Simple, but not easy!

We may not have piles of snow around our doors or low, gray skies, but we are anticipating spring as much as everyone else!  Winter here is not a lot different weather wise than most of the rest of the year except for the lack of rainfall.  We haven’t experienced a measurable rain here for nearly 2 months!  It is a time of harvest in December and now a time of preparation for the planting season in March.  It’s also an exciting time around the school! The school day is pretty normal, but things are close to being in place to make the much anticipated floor repairs....

All the gravel, like 12 yards, was carried up by the
students!  7/10 ths. mi. uphill!

Drinking from the saucer?  A cool drink
after a hot job.

The people were pretty impressed with this
 big machine!

and Saturday morning, a bulldozer rumbled over the hill!  A bulldozer in this part of Haiti is big news and everyone in the neighborhood came out to watch the big machine work on the new road that will connect our area to the main road by the river.  Everyone is pretty excited about it!  Just the thought of being able to get a machine closer to their homes brings relief to our hard working neighbors.  Life here is simple.  If you need to go somewhere, you just pile what you need in a sack on your head and go.  It is also very hard!  If you need to go somewhere, you just pile what you need in a sack on your head and go.

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And when you go, it’s not just down to the local market or convenience store when you need a gallon of milk or some toilet paper.  A trip to market will usually consume an entire day.  And depending on what you found, you might have to change all your meal plans for the week.  Maybe that’s why when you ask most Haitians what they are eating the answer is almost always “dire ak pwa”, rice and beans.  Even things a simple as your morning coffee involve planning and a considerable amount of work.  There is a good side to all this work though.  Almost everything we eat could be labeled ‘certified organic’!  With no refrigeration, everything is very fresh and there is very little use of herbicides and pesticides. 

No wonder their eyes are always burning!

We are pretty big fans of the ‘fresh’ part of our lives, especially the drinks. Your morning coffee starts with raw beans roasted over an open fire in very smokey hut,

“pile” (pounded) to a powder in a “mach ak pilon” (a HUGE mortar and pestle),

You always have to try to 'ede' (help).  It always
produces uproarious laughter !

They like it really fine, but Cheryl get's them
to leave a few chunks to snack on!

sifted and pounded some more.   If you like your coffee sweet, you’d love Haitian coffee!  They like to add a LOT of sugar when they roast their beans.  We just get strange looks when we ask for ours “pa sik” (without sugar).  They can’t understand how anyone could drink coffee “ame’“(bitter).

Besides coffee, there are fruit juices.  We always thought that living in the tropics you would have fresh fruit all the time, but really they have seasons here just like everywhere else.  It’s easy to tell what fruit is in season because the kids will show up at our door trying to sell whatever is ripe.  Many of the fruits we have had here are not for eating, but for juice.  When we first arrived, it was ‘grenadia’ (passion fruit).

They're really not ready until they turn yellow
and get all wrinkly!

 

This small seedy fruit makes a wonderful juice and, so far it is our favorite.  After cutting it open, you scoop out the pulp and seeds and “pase” (strain, strainer) out the seeds.  The juice is extremely intense and just a few fruits, along with sugar and water, makes a lot delicious juice. 

Perhaps the weirdest fruit we’ve seen yet is the “kowsol” which is in season right now. 

 The kowsol is a large, prickly, green fruit that needs to be forced through the pase with a mach to remove the seeds and extract the juice. 

Really, I think you are extracting the flavor more than the juice because you pile (pronounced peela with a long a), add water, pile, add water and pile some more. We’re not sure how long, maybe just until your arms get tired.  The fruit is really hard to describe as it is not similar to anything you would be familiar with.  The flesh kinda resembles an overripe cantaloupe that is kinda stringy but tougher than a cantaloupe.  The flesh also is full brown seeds that are about the size of a large bean.  The juice is fairly sweet and has a flavor and aroma similar to a pear, but we like it better mixed with a little citrus.  The Haitians like to mix milk with theirs too, it makes an interesting flavor.

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Work in the “zonion”(onion) gardens is ongoing too.   The seeds are planted and the watering has begun.  This means many trips up to the garden, down to the river, up to the garden, down to the river, with a bucket of water.  Simple, but not easy.  We've worked at trying different pumps to take away some of this manual labor.

  This push/pull pump works pretty well.  It took a couple tries to get it to work well without getting too wet, but with it we can fill a 50 gallon barrel in about 10 minutes.  

Yeah, that's the pipe going up to the garden!  You can see the barrels up
at the top of the shaded areaTinom's garden is terraced up behind
the tree in the center to where the vegetation begins again.  

Pumping water up 30+ feet to the garden makes for some tough pumping, but last evening 3 of us provided water for 4 gardens in less than 2 hours.

Tinom watering his 'jarden'.

It would be soooo nice too, if you could trust leaving your stuff out, but everything, pipe, buckets, barrels, pump, has to be taken down and carried to a secure place across the river.  The gardens are watered twice a day, every day, for 6-7 weeks.

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One other recent highlight was the opportunity to connect with a medical team from the Cincinnati/Dayton area that included one of Cheryl’s friends from Kettering Hospital.  We’d met a young boy with a mass growing on his neck that seemed to be getting larger.  We had hoped to get him to see a doctor, but really didn’t know how to proceed.  We wanted to see an American doctor and knowing someone on this team provided a very unique opportunity to sidestep some of the waiting process and get him seen.  We took Elifaite and his mother with us on our visit and Steph (Cheryl’s friend) had told the team we were coming. 

 They took us right in and got started on some tests.  We still spent most of the day there, but we left with a fairly confident diagnosis that Elifaite had TB and the growth was not cancerous.  We praise God for that, because TB is treatable with medication and diet improvement, and once the diagnosis is confirmed we can get him in a med program that is free!  It’s hard to be happy to say someone has TB, but a cancer diagnosis for a mountain person would be very difficult to manage.  Thank you Jesus for hearing our prayers!

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Some things are just too good to pass up.  Parents, how many times have you scolded your children for playing with their food?

I'm thinking this takes it to a whole new level!!!!

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• On a personal note, you can continue to pray for us to be more selfless in our ministry and more Christ focused in everything we do.  Last evening we watched a video from Louis Gigllio’s talk in Passion 2012, and felt the Spirit of God speak to us through him.  He was teaching from Eph. 6:18-20, with emphasis on vs. 19,   “and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. “ (ESV) It is easy to get caught up in doing things and forget who you are doing them for.  

• With the construction of a road, we are also considering the purchase of a 4 wheeler for transportation.  Pray with us for wisdom in this decision and that God will provide the necessary funding to make it possible if it is His will.  We are truly blessed by your support!  We are very careful to be good stewards of everything God provides.  

• We try to keep up to date with what is happening here.  We’d love to hear from you to keep us up to date with what is happening in your world.  Drop us a note if you get a chance either in the comments on this page or to pkaufman3@gmail.com but please make sure you put something in the subject bar.  Our computers are very precious and notes with no subject don’t get opened because of the possibility of virus’. 

We pray for you every day.  Thank you for praying for us!

“Bon jou ak Jesi”   (Have a good day with Jesus!)    

Edmond, our favorite moto driver.