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