Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Language Barrier

I'm sorry I've been kinda slow to post. Our plane flew in late last-Friday and we drove home on Saturday. I've been home since about noon Saturday. So much has happened that I don't know where to begin. I'm going to break everything into a series of shorter posts about a specific thing. My goal is about two per day.

I thought I'd focus on Creole for this first post. The language barrier was much more difficult than I could have imagined. I didn't realize how much we communicate through words. Aleia, a girl from our partner team from Iowa, and I tried to teach a group of kids tag through motions. It didn't work. The kids just gave us the These Americans are crazy look.

Creole is a deviation of French. Instead of bonjor, they say bonjou, which means good morning. Many of the words are very similar, but it definitely isn't the same language. Many people do speak both Creole and French because French is taught in school.

I don't know what we would have done without our translators. I don't think any of our our ministry would have been effective without them.

Monday, June 1, 2015

Our Week in Haiti

Since we are leaving in less than a week, I thought I'd inform you on what we will be doing. In the mornings on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we will be doing mercy ministry in the school for deaf and disabled children. I'm not completely sure what all that entails, but I think we will just be spending one on one time with the girls. There are 12 girls who live in the school.

Then we will be planting trees. We have two trees to plant per day.



After all that, we will be running a three day VBS (Vacation Bible School) at the church. We don't have a theme, but we will be doing different crafts, skits, lessons, and games with the kids. I am organizing the crafts, while Jerry is organizing the lessons and skits, and Cade is organizing the games. We are expecting between 20 and 100 kids, It should be a lot of fun.

On Thursday, we are going to a small town outside of Port-Au-Prince where we will spend half the day at the beach and the other half with an orphanage and then we will fly out the following morning.

But as Rudy, our trip manager put it, Haiti is the land of flexibility so any if this could change.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Sorry, I haven't had much time to post in the last week or so. I know you've been looking for a new post.

The Haitians are pretty rough on their disabled children. Disabled children are know as cocobai's, which roughly translates to worthless, or disgrace. Disabilities are also seen as contagious, so the parent of a disabled child will try to hide him/her as much as possible. Sometimes the family will just simply abandon the child on a doorstep. Other times, the father of the child will go and find another wife to prove that it wasn't his fault that the child was born with a disability. As a result, many disabled children are raised by single mothers.

If you're happen to be interested in Haiti culture, this is a fabulous monogram about it. http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/culture/monographs/haiti.php

Friday, May 1, 2015

The Sad Truth

Truth to be told, slaves in Haiti were never really diminished. The Haitians have spent over two hundred years trying to rid themselves of the concept of a human owning another human, but more than 300,000 child slaves called restaveks still exist there.

Many parents of children in Haiti are in extreme poverty, therefore not enabling their children from having education and other opportunities. Because of this, many parents decide to sent their children to wealthier families in hope that they will be better cared for. They rarely are. Many times these children are kept in their owners backyard and are given only the worst scrapes, if there are any. Many owners abuse these children physically, emotionally, and sexually. These children don't even have a birth certificate. About two thirds of these children are female. After these children are with their owners, they lose all contact with their birth family. But the worst part is that many cases the owners also send their children to even a wealthier families to become restaveks. It doesn't even occur to many of the children that the way they are being treated is wrong.



Monday, April 20, 2015

Different Experiences on the Mission Field

This Sunday, at our Haiti team meeting, we had a presentation from Roy and Dina Brent, who worked in Kenya for about thirty-eight years. Dina mostly talked about her Sunday School for young children. She described how there are many similarities to the children in America, more than you would probably guess. Children have an attention span of about their age. Children love to do activities. The children in Kenya loved to sing, while that is not generally the case in America. But because one of the major influences in people's lives is their experiences, the children of Haiti may not have some of the skills we expect them to have such as coloring. One thing Dina found interesting was the children of Kenya had never seen puzzles. They were something that they were never exposed to in their life. One thing Dina could almost assure of was that the children would have ball skills. You can make a ball out of rags and many children do. There are going to be some cross-culture issues that we are going to have to deal with. Language will be a big problem.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Earthquake to Cholera

Directly after the earthquake in 2010 (well ten months after the outbreak in Haiti), there was a very large and disastrous outbreak in Haiti. It was caused by Nepalese peacekeepers who controlled the water supply. The water supply was contaminated because a human waste disposal site was improperly managed. This outbreak took a huge tole on Haiti. It affected one in every twenty Haitians and killing 9,000 people. The number have began to significantly decrease after 2014.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Les Cayes

Hi everyone. This is the blog for our short term mission trip (STM) next summer. We are very excited to go and serve the Lord in a much different area of the world.

We will most likely be working with disabled children in Les Cayes. Les Cayes is a beautiful sea port city. It is Haiti's fourth largest city and annually exports sugarcane, coffee, bananas. etc. It is home to large waterfalls and other signs of the beautiful Caribbean. 

We are partnering with the Christian Education Center for Deaf and Handicapped Children. We hope to touch to lives of the Haitian children!