a beautiful church and some graduation beautification

Yesterday was a beautiful Sabbath, starting out with good communion with our brothers and sisters in Pastor Elizay's church. Located right next to the airport, their tin church has been built on top of a garbage dump, and consists only of tin siding, wood, and beautiful people.

John, one of the men visiting us from Sharptown Church in New Jersey, is a worship leader, and shared some special music with the congregation. As he put it, "it is a little slice of heaven" to sing "How Great Thou Art" in English, and have a whole congregation of people lift their Creole voices to sing the same hymn. It was GREAT!

I was also overjoyed to listen to only the second woman (in our three years here) preach yesterday, and preach WELL. Their men's group also sings some fantastic gospel music, and Elizay is such a humble and passionate man for the Lord...It was a great service.

In the afternoon, the "decoration committee" made up of 10 women from Saccanville in partnership with a group of students, brought the decorations to our house for graduation. The students are going ALL out, complete with decorated cowboy hats, painted palm trees, and paper cut out hearts. While Matt and I are about as crazy for cowboy hats as we were for the blue-scroll wall painting, we keep telling each other: Repeat after me...this is NOT an American graduation!

Paul, Matt and Luke told the guys to make it BEAUTIFUL, and it will be Haiti-beautiful! I'll have fun pictures coming...

Aunt Lisa is coming today and we are SO excited. I'm not sure how we would make it through this week of final exam grading, decorating, graduation planning, final year staff and student parties, finalizing summer presentations, packing, cleaning and hosting four visitors, without her!!!