Haiti Trip 2013: Saturday

I'm continuing to recap last year's Embrace Church trip to serve with Mission Haiti. After I've finished with the 2013 trip, I'll get back to posting from the 2014 trip. This one is also much shorter than the previous post as it was the first of the journal entries that I finished in Haiti this year. ;-)

Saturday, February 23, 2013

The first event of the day was the 5K we were hosting. The course had already been mapped out and the hope was to get going before it got hot. My job was to stick with Pam in case she was needed for anything. This proved much harder than it sounds as there were multiple times that I turned my back for a second only to find Pam 50 yards away walking quickly in the other direction.

Taylor nearly ran down Elisee 

The race course had been measured out and an ATV was to go out to serve as the turn around for the runners. We had several members of our team running and most of the rest of us were either taking pictures or cheering runners on. Seth was doing balloon animals for the kids which was fun to watch as kids would just light up when he gave them the balloons.

The race started and they were off like a shot. We began to relax a bit and wondered how long it would be before they would be back. It turned out to not be very long as the first runner came back around the corner after about two minutes. We obviously knew that they hadn't done a full 5K, but we scrambled to be ready for them at the finish line anyway. It turned out that the ATV hadn't gone out as far as planned, but since everybody played by the rules and ran the same distance, we decided it was as official as the results were going to get.

Julie & Rachael were good running partners

After the race, we had a little downtime before heading to Antoine's house for a prayer visit. Antoine runs the coffee shop where we would host a movie night later that day and also has a daughter (Melanita) who had suddenly become unresponsive several months earlier. She had been taken to the doctor a few times, but they were unable to find anything medically wrong with her. They were either dealing with a condition unfamiliar to the local doctors or there was a spiritual element to it. Pam wondered if it was a matter of a voodoo curse that had been placed on Antoine's family. That may seem strange to our enlightened, educated, American minds, but there is a reality to spiritual battle that we have become numb to that is very present and much more out in the open in Haiti and it is more than simple superstition.

Jeff had been teaching on voodoo and spiritual warfare and took us through a time of prayer for Melanita. We left fairly certain that we were dealing with a curse of some kind and were unsure of how or when God would answer our prayers for this sweet little girl.

From Antoine's house, we walked back toward the mission, passed the turnoff, and went to a piece of property that Pam had acquired to build a new school for Ti Rivier. Jeff again gave us some instruction and we began to walk the grounds, praying for the work that God would do there.

Me and Totes, my goat

When we arrived back at the compound, we found that the prizes for the 5K had arrived in the form of 8 or 9 goats and a handful (almost literally) of chickens. The goats were tied around the yard eating any vegetation in their reach and the chickens were tied and hanging by their feet. The plan was to bring them all to the coffee house (about a two mile walk) and give them out before the movie started.

We had a little downtime before we headed out, but before we left, we all staked our claim to livestock and made sure to get plenty of photos with our new friends. When it was time to go, we started the herding process and paraded our goats down the road. I can only imagine what was going through the minds of the Haitians as all of the crazy white people took their goats for a walk.

Brent & the boys

Adam & Gretchen in the Coffee House

We got to the cafe and found places to tie up the goats while we made final preparations for the movie and hung out with the kids. The movie would be projected onto a bed sheet and we would all sit either on plastic lawn chairs in a few rows in front or on the poured concrete seats of the amphitheater overlooking the hillside that led down to the water. Before the movie started, the prizes were distributed to the race winners and the seats filled for a showing of Courageous dubbed in Creole. The place was packed and it was fun seeing the Haitians laugh at the Americans in the movie, especially during any of the police chase scenes.

Once the movie was over, we helped clean things up and Adam finally had a chance to give away the glow sticks he'd brought with. We then headed back to the mission house in the dark to grab another night's sleep to the sweet serenade of the rooster chorus.