More stories from Haiti, Days 3 - 5!

-          Day 3

-          We spent a major part of the day training w/ local disciples and community there.  One of the hard things for me personally was seeing all of the children there.  The kids don’t get much attention so the great part was that they were SO happy to have us there, we were able to give them attention and spend time just playing with them.  The difficult part was seeing how great their need is and not being able to do much to meet that need.  Most of these kids have super skinny arms and legs because they are malnourished, they don’t know when they will have water or food, and you really can’t give out any type of snacks to them, because if you give one out, within less than a minute, you have around 20 more kids asking for something and it grows and grows.  Thankfully the time that we had there, we were able to at least provide bags of water for all of them and small sandwiches for the people going through the training.

-          Afterwards we went to honor the handicap.  So around 2 years ago Nick (one of our team leads) had started a handicap ministry and they had still been meeting every week since then!  So we wanted to celebrate that by washing their feet and feeding them dinner, praying for them and ministering to them.  Also, the handicap in Haiti are seen as the lowest of the low.  They are completely neglected and treated like outcasts.  So it was pretty special to honor them in this way.  It was pretty moving also for our team, hearing some of the team members say it was one of their most memorable parts of the trip.  A lot of these people have never had anyone wash their feet for them, some didn’t even have feet to wash, so we washed their hands.  That evening 2 people also got saved and there was a woman who was deaf and mute who our team had met the day before.  She was there this evening and got prayed for and the Lord healed her!  I came in during the end part of it, and saw her eyes filled with tears.  Pretty amazing.

-          Day 4

-          We went to a Haitian church service!  Yes it was entirely in Creole, for 2 hours, had no idea what they said.  But the format of it felt like a Lutheran service.  Afterwards we went to the Orphanage that is set up by the Church we attend (the Rock).  This was such a blessing to see these 19 children.  They were being mistreated and abused; who knows where they would have been when the last orphanage was shut down, and God picked these kids up via the Rock Church.  The property they have is nothing major compared to the U.S. but in comparison to what most children have over there, it is pretty nice.  We just spent time with them, playing soccer, basketball, balloon animals, holding them.  And afterwards we spent the rest of the day at the Point training the disciples and community again.

-          Day 5

      Another highlight of the trip for me was when we went to the hospital to minister to people there.  After visiting the children’s ward, we went into the pre-op/post-op room for adults.  We did not have a translator at first, so we prayed for them and told them the few phrases in Creole we knew like, “Jesus loves you.”  (Jezi renme ou)  As we walked out, one of our translators arrived (Damas) and we still had 20 minutes left, so we walked back into the room.  One of the men in the corners spoke excitedly to Damas when he saw he could speak Creole and English.  I asked Damas what he said and he told me that God had given this man a vision in a dream one night and he shared it with him.  Here was his dream:

o   There was a man standing with a 4 pronged fork and asked ‘from where do you get this power?’  The fork edges represented 4 names of people who needed to hear the gospel and get saved.  God gave him 4 names in his dream.

-          So this man had been given this dream a few days back and the day after he had his dream he was driving somewhere and got into an accident.  He was unconscious for 3 hours.  When he woke up, he was in that hospital room!  The 4 names he had been given were in that room!  2 of the men had been moved to another room somewhere in the hospital, but the other 2 men were still there.  So this guy was asking us to pray for them!  So we ended up sharing the gospel with them while other Haitians came into the room and listened.  These 2 men, along with a young boy in the corner of the room, received Christ as their Savior that day!  It was crazy to be in the middle of seeing God speak visions and dreams to someone, and using that to bring salvation to these men!  Praise God!

More stories to come.