News ending Sunday 8th May

We start with our prayer requests. These are most important to us, not least as you will see below; because our prayers are being answered.

• The local political situation. We still have an unresolved Deputy election, here in Grand Goâve. The first result was overturned, the second result proved to be fraudulent, now we have 2 factions in town fighting over who should be the elected Deputy of the Grand Goâve area. During the dispute we have seen road blocks, stone throwing, electricity power outages and reports of gun shots. The schools in the area are closed for the pupils’ safety. This has now been going on for 4 weeks and there seems to be no resolution in sight. Please pray for local wisdom and recognition of the need to compromise.
• A medical team from Ashville is due to arrive on Saturday 14th May. This will be the first full medical team of the year and our first to include dentistry. Please pray for their preparations and for their mission week as we seek to use their skills and expertise in Grand Goâve.
• Continued strength and peace as we strive to conceive and work for God’s Will for Grand Goâve.

 

Answered Prayers
As you will see below the photos tell their own stories. We have been blessed to witness many answered prayers this last two weeks. God is Good.

Goats
We are in the process of buying and distributing 18 pregnant goats to families in Temple Baptiste Church and its 3 Satellite Churches in the mountain villages in Grand Goâve.  The church council has made up the list of the 18 recipients. The only stipulation to being given a goat is that the goats be allowed to keep reproducing. One goat form each recipient family will then be given back to the church next May to be redistributed to other church families so the goat project will be self sustaining. Our grateful thanks to our home church North Stuart Baptist Church, who’s youth raised enough money for 9 goats and whose mission committee doubled the gift to 18 goats.

Our Kitchen
It is finally completed with fitted cupboards. As Grand Goâve can be quite a dusty town and with having no glass in our windows to keep the dust out; a kitchen which now has cupboards to store food and sundries is a blessing and really appreciated.

HiAce

Our future mission teams will no doubt appreciate our brand new air conditioned HiAce which will be able to take them to and from the airport in some comfort. It has only taken 6 months to arrive!

SHG training
Our Self Help Group leaders came to Grand Goâve to train interested people in becoming facilitators for SHGs. We were able to see the training sessions and be encouraged by the interested reception of the Self Help concept in our area.

Well Repair

We were able to witness 4 of our specially trained well workers, repair a local well. This is a positive step forward Haitians being equipped to perform the work themselves and to charge the local rate, instead of waiting for an NGO (Non government organization) like CBF, to come along eventually and repair it for free.

Comfortable chairs
Mike’s mother warned us that comfortable chairs are not a luxury but an essential to missionary work. How right she was. After months of hard seats, we have finally comfortable chairs to relax in. Mike has made them himself but thanks again to North Stuart Baptist Church for encouraging us to spend some of their mission money to Grand Goâve on ourselves. The chairs are based on the Morris design chairs, found on the internet.

Church rebuild plans
We had a visit from Rod and Gerald, from the Texas Baptists - they were able to discuss the possible design of a new Temple Baptist church. Part of the discussion was a new construction method that uses no steel, at all, bur uses fibreglass i nthe concrete and fills the blocks with cement to make the reenforcement through out the wall.

We are building a test wall - many hands make light work.