Haiti Trip, February 16–25, 2012, Days 2 and 3

Bonswa…Kòman ou ye? (Good afternoon/evening…how are you?)

I made it into Port-au-Prince yes­ter­day with­out a hitch, but after that things got fairly inter­est­ing. The team from Shreve­port, LA got in about 30 min­utes after I did. We loaded up the van and started head­ing to Les Cayes…normally about a 4 hour drive. On the way out of Port-au-Prince we found out that the pres­i­dent had declared that Car­ni­val would be in Les Cayes this year. Car­ni­val starts tomor­row after­noon and runs through Tues­day. The expec­ta­tion is that close to 1,000,000 peo­ple will be in Les Cayes these three days. I think we were caught in the traf­fic with half of them. It took us about 7 hours to get here.

Our first site to visit today was Bigarouse (also known as Big House). On our way there though we stopped at a local street mar­ket. This pic­ture is of the park­ing lot. Part of our team is here to plan for a group of col­lege stu­dents to come this sum­mer to teach in two of our orphan­ages. Their desire is to immerse the stu­dents in the local cul­ture. This mar­ket will be one of those oppor­tu­ni­ties for immersion.

While at Bigarouse we met with Pas­tor Jean Ely­see. We shared with him the plans to have a team here this sum­mer that was going to focus on teach­ing French, math music, art, his­tory, and geog­ra­phy. He was very excited. We also came up with a plan to have some of his chil­dren and mem­bers of the church com­mu­nity pre­pare some lessons for our team mem­bers. We thought it would be great for them to teach his­tory, local cus­toms, and some songs and dances. This is where his and Pas­tor Louis’ excite­ment and enthu­si­asm really lit up. He shared that the Amer­i­can teams always come down here to teach and that he really appre­ci­ates that. This is the first time that one of these teams has asked him to pre­pare some things to teach the Amer­i­cans. He feels like it is a group that wants to “cir­cle the wag­ons” around him and his ministry.

Our next stop was Dari­vager. The team will also do their teach­ing pro­gram at this facil­ity. Once again the pas­tor, Pas­tor Mon­re­gard was very excited about the ideas for the pro­gram that was set up at Bigarouse.

After vis­it­ing these two sites we were able to visit some his­tor­i­cal sites that date back to the 1700’s when the French occu­pied the coun­try. These areas will be part of the cul­tural immer­sion for the col­lege stu­dents. One of the sites that we vis­ited was Fort Cachalou (not sure about spelling).

Tomor­row we will be par­tic­i­pat­ing in a cou­ple of churches ser­vices and pos­si­bly check­ing out Car­ni­val. Thanks for your prayers. I will send out my next email on Monday.

Prayer Updates:

• My mother had her gall blad­der removed and should be home by the time you
  get this email.
• Please con­tinue to pray for Ben and Susie as they walk through the ill­ness of her brain tumor. You can fol­low here progress at http://www.benandsusiethomas.com.