So wow, we’ve been back here for 3 weeks and yeah, it’s time
to catch you up a bit. The trip back was
uneventful except for not finding 4 flash drives that were in the outside
pocket of our one carry-ons. I hate carrying a bunch of luggage in the airport
and trying to pack it in the overhead bins. Our flight from Seattle to Dallas
was full so they offered to check any carry-ons through to our destination
free. I love it when that happens. It didn’t work out so well this time
though. Someone looked through the
outside pockets of the bag and scooped out 4 memory sticks, including a brand
new 16 gig and one that a friend had loaded with teaching CDs for us. It’s nothing valuable or irreplaceable, but
it’s pretty disappointing. Lesson
learned.
We spent Thursday night at the mission house in Fond
Parisiene, and waited Friday for Clint Bower to swing by and pick us and all
our stuff up and haul us up the mountain to Soliette.
Clint has been working on a goat house up
here, to eventually help the locals with improving the quality of their
goats. He was bringing up a load of
materials for that and stayed with us for a couple nights while we worked on
it. He’d brought a generator and
electric hand saw and boy did it attract the attention. I ended up being his cutter for flooring and
rafters and in 2 days had it ready for roofing.
The government had finally settled October 1 as the start
date for all schools. I spent most of a week putting skirt boards around the
school to attach the tarps to and putting up the tarps.
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| First you had to lay the tarps out and cut them in half. |
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| Screws with pieces of plastic bottle to keep them from tearing holds everything on. |
This is a yearly process and pretty much a
pain. I think this is the first year
since the earthquake that we’ve started with all new tarps all around the
outside.
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| Looks pretty good, fresh and new. Hoping to be hurricane free for the rest of the year. 'Canes are tough on tarps! |
Hopefully, this will be the
last one too. If you don’t mind a little
commercial right here I’ll elaborate.
Our prayer is to put up block walls around the perimeter this winter to
include steel doors and windows with bars and shutters. The cost for this project is $3500 – 4000.00. We’d love for you to participate in that
need. Also we are in need of
laborers! Surely a couple weeks on a
beautiful Caribbean island in January or February sounds delightful, doesn’t
it?
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| Now it's up to the director to decide where to put the classroom dividers. |
We are looking for 2 or 3 small
groups (3-4 couples or a mix of maybe 5 men & 2 or 3 women) to come help us
lay block and make our school look like a school. If you’d like more information, you can contact
me on Facebook or email (pkaufman3@gmail.com) or call Jen Wagoner @ 574-8634931, 260-5784957 or jdwagoner@kconline. We’d love to see you here to work together with us. After an exhausting day laying block, to lay under the beautiful Haitian stars at night it the ultimate refreshment. We pray that you will be obedient to the calling that God lays on your heart to help us! We also have 40 of our 170 students needing sponsors. We are discovering just how valuable an education is! You can help change a nation by sponsoring one of our kids for only $25.00/month. It’s easy to do from our website, hoc-haiti.org. On the home page, click on ‘Sponsor a student’ and you can pick out the one (one’s J) you want.
In between working on the school, I had corn that needed
harvested. I’d planted about ¾ acre of
corn in April and had depended on a friend to purchase the seed. Turns out, he didn’t buy the best seed. I’d
really feel bad if his corn looked even a
little better than mine, but it didn’t. My expectations were not very high, thinking I’d be really happy with a bushel of corn from the whole field. Well, a friend helped me pick and that didn’t
take but about an hour and a half. I
have a shoulder harvest basket and the entire harvest fit in that basket. The next day, I scattered the ears on the
roof to dry and in the evening Cheryl and I ‘grennen’ (shelled) it. We ended up with 2 ice cream buckets of
corn. If I had to live on what I grew I’d
starve to death! It gives a new
perspective to the reports of record yields coming from home.
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| I was a 'picker/sheller. Cheryl was just the sheller. |
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| The little ones make the big one look pretty impressive but it's only about 7" long. |
For us, this is enough corn and we’ll
probably have it ground and give most of it away. We’re still learning to prepare and like some
of the traditional Haitian dishes that use a lot of ground corn, but visitors
are always thankful for the gift. They
can make a meal out of 2 cups of corn!
But when you look at the ears that came from my field and compare it to many of the stalks in your fields that this year had multiple ears on them, you wonder how our
worlds can be so different. How cutting
edge farming science can exist in the same time space as stone age
technology. Most of my neighbor’s corn
looked better than mine, but there would be rejoicing for 5 bushel/acre! Life is hard here, that’s just a fact. There is a contentment that comes with the
acceptance of that fact that is just beautiful.
The Lord gives, the Lord takes away, Blessed be the name of the Lord!
Several of the boys up here are taking music lessons. This is exciting! Their goal is to form a band to lead
worship. One is studying keyboard, one
wants to be a drummer and several are taking guitar
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| I've invested nearly an entire bottle of super glue in holding this guitar together. |
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| I don't know much about guitars, but with these big strings the have to crank it so tight to tune it that they're breaking the neck off! |
Pat Kaufman
Unit 2052 Heart
3170 Airmans DR
Fort Pierce, FL 34946
We’ll send you a pic of the smiles!!!!
Of course, life here has it’s little annoyances. It seems the bugs are a little over the top
for Cheryl. She must have gotten too
used to living in screened and air conditioned places while we were home and
forgot what it was like to get back to nature.
The main thing during the day are the ants (sorry no pic, will get one for a later post). Little, tiny, swarming buggers that get into
EVERYTHING! Any little piece of food
that hits the floor or left on the counter is attacked by them in short
order. You can’t leave anything out or
unprotected for long or you’re picking those creepy little things out of your
food or throwing it away. Not much gets
thrown away, nuff said on that. But they
get into everything!
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| Rain bug flying circus! |
The night is a different story. If we’d choose to leave the lights off and go
to bed at 8:00 there would be no problems.
But the lights add a whole new element to night life in our house. Of course it enables us to do things, but
Haitian bugs have never seen lights before and come swarming in to see this new
thing! If you get a rain after dark it’s
the rain bugs. A 30-45 minute phenomenon
of bugs swarming everywhere, swirling around the lights, their wings falling
off and covering the floor & every other surface with dead carcasses!
Endure it and sweep them out the door when it’s over and it’s not a big
deal, but they are everywhere and that is one long half hour when they are
swarming around!
Moths of assorted sizes abound too. Most are harmless ceiling dwellers while others bomb your computer screen and get in everything.
Others are bird size and cause quite a
commotion while you chase it around with a fly swatter trying to knock it out
of the air. You take your entertainment
where you can get it, but this is not Cheryl’s favorite creature. But given the choice, I think she’d rather
chase moths than look up to see a tarantula crawling down the inside of the shutter.
They’re easier to kill than the moths, but way creepier!
Well, this is long enough. For those of you that are still
with me, the church is doing well, the garden is starting to produce again. Been
planting things and patching people up today.
Cheryl just relit the stove under our supper after consulting an expectant mother and one of her daughters. She's counted 7 consultations (pregnancies, babies,
blood pressure, blood sugar, various sicknesses) today,a couple small wounds and now she’s
headed to a neighbor’s house for her second home visit of the day to check a blood pressure
while the rice is simmering on the stove. Along with
helping at school this morning and doing laundry, she’s had a busy day. Pretty soon it’ll be dark and things will
quiet down. We’re
learning to take things as they come, and if we don’t get to what we’d planned,
well, that’s ok. It’s nice to eat and
shower before dark, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. And we’re
learning that that’s OK too. “ He must
increase and I must decrease.” John 3:30
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| Just pickin and 'grennen'! See ya next time. Make your plans now to visit us this winter! |
