Blog Day 2
Today was our first full day in Haiti. We started our day
with breakfast and fellowship, and Ann read us some verses from Mother Theresa’s
book about Jesus saying “Let the children come to me.” It was supposed to get
us ready for all the children that would approach us, but you can’t really prepare
for something like that. At our first stop in Cité Soleil, there were already
so many people waiting for the water truck when we got there. Mothers, teens,
and naked children were all running around, grabbing buckets and yelling “Hey
you!” to get our attention (I can’t tell you how many times we heard those
words today). We carried water to their houses and held and loved on all the
children we could.
We went to the Healing Haiti farm and sat through even more
thick traffic, so we had a little bit of a mental break before our second stop.
This stop was much more extreme. There was way more people, children especially.
At one point I had one little girl in my arms and about four others hanging on
to my shirt and pulling me in all different directions, all saying “Hey you!
Hey you!” One young boy named Jeff stuck around me the whole time, leading me
around and helping me carry around buckets of water. It broke my heart to see all of these children
wanting love and attention, and not being able to tell them I would hold them
next, because of the language barrier. When we finally left the neighborhood, I
had to hug Jeff and tell him goodbye, and he followed me all the way to the
truck and waved as we drove away.
Tonight we shared our words of the day, and mine was just “wow.”
It was hard to comprehend all the poverty I was seeing and realize everything
we take for granted every single day (i.e. running water, electricity, clean
clothes and even shoes.). These people have to sit and wait for a truck every
week just to get their water, and we sit in pools for hours on end and don’t
even think about it. Clay and Laura’s words were “chaos” and “peace,”
respectively, and those were two very important feelings I experienced all day
long. To see everything going on by the trucks was overwhelming, but I was also
at peace knowing God was there with us, working through us for these people. We
decided our theme song for the week is “This is Amazing Grace” by Phil Wickham
because that’s exactly what we see every minute in this beautiful, but broken
country: God’s amazing grace and unfailing love.
Please keep us in your prayers as we go through the rest of
our week!
With love,
Emily
