Joel's freakish bus driving.
Prayer walk.
Food Distribution Dance.
joyous haitians.
Kindergarten Promotion.

My camera is officially in a coma. So Heidy was kind enough to offer her photos from her really really nice camera. See her post above! Hooray for Heidy, she's one of my favorites. :)

We went to Kindergarden and 6th grade graduation at the church this morning. It was an entire service.
First of all, who knew other countries did Kindergarten graduation?
Second, I love that they made it into a whole motivational church service.

I'll be honest it was hot.
And it was long only because it was all in Creole and we only caught the words "Bon Jour" and "Jezu" from time to time. But it was great to see the church in action, after seeing it more or less empty all of yesterday. They bring everything in, the music equipment, the microphones, the choir (obviously) and any accessories.
Our team brought them festively wrapped graduation presents, everyone was proud of them-- and then we got out of that hot church!

After lunch we had another round of VBS at our second location, down the very bumpy road in the big yellow schoolbus. We will all need chiropractic care after braving "Hwy 3" everyday in the bus, ha. The location was not as predicted and we, as usual, switched alot of stuff around without the kids being any the wiser about our scramble.
But when they walked out, they had heard the Gospel, four had responded to an "altar call" and everyone had a piece of origami to play with or mangle, depending on the kid. :)

Then we got back to the "compound" and had enough time to load up with more beans and rice to hand out around the "neighborhood." It was good to visit the famous [to us and the locals] ex-witch doctor's house and meet his beautiful family. His kids even walked around with our group to deliver the rest. His son, Wilkinson held mine and Kevin's hand, and Edison held Kacie's hand.
Such good kids, and I loved knowing that their home is a safe place for them to live now, now that their father has turned his life around and become and new man, thanks to God. He came by late last night to speak to us and tell us the extended story of his transformation. Very powerful. Truly anything is possible.

The last house we handed food to, was a current witch doctor. If you want something to pray for (well there's plenty, but...) pray for him and his family because the future looks very bleak for them if he continues down the path he's on.

Today's post will be heavy on my side of things, since Trina and I spent the whole day at the local church painting murals on their walls. I really can't believe they let total strangers that don't even speak their language, just walk in with a bucket of paints and go-to-town on their church walls.


I kept looking over my shoulder waiting for someone to stop me. Especially since people that lived nearby would walk in with the "what is going on in here?!" face, and then look me over with a raised eyebrow.


Well either way, I finished mine by 5pm but Trina's got more to go later this week. I kinda cheated because I made my painting kinda coloring book style, and all I needed was one kid that spoke english and 5 of his friends with paintbrushes to do the work for me!


It was like having an automatic mural machine.


I wish I could show you the final work, but my camera has been in critical condition lately, and it fritzed out. So when I'm not too lazy to track down Trina's camera, I'll post the results.

This is how we traveled to the church. Yes, my family, I shared an ATV with two other women (the driver is taking the photo here) . It was more crazy than riding a horse. It was like Mr. Toad's wild Haiti Ride. I held on with my death grip to the back luggage rack, while donkey and goat poop was flung up onto my skirt and shoes.

Hot.

We have arrived safe and sound in Haiti! Bags and bodies!
From SFO, to Miami International.
From Miami International, to Port Au Prince.
And finally from Port Au Prince to the Momprierre's place near Pignon.
The final planes were unnervingly small. I'm talkin' one propeller, 5 seat'ers. We had a few barfers, but luckily, not on my plane! We landed on a grass airstrip. I admit, I was gripping the fiberglass door upon landing.
The Momprierre's UCI "compound" is such a jewel-- beautiful buildings that are so well suited to their purpose of serving the community and making all of us visitors feel welcome. Tomorrow I will try to post photos, tonight it didn't work for me. As we were listening to our orientation this afternoon, a dramatic thunderstorm rolled over the mountains and poured down onto the tin roofs. And as Kris and Jean Jean were opening the packages we bought for them, some of us scampered outside to drench the afternoon heat. I wanted to see them open the tetherball sets, so I stayed inside.
Today's theme seemed to be "just when you think you can't go on on 2 hours of sleep (which is about the average amoutn of sleep that we got on the flight down), something amazing happens and you wake up." It happened over and over in the last 24 hours.
I have a feeling that this theme may continue throughout our stay here.

Doubtless, we've all been scurrying around preparing for the trip.
I look at everything in my home and at stores through the lens of "can/should I bring that to Haiti?"
I've been fighting the very American attitude of buying and acquiring = preparedness.

In my packing and readying, I needed to pull out a few songs for our team's worship sessions.
It seemed like a passionless, route part of my to do list: copy the songs, and play through all of them once for practice.

But I found myself crying as got to the words of this song...

But the harder I try the more clearly can I feel
The depth of our fall and the weight of it all
And so this might could be the most impossible thing
Your grandness in me making me clean...

...So here I am, all of me
Finally everything
Wholly, wholly, wholly
I am .... wholly Yours

'Guess it wasn't just part of my to-do list.

This is our day by day calendar for our trip of things to pray for us.

Prayer is a really easy thing to overlook.

So we hope that this list will help remind everyone to keep praying for us and the people we connect with.