Haiti visit: The Final Post

This is the final update about our recent short trip to Haiti. The rest of the information can be found in past posts Haiti Update Part 1 and Haiti Update Part 2.

Day 3: Take a hike!
The Haitians think it's absurd that anyone who doesn't have to walk somewhere would choose to do so for leisure. They walk constantly to get everywhere and to get anything they need, be it water or food or whatever else they may need.

So, you can imagine it seemed a bit weird to them for two white guys and their pregnant wives to take a multi-mile hike through the countryside for fun.

That's alright. It was fun.

We passed by the small plot of land (~1 - 1.5 acres by my guess) the Lancours are farming with a local. Their cabbage crop is one of the only in the whole area that has not failed due to lack of rain. Truly amazing and something they thank the Lord for frequently.

The terrain was fairly steep and the weather pretty hot, but the hike took us through some of Haiti's very precious forest. If you weren't aware, much of Haiti has undergone severe deforestation due to lack of regulation enforcement and overuse for things such as charcoal for cooking. Charcoal is the country's primary source of fuel for cooking.

lunch in the pine forest. Many of the trees have machete marks in them. You can't cut down a tree, but if the tree happens to die... well that's fair game, right?

Now, this deforestation has much more significant impacts than the typical run of the mill environmental impacts you may hear about on the news. A lack of trees means a lack of plants securing the steep slopes when they are loaded from heavy rain. This can lead to slope failures: landslides and mudslides. This is one of the reasons the last earthquake caused so much destruction in Haiti. If you get the chance or are a bit curious, the difference in vegetation caused by deforestation can be easily seen in Google Maps directly tracing the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Oriani Clinic
The destination of our hike was a clinic in the nearby village of Oriani. This is a pretty decent facility run by the Mennonite missionaries in the area. The clinic was packed both inside and outside with people waiting to be seen. The people that run the clinic are friends with the Lancours and also quite friendly. They showed us around and we were able to chat with them for a bit. As you might expect, they are excellent people. Just that morning they had delivered several babies onsite. This in addition to treating everything else imaginable.

After visiting the clinic, we bought drinks from the town market (open air, people selling things on the ground and crude tables) and continued on to visit with a few of the Mennonite missionaries in their home. They were extremely kind - they gave us coffee!

Quick side note on that point. Haitians drink 'coffee.' They just add more sugar to it than I would want in a Pixie Stick. It's actually a little bit difficult to get down. I blame this entirely on our coffee snob friend back in Bakersfield (you know who you are).

After meeting and spending some time with these find people, we made our way back to home base, trying our best to take it slow and enjoy good conversation. If you have the opportunity to spend some time with these folks I highly recommend it. They are such a pleasure to be around and such an encouragement. Their love for the Lord and determination to seek Him out in their day puts a smile on my face.

We must have taken the pace a bit too fast, as Jennifer was sick for the rest of the day and a bit for the following day. We are fairly convinced she had a case of altitude sickness (too long from Colorado!). We made it a point to take it easy from there on. The rest of the day was spent enjoying Kirsten's cooking and playing board games. I'm pretty sure the Lancours crushed us in about every game that day.

Day 4: Desperate for water
I'll apologize upfront for the lack of pictures on this day. Leave the boys to their own devices and BAM! No pictures...

The Lancours have been facilitating and working towards several water related projects in their area including building water cisterns and rain collection. Recent climatic conditions have lead to the area being desperately dry: many people are so desperate they can be seen to take drinking water out of puddles in the street. This is quite a bad thing as far as disease goes. A few ministries have been sending water trucks up into the mountains, but the distribution of this water can be quite problematic.

Beautiful mountainous terrain. Unfortunately they are quite far from any form of running water. No rain = no water.

A truck can't simply stop and hand out water as the crowd that would form would very quickly become violent and dangerous due to how desperate people are for water. While we were in Haiti, such an event occurred and lead to a fight and a machete attack. The solution to this is careful and planned distribution in areas where people can be effectively corralled to prevent a mob from forming. The best solution thus far seems to be to have the water truck deliver water to one of the people's cisterns and then redistribute the water from that point. Its a hairy situation and the Lancours do everything within their means to facilitate these operations when they can.

stuck in the gutter
As I mentioned before, they also are involved with water collection for people's cisterns. I had the opportunity on this particular day to help Jessie install a simple gutter system on a house to collect rainwater from the roof and send it into the cistern. PVC pipes are sized and then cut lengthwise, allowing them to be pried open and placed over the corrugated tin roofing material. Water collects in the PVC gutters and runs through more PVC pipes to collect in the cistern.

It's a pretty simple setup but can mean a big difference for a family that would otherwise rush outside to collect the roof runoff with any buckets or bowls they had on hand whenever it rained. This was a very exciting project for me: every time it rained before we did this all I could think about was the wasted water and how that could have gone into that family's cistern. I'm very thankful I was able to be a part of this small project.

We didn't take any pictures of the gutter work, so here's another project I was able to help Jesse with. I don't remember what day we did this, but we replaced a few of the tin sheets with translucent plastic ones to let a bit more light in.

Some of the friends of the family that owned the house helped out by digging for the buried PVC pipe and helping hold pipe for hanging. This made the project go much more smoothly.

After stopping by one other house to do some repairs to gutters Jessie had previously installed, we headed back to the house. We spent a good bit of the remainder of the day trying to prune their avocado tree in order to get some wood for a bon fire.

Independence Day Pumpkin Puree! 
We finished off the day with Kirsten making some Haitian Pumpkin Soup. This is a particularly meaningful dish for the Haitians dating back to the time when the people were salves under French rule. Pumpkins were considered a delicacy and any slave caught eating one was severely punished (one guy, four horses, different directions). Now every Haitian independence day they celebrate with pumpkin soup. It was pretty dang good.

Post meal time at the Lancour house.

Day 5: Down down down and it got way hotter
We took the morning slow and got everything packed up and ready for the trip back down the mountain. The trip was just as rough as before and Isabelle slept just as well. It seemed about as comfortable as sleeping in a washing machine, but who am I to argue.

Several hours later we arrived at our destination: a resort called Moulin Sur Mer.

It was hot. They had air-conditioning. It was wonderful.

Joseph and I throwing rocks into the ocean.

We all put in plenty of bug spray to keep off the mosquitos. I regretfully missed covering my feet entirely and payed a steep price for it. We rested well and called it an early night.

Day 6:  ♪♫It's getting hot in here... so don't take off any of your clothes or you'll be eaten alive by mosquitos... ♪♬
The last full day in Haiti. We took our time at the hotel; the Lancours met a guy who runs a jet ski company as a part of a discipleship ministry. He offered them a great deal on a jet ski ride so they went out and terrorized some fish for a bit while Jennifer and I watched the kids.

Lancours on a jet ski.

After a few more board games we hit the road for Port Au Prince for our final night. We stayed at a house that's owned by a group that provides free daycare to some families in the area. The house is a larger 4 bedroom home and they provide free daycare, 2 meals a day and vitamins to 85 children 5 days a week. Yeah. 85 kids. Crazy.

They were very kind and fed us well, but there is no air conditioning. That last night was made up of perfuse sweating and fear of mosquitos. Still, it was very much worth it to spend time with the kind people there and see what the Lord is doing in their lives.

Travel!
The next morning we left from the PAP airport and spent then next 18 hours traveling back to Bakersfield. We ran into some mechanical trouble on the first leg of our flight that caused some cascading missed connections and log waits in a few airports. It was a tiring day.

Beautiful photo Jennifer snapped on the way down from the mountain. It was amazing how much these red trees stood out from the rest of the either barren or slightly green landscape.

If you feel called to, I would encourage you to check out the Lancours Haiti mission in more detail and consider supporting them. They do great work and the Lord is blessing it. Follow this link to learn more about supporting them.

Thank you so much for following along with what's going on in our lives. We will continue to update this blog as often as possible, so keep checking back.