Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Home in Piyon




While we were in Piyon, we stayed at Can de la Grace, a camp used by all kinds of groups, usually church-related. Our family occupied the top floor of the building shown here.
There were two bedrooms and a bathroom and a little balcony in the front where we hung out our clothes. The kids' room also served as their school room. Todd and I studied in the wide hallway.

Dorcas Ladies

While in Pignon, Willhelmina and I attended a meeting for a non-denominational group of women who meet each Sunday afternoon. This group called “Dorcas” has an amazing ministry meeting practical needs in the community like Dorcas did in the book of Acts. My favorite part is that they are national women who see needs and feel compelled to meet them. Several of them go to the local hospital nearly every day to pray with patients. They distribute food and clothes as they become available. They do a monthly meal for those in the community and surrounding area who are needy.
My favorite part of the meeting was the singing and the ladies reciting in unison about four or five chapters or long passages from the Bible. It was beautiful.

Jaklin


We are now finished with our official language and cultural training in Piyon. We can carry on basic conversations with neighbors and those we meet at the grocery store. There is still much to learn, but it is nice to have a foundation and quite a few of the important words like “thing,” “what,” “How do you say...,” numbers and basic greetings.

This is a picture of our teacher Jaklin, and on the table you can see our THICK Creole books, the source of our wealth of knowledge. :)

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Starting our Blog


We have been in Haiti for three months now. Due to the rural area we were living in and our limited access to the internet, we were unable to get a blog up and running until now. We would like to rewind time a bit and post neat stuff from all of our time here. It may be a bit random as different memories come to mind.

We are missionaries with Mission Aviation Fellowship working in Haiti. We spent about three months living in the Central Plateau town of Pignon to do some language study and learn a bit about Haitian culture. Todd will begin work as an aircraft mechanic in mid-March.