Tuesday, August 28, 2007

New Toys!!

Greetings from the HOH. Jenny is back from PAP, Linda is finished teaching her courses, and we are trying to get everyone and everything ready for school that is opening on Monday the 3rd. Where oh where did the summer vacation go?

Thank you for your prayers for the boat and customs and all of that. We were able to receive a number of boxes over the weekend, and among them were three tubs of new toys for the kids. They have been having so much fun on the trikes, and with the balls, and all kinds of other things. We are so thankful for the church in Vancouver, WA whose children collected and sent these toys to our children.

I was not able to take Ciliana to PAP for testing, so that will have to happen at another time. We are looking forward to our friends from England, and the Hands of Hope who will be coming this Friday to spend a week with us.

Most of the Our Hope young people who went to visit their homes, are back. Several of them had the opportunity to teach 5 Day clubs in their home areas while visiting, and a number of children came to know Jesus as their Savior as a result of these clubs. We are thankful that God is using our young people to teach others about Him.

We have a number of new babies who have come to the HOH with severe malnutrition. Their names are Bendjy, Shelov, and Keisha. Please pray for them and their parents who are staying with them as they are really struggling to make it.

We appreciate your prayers for us very much. These next few days/weeks as we get everyone ready and into school will be very busy ones for us. We also will begin our evening Bible studies, so I could use your prayers as I prepare the materials for these. Please continue to pray for God's provision for our needs, and that we would be lights, shining forth God's love to those around us.

Have a great week!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Malaria

Well, that pretty much sums up my week last week! I started not feeling well about Tuesday, but thought I was just really tired. The weather has been so hot here, you break into a sweat just sitting in the shade doing nothing, so I realized something was wrong when I started trembling on Wednesday night. Anyway, got my finger stuck, my blood checked, and started treatment on Thursday, which pretty much was the end of my week. I'm feeling much better, with a greater respect for mosquitoes, and my need to stay away from them!

Things have calmed down significantly as far as activity at the HOH, for which
we are somewhat thankful. About 15 of the "Our Hope" young people have gone to their home communities to visit their families for a few weeks. So our numbers have dropped, and with that comes less activity.

Linda is busy in the mornings teaching another Child Evangelism Fellowship course for the next two weeks. She'd appreciate your prayers for her that she'd communicate well, and that God would use her to train these students how to share the Gospel and the Bible with children in their local communities. Pray also for good health for her, the other teachers and the students, as they have a lot of work to get through in these two weeks.

We've received several new children in during the past week. One of them is a 12 year old girl named Michelda (pictured here). She is unable to walk, and the doctors are still unsure as to why that is. At the moment she is under observation, but might begin treatment for TB of the spine soon.

Ciliana is continuing to do really well. We still don't have clear results from her tests, but that still makes us think it's a good thing, and that she might be rejecting her mom's antibodies, and turn negative any time now. I'll be heading to Port-au-Prince next week to attend a CrossWorld Ladies' Retreat, and will take her with me. We'll try and redo the tests, and hopefully find a more conclusive answer.

The drainage canal we were working on is now finished. Boy did we get that done just in time. The day after we finished it rained, torrential tropical rains for several hours on end. We can't even imagine all the damage all that water would have done to the HOH if we hadn't had the canals finished. But then God knew all about that didn't He? It's so nice to know He's in control.

We appreciate your prayer for us very much. Please continue to pray for God's provision for our needs. We have a praise in that department, some friends of the HOH offered to pay for the cost of putting in the canal, so that is a huge help to us. Another prayer request we have concerns the shipping company that has brought supplies in for us from Miami for many years now. With new laws and regulations being put in place in Haiti every day, it is becoming more and more difficult for these boats to bring in supplies. The boat has come in this week, but is unsure that it will make any more trips with supplies, depending on how difficult the government makes things. So please pray that we'll be able to work through all of this. The best thing would be for things to be not that hard, and the company be able to continue bringing things in for us. We do have a lot of stuff in transit at the moment as well, so pray that we receive all that is for us during this time of transition.

We heard back about some of our other students, a number of them in the higher grades didn't pass their exams and will have to redo their school year. Among them are Ronel and Phania. Ruben failed, but with enough points that he has a chance to rewrite the parts of the exam he messed up on, so he is busy studying and would appreciate your prayers on his behalf. On that same note, school is just around the corner, so we'll be busily preparing for that in the next couple of weeks...boy this summer just blew right by!

Well thanks again for your prayers...til the next time...Bye

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Whew!! Let's all catch our breath!

Well, we made it through Staff Camp, most of our visitors have gone back to their homes, and we were looking forward to a relaxing week of just catching up on things around the HOH. But instead, it has been one of those weeks, where everything seems to be happening at the same time. First of all, Monday morning we realized the main drainage canal from the HOH was totally blocked and the water was backing up into the HOH. So the boys started working on getting it unblocked. Problem is, when the new hospital was built right beside us, they built right on top of our canal, and didn't leave any access places to check it out if there were ever any problems. Well, in the middle of trying to figure out how to unblock the drainage canal we were called to the other side of our property to check out a septic tank. It was very evident that the tank was full and overflowing onto our yard. So we had to stop the drainage project, to work on emptying out the septic tank, by hand, after digging a huge hole to empty it into. Having finished that, we returned to the drainage canal, only to get the metal pole stuck, that we were attempting to stick into the canal to unplug it. The next day we got some help with the metal pole, and it finally came out, but after a third whole day of working on the drainage canal, it is still just as plugged as ever. Thus we came to the conclusion that we must build a new one. We knew this was going to have to be done at sometime, we were definitely hoping for a later time, but it can't wait at this point. So today the boys are at it again, working hard to dig a new ditch to put the drainage canal in. This time it won't be under the hospital!

In the midst of all of this, the maintenance men of the hospital came to tell us that we needed to cut down the dead palm tree that stands right beside the HOH. It has become more and more of a danger whenever we have high winds, and they were sure that yesterday was the day for the tree to come down. It was unbelievably nerve wracking, as we watched them work on cutting it down. It was so close to the house, just a tiny mistake and it could have been a mess. We prayed the whole time they were cutting...and it came down perfectly in the best possible place. Praise God! Here's a picture of Bòs Dieunousa cutting it down. And then here's one of it on the ground.So you can see these past few days since camp have been a bit hectic. Thanks for your prayers for us, and please continue to pray as we work on getting the drainage canal finished before any major rains, or we'll be in a lot of trouble.

We just got back the wonderful news that both Benitha, and Jean Daniel passed their grade 9 government exams this year! They are so excited. And even more exciting is that Jean Daniel was the Valedictorian for his school! Praise God together with us for this great news.


We are still awaiting the news for Ciliana's tests. I know some of you think I've forgotten to let you know, but that isn't the case. The clinic that performed the tests sent word that the first set of tests came back inconclusive, so they did a second one, it too came back inconclusive. So I will be taking her to Port-au-Prince once again this month to be tested. This is really good news, as we feel that if she was going to be positive, it wouldn't keep coming back inconclusive. Perhaps that's wishful thinking on our part...but please keep this in your prayers. As you can see from the picture she is doing extremely well, and has started to get a tooth!

We appreciate your prayers for us so much, and ask that you thank God with us for his provisions for all of our needs, and ask Him as well to continue to provide, especially as all these new expenses are popping up to fix things.