Written by Adam Shell & Kait Connealy

With all of the chaos of the past two days, we have had to put both days into one incredible blog post. We will begin with Sunday.

On Sunday, our group attended church in Savanette at the Baptist church. The church service was definitely a cultural experience; we enjoyed singing songs in Creole and English to the Haitian congregation. For the rest of the service, we tried to comprehend what was going on as the pastor and choir were speaking in only Creole with no translator. Despite the language barrier, we were incredibly blessed by the service and worshipping our God together with the people of Savanette, even if we were just humming along.

After church, we returned to the compound for some lunch. We had ham and cheese sandwiches and some citrus drink. Once we all finished lunch, we decided to bless the cooks by cleaning the dishes for them. They have worked very hard for us all week, arriving at 6 AM every day and leaving at 8 PM, so they definitely deserved a small break. After this, our group began individual reflection time to process the week we just spent in Haiti. All of us went off to various spots on the compound, and while there each of us thought specifically about what God was trying to teach us this week. We all found the reflection time to be beneficial.

At 4 PM, our plans changed (shocking). Originally, we were going to finish goat deliveries, but instead we headed back to Pignon to pray at the hospital that MH4H supports. While at the hospital, we also spent time singing and talking with patients.

We then returned to the Savanette compound. We aren’t going to miss that bumpy truck-bed ride too much we don’t think, although we do love the opportunity to wave and attempt to speak Creole to people on the side of the road during that time. We ate dinner and went over some housekeeping things for leaving donations with the compound to distribute to the community.

Together as a big group, we headed out to the Thrive for Five center and talked about the week. Zeke and Woody shared letters that the attendees of the conference on Thursday and Friday had written. It’s safe to say we were all very blessed by the kind words of encouragement that the community wrote to us. After that, everybody shared what God was laying on their heart during the course of the trip. We were all encouraged to hear the many different ways that God was moving in each of us this week. Some of us felt called to mission work in other areas; others were able to confirm their passions for children; some expressed a heavy heart for Haiti itself. During this time, a super scary bug landed on Joe’s leg while he was sharing. Needless to say, there was a lot of jumping and screaming before he could finish his story. We then went off to pack for the next day, play some final rounds of jungle Uno, and head to bed.

 

This is the killer bug that landed on Joe’s shoulder! His reaction was classic.

We woke up bright and early at the crack of animal noises just like every other morning on Monday. We ate a quick breakfast, packed up the vans, and said goodbye to some of the Haitian staff. We then got into the vans and began the long drive to Wahoo Bay Resort (north of Port Au-Prince). We were happy to have some of the Haitian staff accompany us on this trip. While the countryside was very beautiful, the driver we had was a pretty crazy driver by American standards. We have learned this week that honking the horn in a vehicle means: I’ll go first; you go first; get out of my way; I’m passing you; You can pass me; Hi; Your goats are loose. In short, we don’t know what honking means. After the long drive, we were very excited to arrive at Wahoo Bay around lunch.

Some of us did better than others during the ride from Pignon to Wahoo Bay.

We settled into our rooms and quickly changed into swimsuits to explore the resort. Because the food takes so long here, we actually ordered our food, headed to the ocean, and then came back around an hour later. The resort has a nice beach and pool, and many of us found our inner-child whilst playing on the water trampolines. The group somewhat broke up to do various things, whether it was to lay by the pool, go snorkeling, or take super cold showers for 10 minutes at a time (looking at you, Adelmo).

The view from Wahoo Bay. One of the sets of people that went snorkeling.

We got dinner at the resort, and proceeded to spend the rest of the night chatting about the trip and talking about future plans. For some reason, the girls left this joyous time to go watch The Bachelorette. To be fair, most of the guys left as well to watch the Heat-Pacers play-off game. The guys activity sounds exponentially better (in the opinion of Adam).

Tomorrow, we will leave the resort around 6:30 AM, and after a long day of flying we will land in Des Moines late tomorrow night. It’s hard to believe that this is our last night here, and we cannot wait to tell you all about this trip in person. There has been so much more than these short posts.

That being said, as recent college graduates, we are now submitting our final homework assignment. We are pretty thrilled about that as well.

Bondye Bon!