On the ground in Haiti- Day 4 1/22/10

23 Jan

One knows it is coming, one knows that long days will eventually catch up with the mind and body, and that the destruction will all begin to look the same. Today was that day. And today God continued to sustain us. The morning began with two significant tremors that had folks zipping out the door. Smaller aftershocks continued throughout the day. We have set this evening to be a strategic rest night, meaning we’ll go to bed before midnight, unlike previous evenings.

We returned to Gressier to do an assessment of needs and potential partners. While there, we looked at a house that may be a location for teams and our team hosts who will provide continuity for the ministry. There we found many crushed homes, the survivors living outside in whatever they could scrounge. Clean water has become a real issue. The few community wells are not being used by the people because of the proximity to places where the dead still lie underneath the rubble. But we also found a group providing clinic care. They located at the town clinic building which is in good shape, but noone will go inside due to the frequent aftershocks.

To this point we hadn’t found that strategic place, work and partner that we felt God would provide. But He wasn’t done with us today. We found ourselves at a place named Christianville where all but one of the buildings are seriously damaged. This group has been feeding 2,500 people each day and were running out of food. They have wonderful ministries established and seem to be folks who want to partner in ministry. We were able to take them to our Army friends and get two pallets of MREs and water for them to use to feed people in the community. God opened the floodgates and used the relationships he provided us over the past two days to be able to ensure that 2,500 are now being fed. On the same trip we were also able to obtain 330 gallons of diesel fuel (a commodity that is in extremely short supply) here in Haiti. Each day there is new evidence that God is directing our steps. Mark and I are thrilled that now we can move ahead with a strategic approach to using holistic ministries to multiply healthy churches here in Haiti.

This won’t be a long update, not because the day wasn’t full, nor because the tragedy is lessening. The clinic in PaP is still seeing hundreds of people, the hospital in Milot near Cap Haitian is still overflowing, and the need for workers still grows.

Continue to pray for the people of Haiti, the opportunity for the Christian community to show the love of Christ, and for ongoing connections that will make the efforts even more effective.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: