Off we go

Tomorrow morning we head out a little before 6 for a two week trip with the Thede's. The nine-hour drive will be broken up by a church visit in the middle, and then we will arrive at a Baptist mission in southern Haiti where we will stay for about a week. We all need to renew our visitor's visas so we will hopefully get that all done on Monday! Cory, Chris, and I will head to LaGonave (the island off the coast of west Haiti) for a few days, where we will meet up with some missionaries there, see the Wesleyan hospital, and sit in on a few English classes. We are also told that this is the land of icecream!! So we are so excited for that!
The next week we will travel to a retreat in Port au Prince for the missionaries in our area. (Haiti and surrounding areas) We aren't sure what to expect but are excited for the opportunity to go and see more of Haiti and have a change of pace. We will also get to meet more people, and I (Kathleen) will get to see one of my friends from college who happens to be living on LaGonave this year! So we are looking forward to the trip, despite the long car ride. It will be strange being away from our home. I'm looking forward to coming back in a few weeks and having it really feel like coming back home!
Please pray for safe travels and ease with getting our visas and getting to LaGonave. Also, that the retreat would be refreshing and encouraging for everyone.
We won't have internet the first week, but probably the second, so we will try to update sometime! thanks for your prayer and support! Au revoir!

New every Morning

We woke up to a particularly beautiful morning today. We were really struck with how great it is to have new days. Sometimes it's just a relief when a day ends, and you know that there is a fresh one coming. God is so good in that way, and we are full of praise.
"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:22-23

Sometimes it's hard to keep up that attitude of praise when the cool morning becomes a hot, full day (particularly, a Monday ;) What does it really mean to depend on God and get strength from Him? I hope we can understand that even a little more during our time here.
Being in a new place out of your comfort zone has a way of revealing the weak spots we have learned to tuck away. God is so good and he provides for us, but that doesn't mean we do everything perfectly and have smiles all day long!! Though that would be so nice! My prayer is that he won't leave us the same, that he will make us more real in our faith.
Thanks for your prayer and support and for reading our blog!! It's awesome to be able to stay connected to home. Here are a few prayer requests we'd like to share,
-Walfie..he was going to come to church with us Sunday but didn't. For chances to talk to him about God, and that we'd understand what he says. (if only they spoke English! or we spoke Creole!)
-Wisdom for how to best teach English and what to talk about during class
-Pastors in Haiti, to have endurance. They are so busy and the handful we know are going through a lot of hard things right now. Praise that Pastor Emmanuel (a neighbor of ours) shared that he was able to pray with a witchdoctor a few weeks ago and he turned to God! He introduced us to another witchdoctor that he knows when we visited his church last week with Cory. As you can imagine being a pastor here can be pretty heavy.
Thank you. Have a great week!

Class in the Dark

(This is another picture from the church we visited on Sunday) The other night we had a neat experience in our English class. Our beginner class is at 4, and advanced is at 5:15, so by the time we get started with the second class it is starting to get dark. By 5:30 no one can see the chalkboard and it’s difficult to see each other’s faces. Usually the generator gets started up and we can turn on lightbulbs, but on Tuesday night due to technical difficulties the lights didn’t come on until the last 15 minutes of class! So we met in the dark. At first we didn’t know what to do…we depend on the chalkboard and their workbooks for much of what we do. But Chris decided to start telling the class about us so that they could have practice listening to English. (This is the hardest skill for them. Many can speak fairly well but have lots of trouble hearing and comprehending, which is also the hardest part of Creole for us) So we had the opportunity to talk about our families, where we are from, how we met, and things like that. They were full of questions! Chris got to share a little of his testimony, and we hope to be able to continue that another day. They wanted to know how we are adjusting to life in Haiti and how we like it here. So we got to share about our experience, the difficulties and joys we have been through so far. We got to share about the differences between American and Haitian culture, and the strengths we see in Haitian culture that we admire. They shared some things about American culture they like. One of the pastor’s mentioned how Americans tend to be more smiley, and less serious, and how he likes that. It is interesting how we both see good in the other culture, and can benefit from rubbing off on each other. Neither is perfect, of course, but with a less critical and more appreciative eye we can really gain from observing and living among different kinds of people. We totally felt blessed to have the chance to get to know our class on a deeper level and have the opportunity to share what we are experiencing. It was one of the first times we felt we got to go beyond surface level with Haitians. God is good! We have enjoyed sharing some Chris Tomlin songs with our class this week and having them crack open their Bibles and read aloud. We tried to find a comedian for them to listen to, but our American humor is much different from theirs! So we scratched that idea for now.
Chris has still been going to clinic three mornings a week with Kris and it is becoming more comfortable for him to be around patients. I have been attempting a few new ideas for Eli and Anna’s spelling lessons, some go better than others! Sometimes spelling is just a drag, we can all attest to that. Anyway, hope you had a great week so far. Thanks for your prayer and support so much!

This past weekend and week have flown by! Teaching English classes four nights a week and having Kreole lessons on two of those nights makes the evenings seem so short! Kathleen and I are really enjoying teaching! Despite being the youngest persons in our class we do know the most English and our students have received us very well. No, the first week was not perfect, but our problems only stem from the Haitian people wanting to learn English (to the point that they try to sneak into class or persuade us to let them in our already bursting classes). So we hope that this week those wrinkles get ironed out and we are able to help them improve in English over the next two months.
We spent Saturday printing the 39 workbooks needed for the first class. We had some printer problems and such but all is to be expected. We have found out that the saying "everything is harder in Haiti" is quite comforting when it takes hours and days longer to do something than it should... such as print workbooks.
We also visited a church this past weekend. It is on the other side of the mountains that we hike along, so it was only 4.5 miles away. With that said it took us about 30 minutes to get there. The road after Port Margot was so bad that we almost didn’t finish the trip in the truck. The number of cement block houses decreased, being replaced by thatch houses covered with a mud/plaster. As we approached the church, we noticed ruins of old buildings that we later found out were colonial. We were on the grounds of an old plantation where it is likely that sugarcane was grown and harvested by hundreds of slaves. During church when we were worshiping with the Haitians Kris leaned over and said how cool it was to look out the window and imagine slaves toiling in the fields, the ancestors of the people we were now worshiping with in freedom! This country has had a history of turmoil and hardship but yet there are hundreds of churches with people praising the Lord. It is amazing what God can do in spite of man and his mistakes

First day of School!

Yesterday, after a weekend of printing and copying papers and preparing, we had our first English classes! Originally when we met with the pastors to decide specifics about the class, we set a limit of 25 students per class. Those interested were instructed to come to our house sometime before the class began to give their name and take a short test to determine if they would be in the beginner or advanced class. By last week we had to begin turning people down, encouraging them to sign up for the classes in January. However, at our informational meeting last week, only about 1/3 of those signed up showed up, along with a whole new crowd! The best way I can describe this experience from Chris and I’s perspective is that we were both wide-eyed! We were a little overwhelmed by all the people crowding in to try to get their name on the list. Unsure how to handle the overload of people, we went into yesterday’s class hoping and praying that it would simply all work out! Well, after it was all said and done yesterday, we had 37 signed up for the first class, and 25 for the second. This seemed easier than trying to explain that there wasn’t room in the class, and trying to figure out who had signed up first and all that. So we are now blessed with 62 eager students. It is amazing how much they want to learn English; it is so important to them. Sunday we visited a church literally 5 miles from here, and it took us 40 minutes to get there. (This was not due to traffic-it was the fact that we crossed three rivers, and drove over road covered in potholes and big rocks!) But to give an idea of how much they want to learn, the pastor of this church is making that drive 3 times a week, and some are driving from even further away! It is a dream in Haiti that an English university will one day be started here. This motivates people to learn English as well as their desire to go to the States, communicate with people in the States, and other reasons we have yet to understand. All that to say, we were very thankful to have a curriculum to follow, eachother to stand up front with and help teach, God to calm our nerves and let us know we just have to do the best we can, and a sense of humor allowing us to laugh at the mistakes we made and enjoy teaching. It’s really cool to have this opportunity. We get to meet new people and help them with something they really desire to know. We also get to give each student a Bible. Who knows what God wants to do with that. Please pray that we will be good teachers, and that we’ll have opportunities to share God with our students and encourage them, and that they will learn English! Thank you, we need your prayers! This is our classroom, and also the church we usually attend when we aren’t visiting somewhere. The windows have an awesome view! The other pic shows our new fall decorations, even though it's still in the 90's here and feels like July! Thank you for your love and support. We can’t say that enough. “Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will not be shaken. My victory and honor comes from God alone, he is my refuge, a rock where no enemy can reach me.” Psalm 62:5-7. Have a great week!!