Some Words from Haiti

I'm posting now from Ranquitte, Haiti, where--with Pastors Ron Luckey and Barry Nesse and Dr. Greg McMorrow--I'm to work on a variety of projects at the Calhoun-Spady Missionary School. Ranquitte is a mountain village accessible by forty-minute flight out of Port au Prince in a small-single-engine plane, followed by a ninety-minute drive in a pickup truck on an eleven-mile dirt/rock road. The school, large by Haitian standards, is filled with 1,300 students and a staff of 100 teachers (many of the part-time). While here our team will be working on the water-purification system, repairing equipment, and doing some public-relations photography as I'll be attempting to locate and a promote a sister-to-sister city relationship with a state-side town, comparable in population to that of Ranquitte, some 6,000.

This morning we visited Per Andre P. Augustin, the vibrant catholic priest at the local St. Francis of Assisi parish where we attended the baptisms of six Haitian children. All of this is simply prologue to my request to ask for your prayers and intercessions for Haiti and its people. In special, remember eighty-nine-year-old Ivy Solomon, the "Mother Teresa of Haiti," who began work in Ranquitte thirty years ago and now in her elder years has been blessed with dedicated group of Christian workers, teachers, agronomists, and village leaders who work day-by-day, and pray every morning and evening, singing hymns in French and encouraging one another in Creole, the native Haitian language. If the Holy Spirit every teases you into thinking about coming to Haiti with me sometime, be sure to let the Holy Breath of God fill us with conversation about the possibility.

We'll be attending the 6:00 a.m. Mass tomorrow morning and will certainly turn our thoughts to you and ask God to bless you, even as you ask God to bless us.

I'll post more in a day or two.