The Dominican Republic for my 50th

Some of my friends have gone to Hawaii or the South Pacific for a landmark birthday. Some have gone to the Holy Land. My big landmark birthday will be Monday. While it is a school holiday here (the Day of the Dead!), I have no big plans to commemorate the day, just plans to teach our Godly Woman coordinator to use an electric sewing machine and to meet with the management team to plan strategies to deal with the recent major increase in the Haitian minimum wage. HAFF staff members enjoy observing each others' birthdays with a little evening party, so, I presume that will happen. My exotic birthday trip was last weekend, a little closer to home.

It has been a busy 8 weeks since Greg and Barb and Heidi and Jeff and I arrived in Haiti. School is well under way as are the Godly Woman and Young Leader's for God classes. Jeff and Heidi are settled into their routines and Greg and Barb and I have settled back into our normal busyness of meetings and teaching and maintaining the property and taking people to the hospital and fitting people for glasses and working in the office and all the other many things we do at HAFF each day and each week.

Two weeks ago Dr Jerry returned and he now has his dental clinic up and running. Yesterday a new family, Jonathan and Kathy arrived with their baby, Jackson. They will be staying at HAFF for 6 weeks to help out and investigate future possibilities. And today, Carla and Colin and Becky and Rachel return to Haiti. We are also hoping that Barb and Greg's daughter Gabi will be able to join us in a few weeks time.

It will be a busy 7 weeks until I go back to the US for Christmas. In this time we will be continuing our normal activities as well as orienting and helping Jonathan and Kathy, we will be preparing and submitting the major financial report for the Haitian Ministry of Finance and we will be hosting some groups of visitors.

In between these two blocks of busyness, Greg and Barb and Heidi and Jeff and I decided that it was the perfect time to take a break. So, last weekend, October 23 - 25, we went to the beach in the Dominican Republic. We all agree, if we go back, we want to go for longer. We were able to drive HAFF's Land Cruiser all the way to Cabarete, a major destination for Kite Surfing on the north coast.


Kite Surfing at the beach at Cabarete, Dominican Republic





Thankfully, the road conditions on the Haitian side have improved, so the trip only took about 7 ½ hours of driving time. At one point, that would have been the time needed just to get to the Haitian-Dominican border!

Our 2 nights and one full day at the Hotel Kaoba in central Cabarete, just minutes walk from the beach, was very pleasant. We didn't do much. We had several nice meals together,



Barb, Jeff, Heidi, Connie and Greg at breakfast Saturday in Cabarete.




we sat, walked, swam, flew kites on the beach and read and relaxed and enjoyed unstructured time. It was just what we needed.

Sadly, Barb and Jeff were not feeling well part of the time there and are recovering now we are all back home. And Heidi succumbed to what Jeff had once we got back.

We are looking forward to having all the staff houses full for a while and to having many hands to make the work light. Please pray for us for our health and ministry. Pray that the Lord would keep us well and would use us in all that we do to make His name known and to show forth His grace and mercy and love.

June - September 2009

It has been a while since I posted to the blog. I am sorry, but when I tried to post in June, I spent 10 hours trying to upload the photos for a post and the sessions kept timing out. I finally gave up! Then I was traveling and visiting all summer.
It was a crazy summer. We hosted several more teams after the veterinary team, prepared the teacher contracts for the coming school year and got arrangements made for the students going to the national exams. Then at the end of June I left Haiti for the US and spent 10 weeks traveling from coast to coast to coast (yes, three coasts)!
I drove to Pennsylvania and then flew to the west coast where I visited family and friends in the Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and Los Angeles areas for 2 weeks.

Mission Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA.

I spent a couple more days in Pennsylvania before driving to Portland, Maine to take the ferry to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island where I spent a week and a half visiting with the veterinarians who have been to HAFF.


The CAT Ferry between Portland, Maine and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

I went back to Pennsylvania for a few final days before heading south. I stopped to see an old high school friend in northern Kentucky, spent time with Greg and Barb in Georgia, and visited with the church in Tallahassee, Florida that sent a team this year. I wound up my time in the US visiting with people in the Fort Myers, Naples and Sebastian Florida areas.

September 3rd I flew back to Haiti with Greg and Barb and their dog Sophie and with Heidi and Jeff and their dog Rugby! Sophie and Rugby got off to a bit of a rough start that morning, but it was a stressful day for both of them. They quickly made friends once we got to HAFF and are good buddies now.

Greg, Barb, Gabi and Sophie at their home in Georgia

Jeff and Heidi and Rugby in Haiti

Heidi and Jeff will be with us here at HAFF till sometime in December. Heidi is doing agricultural research for her doctorate and Jeff is a medical doctor and an artist. There will also be a young family coming in October for 2 months to see if they will be coming with HAFF full time. Add in teams of visitors, and a large financial report due in to the Haitian government by the end of November and it looks like a busy fall even without counting the school and other educational programs that are the heart of why we are here!

Please pray for the HAFF ministry team, Haitian and American, as we work together to reach people for Christ through the medium of education. Pray for the devotions each morning in school and in each session of the non-formal educational programs. Pray with the staff weekly during the 1:00 Wednesday prayer time we have established.

Haitian and American HAFF Ministry Team members gathered for prayer

Please pray for Haiti. The rains failed completely this summer. There was so little rain that the dirt roads are in no worse condition now than they were when I left. With no rain, there has been and will be no harvest. People are hungrier now than last year at this time and some are saying that God has forgotten them. Thankfully there have been some rains since we've been back that give hope for harvests of sorghum, congo peas and black eyed peas and sweet potatoes. Please pray that we would have the wisdom and resources to have an appropriate response to the needs around us. And pray that we would be able to bring encouragement and the assurance that God has not by any means forgotten about His people in Haiti.

Canada Veterinary and Rhode Island Eye Team

It has been an unusual week for me and my colleagues at HAFF this week.

Monday a retinologist from Rhode Island and 3 veterinarians, 3 veterinary students and an animal health technician from Canada arrived for 8 days at HAFF. Since then, things have been very busy!


Normally when a team of veterinarians is at HAFF, I spend most of my time with them, translating at clinics and seminars. This time, with a retinologist on hand, and since I work in the HAFF eyeglass clinic, I have been spending most of my time with Dr Lory. I did take time away from the eyeglass clinic yesterday to spend the morning at the vet clinic translating for Dr Lory's daughter Thais, a vet student who is graduating this month.


The veterinary part of the team has been busy with neutering and spaying dogs and mules

and vaccinating and de-worming and treating sick animals.

Their vaccination clinics have been a race to see as many animals as possible before it rains!

Dr Lory has been seeing BTI students who need glasses and who have dry eyes and folks from the community with all kinds of problems such as macular degeneration, cataracts, needing reading glasses, a freckle on the cornea, eyelids that turn out, eyelids that turn in, just to name a few. With 114 students and 84 community people signed up, the days in the eye clinic have been long – not ending till between 6:00 and 7:30 pm, even though not everyone signed up has come.


Thursday morning, the veterinarians showed the students at school how to care for donkeys, chickens and goats and about parasites. Dr Lory showed them the structure of the eye and talked about how the eye works and what can cause it problems.

Monday the local veterinary agents will come for an all day seminar on surgery and post surgery care and the structure and function of the eye. There will also be one more eye clinic in the morning.

ONG, Sondeo, Christmas and STA

There are several strange words and acronyms in that title. Briefly, the ones you might not know are the French acronym for Non-Governmental Organization, a Spanish (I believe) term for a Rapid Rural Assessment and Sustainable Tropical Agriculture. Those 3 terms and Christmas summarize the highlights of the last couple of months.

After the Chattanooga team left in November, we started working in earnest on the ONG Report required each year by the Haitian government. It is a huge report asking for lots of details about the activities of the organization during the previous October through September. The US staff gathered to look over the forms and to divide up the tasks of gathering and tabulating the details needed.



It was necessary to look through accounting records and to ask our Haitian staff members for their input as well.



Barb and I then took everyone's results and put it into the official forms for the government. This report consumed a great deal of all of our time during most of November.

Heidi is former ECHO intern who spent 3 months at HAFF in the 1990's. She is now working on her graduate degree in entomology.

Rob is a lawyer from Virginia working on his graduate degree in Agriculture. Rob heard about Heidi and HAFF through ECHO and he and Heidi are working on a joint research project that brought them to HAFF in November just before Thanksgiving.

Heidi, her husband Jeff and Paul, a friend from their church, joined Rob in a Sondeo of farmers living in the Bohoc area.




During 4 days the US HAFF staff and some former HAFF students joined the team in visiting people's homes and gardens and engaging them in conversation. The conversations were a way to help determine what people were growing, what other activities they carry on to make money, what pest and other problems they have and what they do with what they grow. It was a fascinating and informative 4 days. Heidi and Rob will now be working on the paper with input from us here in Haiti.

I just got back to Bohoc from 3 weeks in the US for Christmas. I spent most of the time in Texas with my Uncle.

We kept very busy visiting Texan historic sites from The Alamo to the Alsatian town of Castroville to the Birthplace of Texas, Washington on the Brazos, to Mission Espiritu Santo and Presidio La Bahia in Goliad.

We celebrated Christmas and New Years with friends

and were thrilled by the music of ŚLĄSK (pronounced shlonsk), the National Ballet of Poland. It was a busy time.

I arrived back in Bohoc Thursday evening about 6:00. Friday afternoon the STA class from Gordon College arrived. They will be here till Wednesday morning learning about Haiti, Haitian agriculture and what is being done about agricultural problems.


Please pray for Haiti and for HAFF. Times are still tough for the people in the area and it is hard not to be able to meet all the needs we hear about. Please pray for the school that the students would work hard and would develop godly characters.