lots of fun weather :)

We are safe and sound, but >wow< are we having lots of heavy winds and lots of rain. There are a lot of reports of flooding, but none here in Cap-Haitien. As always, our hearts go out to all of the people living around us tonight that have no stable shelter. We have already lost 3 trees just in our yard, and the trees are much more stable than a lot of the shanty houses we have seen. Please keep praying for everyone here, and in the Dominican Republic, as we persevere through the storm!

Meanwhile, classes continue, though we are starting a new session tomorrow without 2 professors who are stuck in Florida. Matt will begin one of the classes, and the other class has been cancelled. Hopefully, they will be able to join us on Thursday, depending on the weather!


We will keep you posted on the weather conditions, but for now, we are all safe and sound here, if not cold and a little (yes, it's true) chilly!

our Haiti roots...

It has been SO wonderful to have a weekend "away" with friends in Port-au-Prince. Stacey lived with the Benson family for each of her prior trips to Haiti, and visiting with them, and others, has been such a blessing. Several other missionary friends have come and gone this weekend, and it has been great to catch up with people that we've known for several years.

There is something restful about being in a place that holds many memories and with people who have known you for more than 2 months. Port-Au-Prince, as well, is much more modern than Cap-Haitien, and it has been nice to drive on paved roads, go to a grocery store, go to a "fast food" place...all the luxuries that come with visiting the capital of Haiti :)

This time has also given us a few days to step away and reflect on our first two months in Haiti and to reafirm why we are here, what we want to be doing, how we want to be spending our time, what He is calling us to...etc. It is our joy to be working here in Haiti, and we are blessed to be a part of a ministry that truly excites us, challenges us, and is something that we believe strongly in.

What a valuable time! We are heading back to Cap-Haitien at 2 PM today, and will then have the evening to prepare for classes started back up tomorrow.

Pictured here are children of some of the women Stacey worked a lot with in 2002 and in 2004.

Hershneice

Matt was able to go and visit our friend Mishlean right before we left for Port-au-Prince. It is her daughter, Hershneice, that is dying of leukemia. She was unable to stand up due to all of the cancer in her stomach. While her stomach grows ever larger, her little body continues to shrink. Nonetheless, Mishlean was so happy to have him visit. Please continue to pray for Mishlean, her husband, and Hersneice, and we will continue to visit and help in any way we can!

We are currently in Port-au-Prince visiting old friends and enjoying a weekend away.

muffins and zoos

Teaching continues to be so interesting! Our students have had SUCH different upbrinings than us, and exploring the differences with the students is amusing, and sometimes sad. They are men and women (well, woman) our own age and in our own place in life: feeling called to take the Lord and the Bible to Haiti. Yet we are worlds apart!
On Monday, Stacey's class had a "review day." For fun, I decided to bring in muffins, espcially because the prior week had been such a hard one for everyone. At one point in the class, we worked through a children's book in English, and I passed around the muffins. I learned quite quickly that food is never "fun." It's not a "treat." It's FOOD. It's survival, it's an existence, a NEED.

I tried not to stare while I read the book, watching the students wrap their muffins in their napkins, carefully placing the parcel in their bags to take home to children, or to save for later. I told them they could eat the snack, but it wasn't meal time nor were they truly hungry, so they all saved it. Thinking back on it, Matt and I both realized that where food can be such a special thing in our culture, it is a true need in theirs. Matt likes his muffins with a mug of steaming coffee. We like to eat a muffin for a snack in the afternoon. But our students? They don't even have a concept of what tastes good with what, or having a snack.

Food is something they think about getting every single day, something they pray for, something they hope to give to their children. Even in a classroom, in ties and learning English and Hebrew, they are Haitians. We will never fully understand a NEED for food as they do...hmmmmm.

My English class is also learning about animals this week. We talked about Haiti animals first: pigs, chickens, goats. Then we talked about American animals, and then zoo animals. No student in the class has ever seen a zebra, a lion, an elephant, a monkey, etc. I asked if there were zoo's here, only to find out that there is not even a word for zoo in Creole. I then tried to explain what a zoo was. The students listened in wonder, but when I asked who would like to go to a zoo someday, I had no volunteers. Everyone thought it would be quite scary to see all of these animals they've never seen all at the same time. (and they are quite sure zebras are "evil". I'm not sure where this comes from...I didn't ask!)

Needless to say, we are always learning so much about Haiti just from our time in the classroom!

fe manje

Literally "make food", this is the phrase for "cooking." Last Thursday we had the staff from the Seminary over for dinner, and Madame Gislin came early to help me. We made a full Haitian meal of fried chicken, banan plezi (plantain), beans and rice and "salad", which is kind of like coleslaw. While I have been cooking Haitian meals for the past 8 weeks, I have NOT been cooking Haitian meals in "the Haitian way".

The Haitian way, I now know, is with LOTS and LOTS of oil. We fried absolutely everything, aside from the coleslaw. There are no measurements, times or temperatures. Only "some," "for a while" and "hot". This made it very difficult for me to record the recipies :) Because there are no measurements, tasting is also a big part of cooking. Every few minutes, Madame Gislin would scoop out a spoonful of boiling liquid from a pot, pour it onto her palm, and taste it. This seemed like a good idea until she poured a spoonful of boiling liquid onto MY palm. I apparently have a ways to go before I become a Haitian cook!

moving forward...

Happy Birthday, Aunt Patty!
Things were resolved today at the school (THANK YOU for your prayers), but the tone on campus has sadly changed. The administration held firm to its principles and regulations, and the student finally complied this morning, after 4 days of tension and rebellion. While it is apparent to all that the school "won", this means that student finally "lost"...which shows a LOT of division. Please continue in your prayers for the seminary, that it might become peaceful again, that we may be unified, and that we may ALL set out again on our original goal: to win Haiti for Christ.

Stacey is sick with the congestion and fever many of the missionaries are currently suffering from, so we will try to spend Saturday catching up on work, preparing for the next week, and getting her rested up! Sunday we will be taking our 22 visitors (from Hamilton, Canada) to a Haitian church to experience what this is like!

Thank you so much for your continued prayers. We received a bit of a "crash course" this week in Haitian culture. There is a deeply rooted value here for "freedom" and a fear of being "opressed." Rules, discipline, structure and consequences are all seen as "Oppression." Doing what you want and getting what you want is seen as true "Freedom." As we realized that this was the mentality here, even for many Christians, we became more burdened for the people than before. The very foundation must be re-defined.

Christ came to set us free! Not from responsiblity or from discipline, but from ourselves...our selfishness, our self-destructive ways and our slavery to dead-end things: envy, greed, hatred. Freedom is found IN setting aside our own desires and taking on His desires for us. As we watch several of our students fight "oppression" such as consequences for wrong actions, we realize that they themselves ARE ALREADY so oppressed. Please pray for us as we seek to share His TRUE and life-transforming freedom with our students...many who we now realize have never actually known True Freedom...as hard as they have fought for it!

We continue to stand on His grace and faithfullness, and on your prayers and support. Thank you!

prayers much appreciated...

We have had not the very best week this week. It has been laced with some rather serious problems all stemming from one student at the Seminary. We believe it will be resolved tomorrow, but we ask that you be praying for the student, for the staff, for the other students, and for the Seminary...that it can be resolved tomorrow and that peace can settle back in and that we can resume teaching the Bible!

We live in a dark country, and we cannot expect there to be NO darkness at the school, because it is a Seminary. Thank you much for your prayers! We promise to have happier updates soon :)

Thank you for standing with us...

small different.

Teaching and being at the Seminary continues to be one of our favorite things to do! It is, after all the ministry that we came here to do...but you spend so much time each day 'surviving' (running errands, cooking, cleaning, communicating, finding things, fixing things) that it is a joy each day to be about training pastors!

Friday I (Stacey) was subbing for another English class. I spent a few minutes introducing myself, and then the students asked a few questions. I explained in my introduction that I went to university to study Journalism, further explaining that this means that I learned how to write about things like news and people. After I finished, a rather confused looking man raised his hand, and then asked. "Jouralism and archeology...there is no difference?"

I'm not quite sure where he had leared about archeology, but decided to try to explain.

So, for a few minutes we discussed again what journalists do and then what archaeologists do, discussing dinosaurs and "old things", like "from the Bible." The students all nooded their heads in agreement, but the student who had asked the question was still looking at me as if they were the same. So we talked about how archaeologists go to many places and dig for bones, artificats, perhaps even Noah's ark, and how I, as a jouranlist, was writing pamphlets for the Seminary.

"Ah!" the student agreed excitedly. "So, small different, yes?"

Perhaps I am not a very good English teacher, but there are now people in Haiti who think that the blond foreigner, "Madame Matt" is in Haiti to dig for Noah's ark!

Matt is preparing to start teaching other classes aside from Hebrew, and we both officially "graduated" from Creole training today! We are on our own to continue to learn vocab.

Thursday night we are hosting dinner for the Seminary staff, and a good friend is coming early to help us cook a large Haitian meal. "If we eat at 5:30, what time should we start?" I asked her today. "Oh, NO time at all," she tells me. "We will start at 2:30 and should be done in time." Right now, I cannot even IMAGINE cooking for that long. In Haiti, this is what women do, from 5 am until 6 pm. I am SO glad that cooking is not my ministry in Haiti! But for one evening, it should be fun :)

All of these pictures are from the seminary, and show you each of our classrooms (without the 6 inches of water that was in them last week :)

Please continue to pray for Hershniece, the little girl mentioned under this week's prayer requests. She has taken a turn for the worst... Thank you!

someday...

"Violence will not be heard again in your land,
Nor devastation or destruction within your borders;
But you will call your walls salvation,
and your gates praise.

No longer will you have sun for light by day,
Nor for brightness will the moon give you light;
But you will have the Lord for an everlasting light,
and your God for your glory.

Your sun will no longer set,
Nor will your moon wane;
For you will have the Lord for an everlasting light,
and the days of your mourning will be over.

Then all your people will be righterous
They will possess the land forever,
The branch of My planting,
The work of My hands,
That I may be glorified.

The smallest one will become a clan,
and the least one, a might nation.
I, the Lord, will hasten it
in its time"
Isaiah 60:18-22

(photos from on our compound)

kek louanj....

Praises!

We have so much to be thankful for, and despite hardships that are common here in Haiti, it continues to be our JOY to be here. Thank you for standing with us!

We praise the Lord for our continued good health! Stacey experienced a lot of sickness in the previous 14 months, and has not been sick at all since coming (despite the fact that every other missionary on the compound has been dealing with colds or "Haitian Happiness"...you don't want to know."

We praise the Lord for the seminary! Admist all the struggles and problems we see in Haiti, the seminary continues to be one of the few things that seems like it is, and could be, generating change. While things like hospitals and feeding programs help make day to day life better (and are truly important!), the seminary is in the business of changing mindsets, changing traditions and transforming darkness into light throughout Haiti. It is a blessing to be working alongside of the other staff and the students and to work in the midst of HOPE for Haiti.

We praise the Lord for the other missionaries! We cannot IMAGINE doing all this on our own...having other missionaries who help us keep things running, help us find places, encourage us and are working alongside us is SUCH a blessing. While we work at the Seminary all day, they are working in 6 other ministry capacities, and at the end of the day we realize that our small compound has accomplished quite a bit for the Lord.

We praise the Lord for our supporters! We are aware every single day that we are here by His grace and by your giving. Each relationship we build, each conversation we have, each person we help, each class we teach, each Bible study we give is possible because of your sacrificial giving. Because you continue to send in your one time and monthly support, we get to DO all this ministry, without having to worry about if we have the money to help a friend pay for his son's eye surgery, the money to pay for gas to go to churches where our students are preaching, the money to pay for our food and home and supplies. THANK YOU for being here with us, for your prayers, and for enabling us to do these things.

We praise the Lord for friends and family! Although we haven't seen anyone from home (and won't for a while!), we never forget that you carry us in your hearts and in your prayers. We are so grateful for everyone's letters and emails and packages and love! We continue to pray for you in your daily ministry, and WE LOVE YOU!

"Surely our griefs
He Himself bore,
and our sorrows
He carried.

Yet we ourselves
Esteemed Him as stricken,
Smitten of God,
and afflicted.

But He was pierced through
for our transgressions,
He was crushed
for our iniquities;

The chastening for our well-being
fell upon Him,
And by His scourging
We Are Healed."

Amen!
Isaiah 53:4

Seasons, Glasses & Peanut M&Ms...

Life continues to be so interesting here in Haiti!

Occasionally we run into unforseen problems explaining something in one of our classes. Today it was Stacey's turn, as she sought to teach her students "Summer, Autumn, Winter, Fall." While we thought these were cross-culturallly constant, we learned today that they are entirely based on location, opinion, and if there is a word for it in Creole. In Haiti, she learned there is "When it's less hot, when it's really hot, when we have lots of rain, and when we have drought." These are the four seasons, though they overlap some. No one could tell her what months these "seasons" happen, or even what season Christmas is in. (Christmas is in "less hot").

However, we aren't the only ones suprised. They are just as shocked to hear us talk about such things, like SNOW in WINTER or leaves magically changing colors and falling to the ground and even though the trees then have NO leaves, the leaves miraculously return again after the snow leaves. Their wonder really makes us think about all the things that were just normal when we grew up...fall, winter, and spring again ARE miracles :)

A lot of other mindsets are very different, too. We have a good friend here who has been wearing glasses without the arm pieces since we got here. She is brilliant...speaks French, Creole, some English and some Spanish. She works computers, and most of the seminary, raised three children alone, you get the picture.

Today, whenever someone gave her a new pair of badly needed glasses, she was thrilled. But they left them in the bag, with the little stregnth sticker in the middle of one lens. All day long she proudly wore her new frames, but left on the clearly sight blocking sticker, stuck right in the middle of the lens. Finally, we said, "Friend! Take off the sticker!" and then peeled it off for her. She looked at us like we were rocket scientists, and said that she had just assumed they came with that sticker built in, and that she was was trying not to complain with her new gift, even though she couldn't see well with the sticker. She was SO GRATEFUL to us for "fixing" them!

This seems like common sense, but on the flip side, a friend saw Stacey the other day furoiusly attacking a stream of ants, and walked away laughing at the foreigner who would be publicly caught paying attention to something so tiny and unimportant. We are quickly learning that nothing is dumb, just different!

The Lord continues to provide for us in so many big and small ways...

Last night we fell into bed exhausted at 9:30 and decided to watch one episode of "The Office" for fun. We are really starting to miss certain foods and "normal, American" things, and this became apparent as we both were salivating over the peanut M&M's that several of the characters were eating in the episode. Suddenly Stacey disappeared and came back with a whole BAG of Peanut M&Ms that her aunt had sent us weeks ago!

This may not sound like much, but to us, in a country where THERE IS NOT another bag of Peanut M&Ms, it was SUCH a joy, and truly a way that the Lord provided a few moments of comfort, laughter and fun.

Thank you for standing with us. It is truly our joy to be here and to be sharing His love with people who don't even know they are loved.

something new

Driving through town yesterday to find a few groceries, we were reminded all over again how very desperate the situation is here. It often feels that there is little hope, but we are confident that the words in the Scripture are for this small country as well. We are confident that He died for each of these people, and confident that His promises apply HERE, too. He will made a roadway in the wilderness, will make streams in the desert, and we are each a part of that! We continue to pray that we will NEVER get used to this....that we will never drive through the streets and see children hungry, see people hopeless, see eyes lost and be comfortable. We pray that it breaks our hearts every single time, even if that makes life more difficult. May He use the breaking of our hearts to spur us to continue seeking to make a river in this desert.

"Do not call to mind the former things,
or ponder things of the past.
Behold, I will do something new
Now it will spring forth;
Will you not be aware of it?
I will even make a roadway in the wilderness,
Rivers in the desert.
The people whom I formed for Myself
will declare My praise."
Isaiah 43:19

seriously. go away.

We were told whenever we got here that whenever it started raining all day every day, it would be "the rainy season." While that didn't help us schedule that into our planners, we now know what they were talking about. It is raining, all day, all night, all morning, every single day. At first, it was kind of nice. It cooled things off a little, greatly reduced the amount of dust in our home and on the street, and has everything looking quite green.

This has begun to be a problem now for us, because many area roads have been washed out and are now impassible. We have also been unable to do laundry for over a week because we have no drier, and the clothes have no time outside to dry (nor will they dry inside whenever we have no closed windows and its pouring, we have learned:) Our floor is a bed of dirt with one layer of tile over it, so as it rains, worms are coming up around our tiles (no more barefeet around the house, for sure!)

However, imagine for a moment that you have dirt for floors, that you have dirt for roads, that you have no vehichle, that your roof is a sheet of tin, that sleep on the floor, and that everything you are wearing is ALL that you have to wear. When it is hot and sunny, this is all ok. Now imagine that it has rained non-stop for 6 days.

The Haitians homes are flooded with feet of mud, they are sick from sleeping in the cold mud and from wearing wet clothes, they have to walk everywhere in the rain and mud, they are soaked to the bone pretty much continually, and their roofs are leaking on their children. The roofs in our seminary are all leaky continually, so Stacey's students took an exam this morning soaking wet (from their walk to the school) in their classroom under 2 inches of water, and the desks pooled with water. Suddenly, five days of rain mean that the Haitian people are miserable, coughing, sick, wet and muddy!

Again, we are so humbled by how different life is here, and by how very blessed our lives are! As we duck into our little house each night...wormy and with clothes hanging everywhere, but DRY, we pray again for the Lord to provide for the Haitian people in all of the ways that we cannot.

"Even to your old age
I will be the same,
and even to your graying years
I will bear you!
I have done it,
and I willcarry you;
I will bear you and
I will deliever you!"
Isaiah 46:4

buried alive

Time is flying, and suddenly we realize that this is where we live now. This is our home and our ministry, our job and our future. It is hard to explain how this realization feels, but settling in to such a new and different place brings a lot of good and hard emotions.

As we are making friends with Haitians, little by little, we are brought so much joy! These are friendships we have prayed for for such a long time, and friendships that will not only hopefully encourage them, but that encourage us so much! They watch us everyday, and we are realizing that 90% of our ministry will come simply from the fact that everyone is watching us all of the time. They watch how we act. They watch our marriage, how we spend our money, what we eat, when we do our devotions, what we wear, how we spend our time and how we treat people. The man that tends several gardens on campus will litterally stand outside of our bedroom window and see what we're doing and ask us questions at 6:30 in the morning! (Good motivation to be up and dressed by then!)

However, the hardest part about being here comes from our growing realization how ENGRAINED darkness is here in Haiti, and how very small our light sometimes feels. It is an overwehleming darkness that comes from hundreds of years of decreasing moral standards, increasing poverty, and the ever steady reliance and integration of voodoo in everyday living. Whereas movies and books have portrayed voodoo to be some kind of foolishness surrounding sticking pins in dolls, Voodoo in Haiti is a very real and dangerous thing. Witchdoctors in Haiti are not herbalists or medical doctors, but are instead men in the business of convincing people that their struggles are a result of a curse, which only they, with the help of Satan, can extract (in exchange, of course, for a large fee...for the service of your children as slaves...etc.)

While this sounds like something that would easily be seen as a hoax, it has been SUCH an accepted part of Haitian culture for so long that even the most educated in Haiti continue to deped on it. Even Christian men and women, when faced with hardship, are almost programmed to turn to a witchdoctor or a voodoo practice. When life is hard here (which is pretty much all of the time) it is built into Haitian DNA to seek Satan for help. Just as seeking the Lord through devotional time, giving, worship and service makes people become more and more like the Lord, seeking Satan through witchdoctors, giving, and voodoo ceremonies makes people more like Satan...and we continue to believe that Satan is not even capable of producing anything good. Looking around Haiti at people struggling with so much need, pain, evil and sickness, this seems to prove the point!Recognizing this as a reality in Haiti is quite discouraging for us to face! Any missionary that has been here for long can share stories of people coming to the Lord after years of ministry, only to continue to practice Voodoo alongside. Some days we really wonder what can be done, even if we were 100 people and even if we had 1000 years.

However, Matt brought up a very revelant point the other day. We were discussing this frustration, and he said, "Do you remember when those miners were buried underground in the States? There wasn't much hope for them, and it didn't seem to make a lot of sense to look for them. But in the end, whatever the cost, they HAD to look for them, simply because they knew they were down there."

We believe that part of why we are here today is to tell you that THERE ARE people down here who are so very lost that it seems like they are beyond all hope. Haiti sometimes seems to be too much of a mess to really spend much time and money on. But NOW we KNOW that there are people down here who are enslaved to Voodoo, suffering from poverty and sickness, and dying every single day without knowing a thing their entire lives other than darkness and chains. And they are worth being here for, worth supporting us for, worth praying for, and worth STAYING here for...Because they are here (and we can't pretend that they aren't!) and we have to keep being small lights, have to keep helping, keep teaching, keep struggling and keep being Christ to a people that don't even know what freedom is.

It is not happy days and good friends and lovely weather that has us here, but it simply the knowledge that He died so that people don't HAVE to live like this. Because we know the Lord and live in His full freedom and light, we have to continue trying to give Him to others.

There are people out there dying every single day without know of His great love.

Now you know.



"Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name;
you are Mine!
When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
And through the rivers,
they will not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be scorched,
Nor will the flame burn you.
You are precious in my sight
You are honored,
and I LOVE YOU."
Isaiah 43:1-4