At the Base

Day three

Bow Dye Bewiw (Lord Bless You)...

We had another great opportunity to attend church. The church was
overflowing again and had at least a thousand attendees. The service
started at 7:00 AM and went to around 10:30 AM. When we arrived there
was something already going on, which we found out later was actually
the Sunday school class. And I have a hard time making it to Sunday
school at 10:00... :-(

Day two...

Bonswa...

Our team made it all here. The first of us made it at 9:40 AM and the last group arrived at the compound at around 6:00 PM. One more person gets in tomorrow. We have 5 us here to continue the construction of the compound and there are 18 team members from across the country (and one from Australia) that will be doing a medical clinic throughout the week.

For those of you that followed our last trip...the septic tank cover has been completed.

We will be going to church tomorrow morning at 7:00 and then spending the rest of the day getting everything staged for the week.

Another team from the Ohio area

Hello Again... from David Short (MNA Haiti site-coordinator)

Today begins our third trip to Haiti. This trip is comprised of 5 men from the Ohio Valley area. We will be focusing on getting the facility in Carrefour ready to use by future teams. We will also be hosting a team of 18 medical personnel that will be travelling daily to Leogaine.

Updates to follow

David Short's final report as he returns from work with the Tennessee team in Haiti

Bonjour...

I made it home about 12:30 AM Thursday morning and as with all of these kinds of trips Laura and I stayed up until 2:30 catching up. God, in His incredible sense of humor, woke us up with a call at 7:30 AM from Julie (our very pregnant daughter) letting us know that she was on the way to the hospital. She was 5 weeks early at the time. Laura and I were at the hospital yesterday until around 9:30 last night.

Levi Samuel Barr arrived this morning around 1:30 AM. He is a healthy premee weighing in at 5 lbs 10 ozs and measuring 18 inches. Mom and dad (and Nonny Laura) are doing well. The next 48 hours are critical for the development of his lungs so please be praying for him.

I sill be pushing our pictures and videos from the trip up to the Flickr server as soon as possible. My next trip is March 27th so I will send more emails then. We do have 7 of us lined up to do more construction and a medical team of 18 coming down. Please keep all of this in your prayers.

Praise God...

Our supplies made it here around 7:00 this evening. We were able to
get everything unloaded and in a secure storage area. Apparently we
had to pay a tariff to the government as well as multiple bribes to small government officials in order to get our own, donated supplies.
When Doudou gets a chance he will add up all of the fees and let you know how much we had to pay. My request is that you contact your senator and assembly person and let them know what is really going on down here.

Today we continued with plumbing, electrical, and more cleanup. There is an abandoned pool on the grounds that we cleaned out and we were able to get some more of the plumbing out to the septic tank in place.

Day 7...

Bow Dye Bewiw (Lord Bless You)...

Today was a wonderful day of rest. We left for church at 6:30 (yes, that is AM). Church started at 7:00 and ran until 10:30. We probably had close to 1,000 people at the church and I would have to say one of the most moving worship services that I have ever been to. The Haitian people are so loving and friendly...even in the midst of the most devastation and poverty that I have ever seen.

After church we rode around the area to show the team more of Haiti.

I continue to thank you for your prayers and thoughts. Our host here is Pastor Lionel Moril. He has been married for 7 1/2 months and they have a baby due in about 6 months. The church that he pastors is about 25 miles from here and he has asked us if we would pray that God would provide a vehicle for him so that he could get to his church more easily.

I hope pictures of the devastation never get too old, but I do not believe I will ever be able to truly give you an understanding of it's enormity without coming here.

May God Bless You and your loved ones.

Day 6....

Bonswa...

Well, we are on the downhill side of this trip. We are hearing rumors that our truck and supplies may be showing up tonight. Today we spent most of the day cleaning the windows and walls of the dormitory rooms to get them ready to paint.


We also did another hardware run and will be able to get the roof drains all set up tomorrow.

The team has made a lot of friends so I suspect there will be some sadness when we head out on Wednesday.

Work and play on-site

From David Short, on-site coordinator, Day 3 of Tennessee team's work

Bonswa...
Well we made it through another day without our shipment. We were still able to get quite a bit accomplished. The electrical team has been able to map out most of the circuits in the building. This should help a lot when we get the supplies here. We also started tearing down the existing pump to see of we can make it work. We will test it tomorrow. We also did some more work on the plumbing.

We also took advantage of the time to clean off the roof and check out the water tank for the gravity feed. Our plan is to reroute the roof drains to some collection barrels to supplement the cistern.

We were also able to get in some frisbee and soccer (with a tennis-type ball we found on the roof).

Today the temperature was 93 but the humidity made it feel like 101. So far it is getting more humid each day, but no rain yet.

Thanks again for all of your thoughts and prayers. The team is great.

Udate from team restoring the relief site in Carrefour

Bonswa...

Well...the Tennessee team made it here today without a hitch. Today it was in the mid 90's. No rain yet, but it is starting to cloud up every afternoon, which usually is an indication that the rainy season is on it's way.

We have not heard yet what the status of our trucks is so please keep praying for them.  Since the team got here after 12:00 we started the work day off with a great lunch...quite a feast.





Since we did not have the construction materials we spent the afternoon assessing the facility to determine what we can do without the materials.  Our first big project has been to do some work on getting the sewer line to the existing septic tank ready for some repairs.

We also put our new banner up at the compound...




Well that is it for today...tomorrow should start getting pretty busy.

Teams heading to Haiti this week

From David Short, the MNA site coordinator for the construction teams in Haiti:

Hello Family and Friends…

It has been a while since I have sent out an update on Haiti. We are finally at a point with our progress that we are sending our first construction team to Haiti. We have 10 men from the Chattanooga, TN who are scheduled to arrive in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on Thursday, March 11^th. I will be heading down there tomorrow night with an arrival in Haiti of 9:45 on Wednesday morning. We are still praying that the supplies that we shipped out from Miami will be there waiting for us.

Our focus for this trip will be to start retrofitting our compound in Carrefour to receive future teams. The locals have named this facility Oasis. Mission to North America (MNA) has 45 teams that are lining up to come down to help rebuild churches and homes once we get this facility up and running. Here are a couple of pictures of the facility that we took while we were down there.

We already have 8 men signed up for our next construction trip, which is March 27^th through April 3^rd. Our hope is to have the facility completed by then and start sending regular teams around the middle of April.

On the medical side

A couple of shots from a group of doctors from Charlotte, NC, that took a recent trip to Haiti with ESMI, providing medical relief and a great account of their work at http://morethanmedicine.wordpress.com/