Today in Haiti

I’ve been busy writing this longer theological piece on Haiti and I’m missing the chance to simply write about our day to day, so I’ll get to it. I’ll work backwards. Today was rough, certainly the roughest we’ve had in Haiti. We both woke up with upset stomachs. That’s a first for us. Usually we always go to the same place for lunch, but it was closed so we tried something different. We all said the hamburgers tasted a little funny, some kind of seasoning. Apparently, the special seasoning was bacteria. I had diarrhea, but got it stopped. Anna felt nauseated but powered on. Eventually she puked and rallied to see more patients. Hertz felt pretty terrible all day, too. We weren’t sure Anna would make it through the second half, but after some Gatorade and a lunch of white rice, she got back in the saddle. She’s so tough!

She’s helping a ton of people. Dr. Benoit is cleaning teeth and she’s mostly pulling them, 23 yesterday. Dr. Benoit is the local dentist. Normally he sees 50 people in a year he said. He will see 50 people this week. He seems very happy. The clinic is in our office in the Bon Aire community of Cap Haitien. 

I am teaching a class in the morning for pastors. They requested that I teach. We are discussing Acts 20:28-32, “What does it mean to be a Pastor?” Today we talked about taking care of ourselves. They seemed very excited about that, and my translator Sainty agreed. We broke into pairs and prayed together. Afterwards, they talked about trying to meet together on a regular basis to support each other. It was pretty cool. We also talked about the Shepherd image from the passage. We agreed that we must love our people, and that can be hard sometimes. Tomorrow I’m going to try to answer some of their questions, which may be pretty hard. Please pray for us. 

It’s going well. We are building steps to help the community access the mountain, plus the clinic and the seminar. Not bad for 4 people! Of course it’s not just 4, but our whole Haitian team that works very hard to see all the work done. It’s great to work with friends.