Haiti Trip, February 16–25, 2012 — Day 1

Map of Les Cayes area

Dear Friends and Family…

Well, I am on my way back to Haiti. I will actu­ally be arriv­ing tomor­row around 3:40 PM in Port-au-Prince. On this trip I will be spend most of my time in the Les Cayes area (see map). I will be vis­it­ing our sites at Bigarouse, Cam­bry, Cayes, Cherette, Dari­vager, and Savannes (Bon Berger). While at these sites I will be updat­ing my assess­ment infor­ma­tion from Sep­tem­ber 2010.

Dur­ing the first half of the trip I will be meet­ing up with a team from First United Methodist Church and Cen­te­nary Col­lege, both in Shreve­port, LA. Louis St. Ger­main (ESMI Haiti Field Direc­tor) and I will be show­ing this team some of our facil­i­ties for host­ing teams and some of our sites with churches and orphan­ages. This group has planned addi­tional teams later this year and this trip will pro­vide the detail infor­ma­tion needed to put those trips together. One of these future trips will include a one to two month Eng­lish and French teach­ing pro­gram for orphans at some of our sites. It is always great to finally meet peo­ple that you have been talk­ing to on the phone and exchang­ing emails with face-to-face.

Dur­ing the sec­ond half of the trip I will be meet­ing up with a team that is com­prised of mem­bers from the Chicago and Las Vegas areas. They will be pri­mar­ily focus­ing on med­ical clin­ics and orphan care. The engi­neer that designed the river­bank repair at Cherette (check out details on this blog and pic­tures on my Flickr account) will be with this team. We will be work­ing together to sur­vey the riverbed and see if we can come up with a solu­tion to reroute the flow of the river away from the Cherette orphan vil­lage. Surveying…another long-lost activ­ity from my past that is being resurrected.

As with my other trips I will try to send out a daily email with some pic­tures from the day and brief descrip­tions of the activ­i­ties. If you do not receive any of these then it will most likely be because I do not have an Inter­net access.

Spe­cial Requests at this time:

• Please pray for safe travel for the team mem­bers com­ing down and for our loved ones that we are leav­ing behind.
• Please pray for my mother. She went into the hos­pi­tal ear­lier this week for the third time in the past nine months with an issue with her pan­creas. The doc­tors are doing some test­ing and non-invasive tests to try to deter­mine the source of the prob­lem and a strat­egy going forward.
• Also pray for my father…he misses his bride very much, plus he is sched­uled to have a defib­ril­la­tor installed in a cou­ple of weeks.
• Please pray for Ben and Susie, friends that are serv­ing with Ath­letes in Action. They have three chil­dren and a fourth one on the way. They recently found out that Susie has a can­cer­ous brain tumor. They are work­ing with their doc­tors to deter­mine a strat­egy to deal with this and also pro­tect their unborn child. You can fol­low their progress on their min­istry web­site.