We currently have three urgent giving needs at Emmaus Biblical Seminary...
With 55 students moving in on August 21st, we need help getting the year started! Beginning a new year means several large purchases for Emmaus: an abundance of food, additional power, dozens of textbooks, additional staff, office and janitorial supplies, all totaling about $10,000.
We have 10 new men and women joining the student body this year, with everyone enrolled in practical and powerful courses such as Missiology and Systematic Theology. We continue to God work through the equipping of Godly leaders here in Haiti, and we need your help.
On Saturday, August 9th, a huge lightning storm struck our generator house. Emmaus is required to generate ALL electricity for itself, and through the generosity of many, we have a battery bank, inverter system and 2 generators. However, lightning fried two major parts of our inverter system and a major part of the generator.
In the extreme August heat, we are living on very limited power (read: melted freezers, no fans at night, no water when the generator isn’t running) and with fried inverters, we have NO way to charge or use our batteries.
We need $3000 to replace the parts fried from this freak and frustrating catastrophe, and every day without the parts is not only an incredibly challenging one without power, but also a day that we are not benefitting financially from using our battery and inverter system.
We have ONE more student from the class of 2016 who is in need of sponsorship!
Louis Claudin (read his testimony below) is our last student who needs a family, church or individual to come alongside him as he studies and ministers through Emmaus!
A full scholarship--$2000 USD--is needed for Louis, but any scholarships in any amount will help make it possible for Emmaus to feed, house, teach and be a part of the ministry God has called him to here in Haiti.
GIVE NOW (365693 LOUIS)
We rejoice that as we sweat and struggle and stand as ministers of reconciliation between God and Haiti that you are with us.
In the suffocating, mosquito-filled black of night, you are with us. In the challenging and life-changing classroom, you are with us. On the mountain tops of Haiti, where His Word continues to be faithfully taken out and sown…you are with us.
Because we are One Body, because of your support and prayers, because of how He has called us each to be a part of His Kingdom in Haiti, you are with us.
Be with us now.
Thank you sincerely for holding are ropes as we all work in Haiti for Him, together!
Student: Louis Claudin
Family: married, baby on the way
Ministry Focus: mountain ministry
Testimony Highlights:
I was born in St. Michel into a Catholic family who was very very poor. They explained to me when I was still very small how I had been born into misery. I was born after four daughters, and my family had always hoped for a boy so that they would have a child who could provide for them.
In my whole family, everyone had girls and girls and girls, so while my mom and dad were very happy to have a son, my extended family became jealous.
Many people in the family were cursing me and spending time at the voodoo temple, trying to lift the curses in their own families.
After weeks of this, I finally died, or that is what my family told me. All night, they screamed and cried for me, but in the morning, they ran and got my mother, and told her, “He is playing! He isn’t dead anymore! Come see!”
So I was alive again, they said, and even when I was little, they always told me about this. They always had me in the Haitian Catholic Church, and finally I asked my mom when I was small, “How did I live when I was dead? Was it God?”
“Yes,” she told me, “But we've never seen anything like that, so I guess it was THE God.”
“Then, I guess I can’t stay in the Haitian Catholic Church anymore, because there are many gods there and it seems that there is only one true.”
I left the Catholic church, and all of my sisters and my brother, born after me, all thought my reasoning was very sound, and left the Haitian Catholic church together…everyone but my mom.
I was so used to being in church, that when we left the Catholic Church we all started going to the community Gospel church. The first time I heard the true Gospel, I wanted it, and went to the front, asked them to pray for me, and became a Christian.
When I led the family away from our tradition, my parents put me out, and I moved to Port-au-Prince to live with my uncle, who was a Christian pastor there.
I didn’t like life in Port-au-Prince. Life was very harsh and ugly there, and I came back to Fort-St. Michel and moved in with another cousin who lived in Cap-Haitian, and found a little work.
I’ve always been a simple person. What I find to do, I do.
I had never been to school. Ever. Never been sent, never had a chance.
So, when I was 19, and I found this small job to clean a school, I took every penny I made and sent myself to school at the same place.
At nineteen, I started first grade.
I put myself through a few years of school, and then the school where I worked went under, and I lost my job. There was a missionary in Cap-Haitian at the time, Vanessa, and when she saw I lost my job but wanted to keep getting my education, she helped me pay my tuition so that I could continue.
Everytime things got incredibly difficult for me, all my friends told me to leave church, to leave God. But I couldn’t. He had given me my life, and even if I didn’t have 5 pennies to ride to church, I would walk an hour to be there. I started teaching a Sunday school group in my church, and was finally baptized.
I finally finished my schooling in 2011.
I asked God what I should do, and in a vision that night a group of people came to me and said, “You work. God gave you back your life for a reason. Go find those people and tell them.”
I came and shared that with my pastor, and he started praying with me for my future.
In September 2013 I got married, and that was the same month I started in the Seminary. There was a group people who knew Vanessa, and when Cholera passed over Haiti, I was helping them, and they were helping people in Haiti with Ambassador Medical.
When I felt called to Seminary, it was them who helped me find Emmaus and helped me come to the Seminary.
I would really like to work in the mountains. I have always been a timid and gentle spirited person, and the city is hard for me. I have a big heart for people living simpler lives in the mountains, to share the Gospel with them.
There have been many challenges I my life. The little bit that I have found has been stolen. The difficulties in my life are huge. But God helps me to forget these things and stay focused on Him and on studying His Word. My wife and I live in Cap-Haitian.
My wife is five months pregnant, and we are in the church near our house, working there with Pastor St-Il Joseph.
Pray for my family. Pray for my family who still does not know Jesus. Pray for God to continue to make ways for me to provide for my wife and to help with my family. My mom is still deeply engrained in the Haitian Catholic Church, and I keep sharing.
(with 365693 LOUIS as your project)
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