Saturday, January 15, 2011

Adventures of a missionary on a mission trip part 2


This is my second attempt sending this post, i am way behind now, like 2 days behind, and I leave tomorrow, and today was another day filled with emotions, extreme poverty but also grace and a pastor here showed us his church, compound where many tent people lived, then took us to his home for an amazing lunch, but lets get back to Thursday:
We got up early and headed out about an hour outside PAP to a large displacement camp where they are basically building a very nice new neighborhood. First of all the traffic here is HORRIBLE! It seems there is only one road out of PAP and everyone from PAP is going somewhere. Crazy! We finally got to the camp and another U.S. group was there putting together a playground set for the kids in the new neighborhood. We were hoping to get some cool work like bolting the set together and everything but, ended up digging big ol deep holes for the basketball hoops. It was hot and muggy, but we dug the freaking holes! And I mixed cement by hand with the locals. It was a good day. We then took a tour of the new houses being built for the displaced people and met some people who lost several family members in the earthquake. Sad but encouraging. Some where saying the earthquake was a blessing in a way because now they have nicer homes. The ride home took forever, I missed my grandchildren growing up during the ride back, but we finally made it. We were all covered head to toe in dirt and cement from working all day, but it felt good. Especially to jump into the pool.

Mixing cement the old fashion way with the locals

The gang digging holes, and we did good!
There are probably thousands of these displacement camps all over Haiti, I don't know how they survive. The minimum wage here is 325 Dollars a year! which is about 89 cents a day.
Tomorrow I meet Yves Prophete and go visit his orphanage which has about a dozen deaf children, stay tuned.
Thank you for praying. There are more pictures of my trip on my Facebook page, (or there will be soon).

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