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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 06:51

This is going to be my second to last entry for the mission trip to Haiti. I am now in Santa Domingo DR waiting on my flight. Because of commitments at home, I was unable to spend the entire time with the team. After I have a chance to digest what I have experienced here in the next few days I will send out a summary. Please continue to keep the entire team in your prayers as they complete the Lords work in Haiti.

Yesterday Bill and I were at Pastor David's house in P Au P installing another water system. He has a beautiful family and a heart full of love. The house is very close to downtown and he lost dozens of members of his congregation in the EQ. In spite of this his smile is easy and his graciousness was like a warm blanket. Every travel advisory I have seen has strongly cautioned against eating food from street vendors, so Bill and I were faced with quite a dilemma when pastor David brought us our lunch (without our knowledge) from a local street vendor. It was likely that he was going without so we could eat. Jeez. So Bill and I ate a meal of mystery meat, corn, fried bananas and french fries. Remarkably, neither one of us suffered from any GI distress.

While we were there the rest of the team was at pastor John´s house doing a clinic for the local folks around his mission home. Before Bill and I left they had started and were already seeing very sick people in desperate need of medical attention. By the time we got back at 3:30 they were just breaking for lunch and had seen 121 people at that point and were getting ready to go back at it. Today they were going to do the same thing.

It was time for me to head to the airport to hopefully catch a military transport sponsored by the State Department. If a person has a US passport, they are able to get on one of the empty cargo planes as it heads back to the states. It is prioritized based on medical need, elderly, and parents traveling with children. There is no schedule and you just have to wait around to see if you can get on. It became obvious that I was not going to be able to make this flight. So I went to the ¨Flight Information¨ desk inside if the only safe part of the terminal, which consisted of a wooden podium with a hand done sign that said ¨flight information¨. The guy at the counter said I would just have to talk to a pilot when they came up to file their flight plan. Apparently the Flight Information desk was doubling as Air Traffic Control. This was confirmed when the guy I was talking to grabbed his binoculars to read a tail number for a landing plane. After striking out with several pilots who didn´t have room, a plane landed that the flight control guy said I could probly get on  to the DR.

As it turns out, there was a group of missionaries from Mission Discovery that were traveling with a pastor that I struck up a conversation with. They were with one Pastor Cherelus Exante who happened to be speaking at the rally that I was telling you about yesterday in front of the presidential palace . I need to make a correction though, the crowd was not 100,000 he told me that it was estimated at close to 1,000,000. It was a lot of people. He happens to be a confidante of the president of Haiti and has been working with him toward this revival. I ended up staying at the same hotel as this group and went to dinner with them where Pastor Exante told me that he is already working with 250 local pastors to bring an international revival to P AuP next January. He understands the need to keep the spiritual momentum going in the country and is very optimistic that it is going to take root. We talked about the idea that if you are following God´s desire for  you, you will be stepping into the abundant life that He has promised for us. That He wants for us! When the president of Haiti got up to address the crowd, he said "Ï am not coming before you as your president, I am coming before you as a Christian brother¨.

Keep praying for Haiti. They are  getting it.

This has already been long so I am going to quit now. On my last entry I will do the Getting to know the team for the last two folks.