Dear Friends and Prayer Part­ners…
Greet­ings again from the Short house­hold. I hope and pray that this update finds you doing well and enjoy­ing this fes­tive time of year. This update is going to focus on the activ­i­ties that I have had the priv­i­lege of work­ing on this past year. The items listed below have taken place since Jan­u­ary 2011 and fell under my respon­si­bil­ity as the Projects and Devel­op­ment Direc­tor with ESMI. Hope­fully this will give you an under­stand­ing of how valu­able your thoughts, prayers, and finan­cial sup­port has been to the peo­ple we work with in Haiti, Laura, and me.

Projects/Construction

Homes for Pas­tors and Wid­ows
Under the in-country guid­ance of Pas­tor Guercy Meme we have com­pleted five homes. Another one is cur­rently under way, which brings the total num­ber of homes that we have been able to pro­vide to those who lost there homes in the earth­quake to twelve. We were also able to fin­ish Arcene Bac’s home, which was a spe­cial project spon­sored by a church in Colum­bia, SC. If you check out some of my ear­lier updates in my blog you will see pic­tures of some of these homes. The excit­ing news with this part of the min­istry is that we already have three churches lined up to build new homes after the first of the year.

Facil­ity Mod­i­fi­ca­tions and Upgrades

This year has been very busy from a project per­spec­tive all across the coun­try. As you might
recall, we are oper­at­ing facil­i­ties in four major Depart­ments in Haiti: Art­i­bonite, Grand-Anse,
Ouest, and Sud. Below are some of the activ­i­ties that we have been con­duct­ing in these areas.
Note that this does not include some of the smaller projects that our short-term teams
worked on such as paint­ing build­ings, build­ing school desks and church pews, build­ing gar­dens
and sports fields, and var­i­ous other crit­i­cal activ­i­ties that helped to improve the lives of our
broth­ers and sis­ters in Haiti.

Art­i­bonite, Fayeton Orphan Vil­lage — The main project here was the recon­struc­tion of the school. We had to remove a sec­ond story that was not built to our stan­dards and then add new class­rooms to dou­ble the size of the school. The school started oper­at­ing in Octo­ber. We also added a cis­tern under the floor of the church. This area is very dry and the need to store water is crit­i­cal. We started work­ing on a project with the city of Gonaives to run a water line out to our facil­ity but the project has been held up by the city offi­cials try­ing to redi­rect our funds to a dif­fer­ent, non-related project. We also had one of our short-term teams install a play­ground struc­ture for the chil­dren (orphans and stu­dents) at this facility.

Art­i­bonite, Mapou Orphan Vil­lage — We were able to part­ner with Water Mis­sions Inter­na­tional to install a
community-based water purifi­ca­tion sys­tem at our facil­ity in Mapou. This unit can pro­vide up to 10,000 gal­lons per day of puri­fied water. We are now able to pro­vide this clean source of life to the orphans, stu­dents, church mem­bers, and sur­round­ing com­mu­nity. We have also been able to enter into a part­ner­ship with one of our spon­sor­ing churches to adopt this site. We are sure that you will hear
many reports next year from this site as it grows and gets enhanced. We are already in the process of nego­ti­at­ing for adjoin­ing prop­erty so that we can build new homes for the orphans here.

Grand-Anse, Jere­mie Uni­ver­sity — This facil­ity has prob­a­bly con­sumed the most of my time through­out the year. At this site we are in the process of build­ing a national level uni­ver­sity. We will begin with the
first depart­ment being a sem­i­nary, but our desire is to add other depart­ments that might include busi­ness man­age­ment, con­struc­tion man­age­ment, lan­guage, and var­i­ous tech­ni­cal pro­grams (machine repair, solar energy sys­tems, etc.). So far this year we have been able to con­struct the Dr. David Nicholas Chapel, the Cafeteria/Fellowship Hall, and var­i­ous infra­struc­ture projects (Water Mis­sions Inter­na­tional water purifi­ca­tion sys­tem, sep­tic tank, and pub­lic restrooms). The next struc­ture to be started before the end of the year is the School of Joy, which will ulti­mately pro­vide pri­mary and sec­ondary edu­ca­tion for up to 1,000 stu­dents from the sur­round­ing area. We also have the designs done for the Admin­is­tra­tion / Class­room build­ing and are work­ing to secure fund­ing for this. Another crit­i­cal com­po­nent of this facil­ity is that we are work­ing with Son­Light Power to imple­ment a solu­tion that will pro­vide solar power for the entire campus.

Grand-Anse, Lundy Orphan Vil­lage — We have had a lot of activ­ity at this facil­ity. The church that has adopted this site has built class­rooms, sup­port build­ings, and many other crit­i­cal sup­port projects. I have not been man­ag­ing these projects but have been excited to see all that is being done for the chil­dren at the orphan vil­lage and the mem­bers of the church there. This part­ner aver­ages one team per month work­ing at this facil­ity. If your church would like to dis­cuss part­ner­ing with one of our facil­i­ties please let me know. A major project that I did over­see was the instal­la­tion of a retain­ing wall. When we first built this facil­ity the deci­sion was made to put the boys dor­mi­to­ries on the hill. This was before we
started imple­ment­ing more rig­or­ous engi­neer­ing stan­dards. It became nec­es­sary to add the retain­ing wall to ensure that the hill­side did not col­lapse below the build­ings. The Domini­can Repub­lic Rotary Inter­na­tional funded this project.

Sud, Big­house Orphan Vil­lage — At this facil­ity we were able to install a secu­rity wall around the facil­ity. This area out­side of the city of Les Cayes has a lot of voodoo activ­ity and hav­ing this secu­rity wall is help­ing the chil­dren feel much safer.

Sud, Cherette Facil­ity — This facil­ity sits on the edge of a river in the Sud Depart­ment. The storms this year have cause this river to flood mul­ti­ple times. We have been able to build a large retain­ing wall, how­ever, the flood­ing has been so bad that the dam­age to the river bank has extended much fur­ther upstream than we were able to address. We are still review­ing our options with this site and are blessed to have a civil engi­neer com­ing down on a short-term trip after the first of the year to con­tinue to assess the prob­lem. He was the designer for the solu­tion that we put in place.

Sud, Les Cayes #1 — This is one of our larger churches in Haiti with a weekly atten­dance around 4,500. We will be work­ing with one of our donors before the end of the year to put in a cis­tern and solar-powered pump to pro­vide water to this church and the sur­round­ing community.

Sud, Savannes — Savannes is an area within the city of Les Cayes that has been deemed as one of the rough­est areas in the city due to drug and gang activ­i­ties. Last year we planted a church there and this year we were able to fin­ish it and start hav­ing ser­vices there. We also have some part­ner churches from the Chicago area that are going there on a reg­u­lar basis to do church related work and med­ical clin­ics and we are see­ing an enor­mous impact on the com­mu­nity. We are now in the process of seek­ing fund­ing to build a school and med­ical clinic on the church prop­erty. Hope­fully I will be report­ing on these next year.

Total Value — Thanks to your con­tri­bu­tions to this min­istry and my per­sonal sup­port to do this work I have been able to man­age approx­i­mately $800,000 worth of projects this year. Many of these projects have been com­pleted and some are in the final stages of design and fund rais­ing. Thank you again for mak­ing it pos­si­ble for me to be able to do this work.

Micro-Businesses

One area of the min­istry that I am also get­ting involved in is the estab­lish­ment of micro-businesses. We work with donors here the United States and Canada that desire to help the churches that we plant become self-sustaining. Some of the micro-businesses that I am inves­ti­gat­ing and will soon be putting together busi­ness plans for are ice fac­to­ries, tilapia farms, poul­try farms, and cyber cafes. This is a whole new area of exper­tise for me so please be pray­ing for me as I develop the skills needed to do this effec­tively. I will also be work­ing next year to build rela­tion­ships with donors out­side of our nor­mal church cir­cle to donate funds to these activities.

Travel for 2011

One ques­tion that I often get asked is when will be my next trip to Haiti. In 2010 I trav­eled to Haiti ten times for a total of eleven weeks. Most of this travel was related to the earth­quake and get­ting up to speed on ESMI and the work that we are doing in Haiti. This year has been dif­fer­ent. I have been able to travel to Haiti for a total of four weeks so far. How­ever, I have also trav­eled to Florida, Geor­gia, Vir­ginia, South Car­olina, North Car­olina, Chicago, Indi­anapo­lis, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nevada, and Cal­i­for­nia to par­tic­i­pate in var­i­ous meet­ings with donors, orga­ni­za­tions, and con­fer­ences to help build the ESMI base
of part­ners. It is a bless­ing to have such a depend­able team in Haiti to work with so that I can man­age the projects remotely and lever­age my abil­ity to work with donors and sup­port­ing orga­ni­za­tions here in the United States. As my per­sonal fund­ing gets more sta­bi­lized I will be trav­el­ling to Haiti at least once per quarter.

Per­sonal Fundrais­ing Status

As I have shared in past updates, our abil­ity to do this work is based on the gen­er­ous sup­port of friends and fam­ily like you. Many peo­ple that we run into still believe that this is some­thing that we do in our retire­ment years. Unfor­tu­nately that is not the sit­u­a­tion. This has become my new career and it is such a bless­ing to be able to use all that I have learned work­ing for big busi­ness to make a dif­fer­ence in the lives of those in des­per­ate need. My salary now comes from dona­tions from peo­ple like you. As you can see from the news above there is a lot of work being done with your invest­ment with so much more to do.

We have been blessed with enough dona­tions this year to keep us fully focused on doing this work. Below is the last report that I sub­mit­ted to the ESMI Board of Direc­tors so that they were aware of how we are doing on our sup­port. Jan­u­ary begins a new year and we will be start­ing from scratch again. If you would like to pro­vide either a one time dona­tion or a recur­ring (monthly) dona­tion to keep us doing this work you can do that on our web­site at Donate for David Short. It is also impor­tant for you to know that 100% of these dona­tions go to what you are des­ig­nat­ing them for. ESMI oper­ates with no admin­is­tra­tive overhead.

Once again we want to thank you for your ongo­ing sup­port in the form of thoughts, prayers and finan­cial dona­tions. This com­ing Feb­ru­ary will be the two year anniver­sary of doing this work in Haiti and it has only been able to be accom­plished by your sup­port. We will be pray­ing for you and your fam­i­lies through­out the Christ­mas sea­son.
Thanks…

David B. Short, PMP, SCPM
Projects and Devel­op­ment Director