Day 3 - Buckets Overflowing

Today was a busy day for our group! After breakfast and our morning devotional we started our day with the first water stop! With our truck, full and ready with water, we were excited to start serving. Those who needed water would form a line in the back of our water truck and would have their buckets ready to go! This water come only a few times a week, sometimes less, and this is such a blessing for the people of Cite Soleil. There are so many children at each stop that want hugs, to be carried and just to have our attention!

After our first stop, we were able to tour and see the progress of Grace Church, and it was even more beautiful than we remembered it! Our co-leader Kathy was able to give us some amazing facts and stories behind the church itself, and we were even able to meet some of the kindergarten students who attend school within the church. They were so happy to see us and eager to come over and say hello.

Our second water stop wasn’t too far away from Grace Church and it is a stop that knows Healing Haiti and its mission well. Everyone was there with open hearts and immediately wanted to get to know us and talk about where we were from, what our names were, and introduce us to those around them. It was so amazing getting to meet these people and serve them as God intended us to.

Our third water truck stop was located next to a pier and was right off the water, which was amazing to see. We were able to witness fisherman, basket weavers and even some neighborhood children swimming! Once we made our way to where we would be delivering water, we could start to see the line of buckets forming waiting for us. We immediately began filling each bucket and loving on the kids that were around us.

Caitlyn

Day 2 - Helpless Yet Useful

Today our group split in ½ and the group I was assigned went to the Home for Sick and Dying Babies.  I prayed days in advance that I wouldn’t be afraid when this day arrived and as we stepped off the tap-tap, my hands shook with fear about what I’d experience behind the walls we entered.  However, as we walked through the door to the room with the sickest children, I was grateful my prayers were answered and I immediately became transformed.  The fear was replaced with overwhelming pride that I was given the opportunity to be with these children that just wanted to be held.  They would happily stay in a wet diaper if it meant you would hold them one minute longer and for a few short hours today, I felt the strangest mixture of being the most helpless and useful at one time.  Helpless there were more than 30 beds of crying babies I couldn’t hold all at once and useful that I didn’t have to do anything but give these babies my time and love.  As I was holding two children because neither would let me put them down, I knew for the first time what it meant to be loved, needed and wanted unconditionally.

Later in the day as we drove to Apparent Project, I was amazed to see along the streets how resilient Haitians are able to make use of everything around them.  Wooden pallets American businesses complain about how to dispose of are transformed into tables, stools, benches and chairs as well as served as railing on a second story building.  Beads were fashioned from colorful empty cereal boxes cut into narrow strips, discarded plastic water pouches were sewn into bags of different sizes and broken glass was ground down into beads of various sizes.  Wheel barrows with broken wheels or no rubber wheel at all were valuable tools of transporting heavy treasures back and forth.  I was humbled by how blessed myself, family and friends are to live where we do and enjoy all the luxuries we take for granted each day.

Tracy