G R A D U A T I O N 2 0 1 0 !

After a long day of airports and airplanes, we are safely home, well fed on Root Beer floats and Bob Evans, and enjoying the little things we have missed from home and our home culture...air-conditioning, Meijers, smooth roads, jeans! For Lily, Ohio is like an entirely foreign world, and she is just mesmerized with carpeting, string cheese, and the family cat.

Graduation was fantastic! Everything went so smoothly

I was laughing SO hard in this picture...One of the cooks, Mona, was taking the picture, and it was the first picture she had ever taken in her life. She was SO excited, and wanted it to look just perfect, and was critiquing and rearranging everyone's hair, dress, smile...

A church choir from Vaudreil came and sang a few special songs...

...second year student Civil "Artist" gave a performance,...

and then seminary choir just brought the house down...they were FANTASTIC!

Though the Haitian culture differs in many ways from American culture, I'm PRETTY sure I have a picture JUST like this of someone texting from my sister's college graduation :)

Saying Good-bye was hard for Gertha and us, even if only for a few weeks.
Matt translating for Dr. Bill Cooper, who gave a short speech about the last years of EBS and about the hope Haiti has today.
Several students were recognized and given class "appointments".

The valedictorian, Loubens Joseph, gave a speech as well, bringing the ceremony to a little over three hours...whew! We praise the Lord for this awesome celebration and ending of a school year where His presence and leading was so magnificent.

You can see more pictures at the Seminary blog.

gettin' ready for the BIG day!

Everything is in quite a flurry in Saccanville today! The last two days have been SO full. There are no stores to buy decorations and no printing presses to order signs, so everything has been done from scratch. The huge metal sign now hanging out front was created from scratch by one of the students who is a welder, and then the design was created, projected, traced and hand-painted (yeah, Lisa and I have spent A LOT of hours in the garage after Lily was in bed), and then welded to the wall using our truck to power the welder.

Lisa took a quick break for her first motorcycle ride....Then finished the sign, cleaned out my cabinets, babysat Lily, packed our suitcases, made lunch...this chick is unbelievable!

I haven't been able to get to the bottom of WHY exactly trees are painted for celebrations in Haiti, except for "It's beautiful!" Works for me! Did I mention that ALL the trees have been painted???

Extra benches have been brought in from the church, ladies from the community will be here soon to hang all the hats and flowers and sparkly "Jesus, I love you" signs. The lawn was cut this morning, and an abundance of bulletin's and song lyrics still need printed and cut...

The cooks have even whipped up a huge meal today for all of the workers, complete with crab.

Tomorrow promises to be a big day!

And this final photo, by request, Matt posed just for you...anything for Martin and Sharon!

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!!!