of stock, so emails will take much longer to be picked up and responded to. Luckily we have a nearby internet café, which is cheap to use. It is small, hot and at times very noisy as the local youth like to ‘hang out’ there and play their music whilst they surf the net. As each computer can play its own music at the loudest volume (the only volume Haitians use) it can be difficult to work there.

Our small group of VIPS visiting us and celebrating the good things that have come about since the devastating earthquake last year, ballooned into a group of 20 people requiring accommodation in Grand Goâve. We are looking forward to a celebratory service at our church, an inauguration of our school and a blessing ceremony on the new rubble houses. We are hoping for fellowship and engagement between our local Haitians and the visiting Americans. Although we seen as wealthy and gift givers we hope to foster a realization of family (brothers and sisters in Christ) helping each other, rather than just a “cash cow”.

We can’t say enough good things about teams that come here – this year we have been left with a number of good books, DVDs and US chocolates. Sometimes it is the small things, in life, that the Lord blesses us with. Without the teams bringing in our requests we would be less blessed, thank you to the teams that brought us the latest two batches of items.

When Jenny came for a visit in August/September, last year she asked if it was possible to have a few ceiling fans in the staff house. The first one took till December! And this week she has finally been rewarded with a fan in her bedroom! She has been very patience about it and I am glad that I finally got the ducks in a row and completed the job.


Today Moise and I installed the new inverter - it really was a very smooth operation. We were replacing the old one with an identical new one so, basically, undo everything, remove, add new one, do everything up.