Hand in Hand in Haiti

This is a good summary of our time in Haiti written by a participant who happens to be the Pastor of the team this week. 

Day 5 – Friday, June 4, 2010

 While the US State Department has a standing advisory against Americans travelling to Haiti. The Lord God Almighty sent a dozen of us to Haiti to serve as His delegation to a small community known by the name of Aztec. All week long we have listened in prayer as we have travelled twice per day into the community to see where the Lord would lead us. What did we find? Lots of debris everywhere; people living in tents, tarps, and half fallen houses. We found many people looking at us with extreme amazement because we were the first Americans to visit their community.   While you can find lots of communities in America who need help, take it from us, you won’t find any who need help as badly as the people of Haiti.   

                Some of the physical needs we helped to meet were: setting up bucket brigades to carry rubble from collapsed buildings, helping to paint a house, delivering school supplies & tents, performing minor repairs, taking a woman and her baby to the hospital for treatment, helping the local church improve ventilation by getting them fans, and doing a significant food drop of beans, rice and cooking oil,.

                The church which also serves as a school is physically located at the center of the Aztec community. But, like the people of the community the church has very little in the way of resources. On day one our combined Haitian/American worship service was attended by mostly children who had interacted with us during the morning Vacation Bible School. But as we visited homes, neighboring schools, and orphanages, more and more people came to worship with us. Today there were so many people that they filled every space inside the building and spilled out into the street. (Note: To anyone reading this gifted in working with sound equipment, this church could make a huge advance if you could help them put together a very modest sound system)

While they wanted to hear what we had to share with them, we were so blessed by their enthusiasm for the Lord. In the space of one week we went from strangers to friends, and from friends to brothers and sisters. Our prayer is that we not stop here, but allow the Lord to establish long term Church-to-Church partners all across Haiti. God is using AIM to prepare the way for non-Haitian churches to partner with Haitian churches by beginning the process of developing meaningful relationships with over 500 Haitian pastors. Before we came, we were praying that God might allow us to meet a pastor and find a church that we could tell our church about with the expectation that maybe, just maybe, we could one day become partners. In too many ways to share here, God has confirmed to our team that He is partnering Freedom Church of God (Haiti) with Allegan First Church of God (USA)