Day Two: Worship at FBC of Cap-Hatien

Well, today we went to church for two hours. It was interesting, I mean I only was able to catch a couple words out of it. Ryan was really smart and would read the verse in his bible and then try and connect it to what Pastor Voltaire was saying. I probably could have done that as well. After church we came back to the house and ate lunch their cooking was really good. We then sort of split up into two different groups, one group which consisted of Travis, Connor, Denise, Craig and Bob Kitchen from Kansas they all went to the school and stated working on the roof. Rakay, Korlyn, Lynn, Tanya, me (Kira), Janet, Dr. Mike, Morel, and Jenny all went to the beach. Tanya got a lot of great pictures today. I think we spent a couple hours at the beach, when we came back we met up with the other group that went to work at the school. We ate dinner and had a lot of conversations. We are all missing Gary, the water team only has two people. At the beach we saw these two girls and one of them saw a sea urchin and started playing with it then, got Rakay and my attention at took a rock then just chucked it down towards the ground and smashed the poor sea urchin. She tried to do it to a star like thing but, Korlyn  rescued it and just said “no”.  It was fun today, tomorrow the real work for the people who went to the beach starts. One more thing, when we were at the beach at least all of us except Morel got the sea urchin’s spikes in our feet. Dr. Mike had to help me get mine out. Rakay just decided to leave hers in and let them work their way out.

Kira Stutzman

Today, Sunday was a day of worship for all of us. We worshipped with our Haitian brothers and sisters

at First Baptist Church of Cap Haitien. The service was in Haitian Creole but the spirit crosses all languages and cultures. I gave a greeting to the Haitian people and Morel interpreted for me. The church seats about 500-600 people. It was full. The podium sits about 10-12 feet above the congregation. What an opportunity to look out over the people and speak to them.  I told them about the snow we left here and how honored we were to worship with them.  They seemed to appreciate what I said. It is a day of rest so after a wonderful lunch we went to Camp DuCroix. Our trip was two-fold. We wanted to see the progress at the camp. There have been improvements,, some of which we have helped fund. We also went swimming while we were there. The ocean at Camp DuCroix is not really a beach but we swam anyway. There are sea urchins and other critters that were fun to watch.

I am involved with the water project. We started work yesterday. We tested sand for the filters and realized we need to do some work with the sand before we can do any installations. Tomorrow we will hit it hard to get the sand ready. We also did a lot of planning with the Haitian water partners. The language difference can be challenging but we are making progress. There will be installed water filters soon! I am so thankful for this trip. Our group is an awesome group. We are a blessed group.

Lynn Ross