Dear Friends and Prayer Partners…

Well…another month has already zipped by. I don’t know about you and where you are liv­ing, but this win­ter has been quite a dif­fer­ent one for us here in Ohio. Even today I am send­ing out this email with a clear and sun­shiny day out­side with the tem­per­a­ture hit­ting the low 60’s. We still keep ask­ing, “When is win­ter really going to hit us?”

Jan­u­ary has once again proven to be a busy month with ESMI. As in the past, as the hol­i­days slip into our past we start hit­ting the road run­ning. I hope and pray that you enjoy hear­ing about some of our activ­i­ties from the Projects and Devel­op­ment per­spec­tive and that you will con­tinue to keep us in your prayers.

Projects/Construction

Homes for Pas­tors and Widows

We were able to fin­ish our 13th home this past month. This home was built for Pas­tor Jean Edouard and his fam­ily. This fam­ily lives in the Bois-Gaman area near Gressier. We sin­cerely appre­ci­ate the efforts of our friends at Christ Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Rich­mond, IN for rais­ing the funds to help this fam­ily receive a home and move out of their tent…two years after the earth­quake. Please con­tinue to pray for this Pas­tor as he also tries to rebuild his church that was lost in that earthquake.

 

We were also able to start con­struc­tion on home #14 this past week. Our friends at Boyn­ton Beach Com­mu­nity Church in Boyn­ton Beach, FL pro­vided the funds for this home and they also have a con­struc­tion team in Haiti help­ing to build it this week. Pas­tor Jean Augustin is the recip­i­ent of this home. He has a fam­ily of 5 chil­dren and is the pas­tor of a church with 350 members.

We are so excited that our part­ners are still pro­vid­ing funds and short-term teams to build these homes. Not only are we able to help fam­i­lies move from tem­po­rary struc­tures into per­ma­nent homes, we are also able to keep 6 to 7 Hait­ian work­ers fully employed and able to sup­port their fam­i­lies. Thank you for your con­tri­bu­tions and prayers for this part of our ministry.

Facil­ity Mod­i­fi­ca­tions and Upgrades

In the Grand-Anse depart­ment we are con­tinue to build out the Uni­ver­sity of Jere­mie. The struc­ture that we are work­ing on now is the School of Joy, which will ulti­mately pro­vide pri­mary and sec­ondary edu­ca­tion for up to 1,000 stu­dents from the sur­round­ing area. We have also com­pleted the design for a solar power solu­tion for the entire uni­ver­sity cam­pus. The com­po­nents are being ordered this week and our plan is to install the com­po­nents and set up the exist­ing build­ings with power the last week of March. We are find­ing that this will be a very excit­ing begin­ning of a new era for our churches in Haiti. We believe that we will be able to start imple­ment­ing basic power solu­tions for each of our churches for about $5,000 each. This will allow the mem­bers of the church to start using their facil­ity more hours of the day, pro­vide power for their schools, and enhance the lives of the mem­bers of their communities.

Lead­er­ship Development

Dony St. Ger­main (ESMI Pres­i­dent), Bre­sile St. Ger­main (Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment Coor­di­na­tor), and Louis St. Ger­main (Haiti Field Direc­tor) have also been quite busy over the last month. They are busy con­duct­ing pas­tor train­ing and lead­er­ship sem­i­nars in Jere­mie and Les Cayes. We are look­ing for­ward to get­ting the Uni­ver­sity of Jere­mie to a state where we can start host­ing the sem­i­nary there. Our plans are to begin this year with 150 full­time stu­dents. Please con­tinue to pray for us as we work to com­plete the uni­ver­sity and pur­sue new oppor­tu­ni­ties for fund­ing and grants this year. Pray that we will have more pas­tors from churches here in the United States and Canada vol­un­teer their time and tal­ents to help in the teach­ing pro­grams that get established.

Micro-Businesses

As I men­tioned in one of my ear­lier newslet­ters we are doing a lot of work in the area of iden­ti­fy­ing micro-businesses that we can estab­lish with our churches across Haiti. We have sev­eral friends and part­ners of the min­istry that are work­ing with us as we inves­ti­gate poul­try farm­ing, fish farm­ing, and ice fac­to­ries as busi­nesses. Please keep me in your prayers as I begin to develop busi­ness plans for these, iden­tify loca­tions best fit­ted for them, and seek to secure fund­ing to make these hap­pen. These will become a crit­i­cal com­po­nent for our work in Haiti because through these micro-businesses we can help our churches become self-sufficient as well as cre­ate cen­ters where valu­able train­ing can be pro­vided to the peo­ple of Haiti.

Upcom­ing Travel

I will be head­ing down to the Les Cayes area Feb­ru­ary 17th through 25th. While there I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing with our friends from First United Methodist Church (FUMC) and Cen­te­nary Col­lege of Louisiana in Shreve­port, LA on a vision trip. This team will be assess­ing some of our facil­i­ties as a place to stay for future trips and together we will be com­ing up with a plan for them to do some great work at some of our orphan vil­lages through­out the year. FUMC and Cen­te­nary have a great part­ner­ship and will be putting together some sum­mer long teach­ing activ­i­ties at our facil­i­ties in the Les Cayes area teach­ing Eng­lish and French. We are very excited about build­ing this rela­tion­ship and reach­ing the peo­ple of Haiti in much broader and deeper areas.

I will also be meet­ing up with one of our short-term teams com­prised of mem­bers from churches in the Chicago, IL and Las Vega, NV areas. They come down on a reg­u­lar basis and do some awe­some work through neigh­bor­hood med­ical clin­ics. One of the activ­i­ties that I will be doing with this team is assess­ing the River Bank Repair at Cherette and see how it weath­ered last year’ storms and what we can do to take it to the next step.

Com­ing up in March I have a mission’s con­fer­ence that I am attend­ing at our part­ner First Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Macon, GA and then head­ing to Jere­mie the end of March to help with the instal­la­tion of the solar solu­tion at the Uni­ver­sity. Please keep us in your prayers as I do this travel, and espe­cially Laura as I leave her here in Ohio.

Per­sonal Fundrais­ing Status

Once again, Laura and I would like to thank you for your prayers, your thoughts and your finan­cial sup­port in our work with ESMI. We are so blessed to have friends and fam­ily like you stand­ing behind us in this work. We have so much work before us and your sup­port is what is mak­ing it pos­si­ble to main­tain focus and energy.

For those of you that have been fol­low­ing our progress on rais­ing our sup­port we are cur­rently at 36% of our monthly sup­port. I am active in the fundrais­ing process and seek your prayers while I reach out to peo­ple that I know for sup­port consideration.