Just back from a week back in the States for Thanksgiving, my return to Haiti and to Be Like Brit was especially exciting this time! Our good friends Alan and Patti Roseberry and Eileen Terry flew down to Haiti this past Wednesday to help with various tasks. As you may have seen on Facebook, our child sponsors have overwhelmed us with incredible generosity and as a result we have LOADS of presents and bags to put together for our 35 children, as Christmas is fast approaching! Eileen and Patti dove right in, and have prepared all of the gifts for the children. Eileen brought with her 40 red stockings, and she and Patti spent hours on Saturday making each child their very own!
The children, of course, don't know it yet - but they will have a very special morning on December 25th! As we cautiously plan for the Christmas Holiday, we are doing our best to keep things culturally appropriate while at the same time being mindful that we are, in fact, starting our own traditions! Be Like Brit's first Christmas with children is exciting and we can't wait to show you what we're up to as we deck the halls and plan to celebrate Christ's birth!
In the meantime, the children are busy with their usual routines! School, homework, play, church, and other programming activities are keeping us all on our toes! With Alan, Patti, and Eileen here, there are a few extra special fun activities ~ and while we adults sneak around to plan for December 25, we've tried to keep the children a bit more occupied than normal! They especially enjoyed a day out today at one of the local soccer fields - of course the one with the most shade!
While Eileen and Patti have been hard at work with Christmas tasks, they have also been such a great help with other tasks! No visitor to Be Like Brit comes without a bit of homework, and Eileen and Patti have graciously spent two full days conducting an inventory of our medical clinic. This is a tedious but necessary task, as we continue to receive donations for our clinic and our stock levels are always changing! Eileen and Patti are meticulous and to have some organized minds on hand has been a blessing! I secretly don't want them to ever leave us!
Alan's kept busy, too! While helping at Mission of Hope and with Gama's own house, he's been busy with some exciting projects here at Be Like Brit, too! Alan has been around from the beginning and has been tremendous for us here in Haiti! He's the expert plumber who has mentored and taught our local employee Jackson everything he knows! He keeps our water supply safe, secure, and has even set up solar powered water heaters! What a treat!
What we're most excited about, though, is Alan's keen sense of community and his generosity will now reach even more members of the mountain community! Alan has arranged it so that we will have on-hand two 500 gallon tanks specifically designed and structured so that each day we can provide 1000 gallons of safe, clean, filtered drinking water to anyone who comes for it! This is invaluable for not just the community but for us at BLB, too! With a dry rainy season, often our well simply couldn't keep up with the usage between operating the building here and supplying the community with water. There were many days where we had to hold back on how much we could give outside the walls, and we certainly don't want that to happen again! This solution and Alan's hard work will ensure we don't have to deny water to the community again, nor will we have to tap in to our own reserves for the building (pun, intended!) The children were so excited when Gama and Alan pulled up with the new tanks, they had to lend a hand and get them in place! Who do you think worked the hardest?
This afternoon, the children all got haircuts! I decided to lend Wilmann a hand, given that we have 19 boys here and they all needed a trimming! We laughed while we lined the boys up and gave them funny cuts and let them run around and laugh at each other's unfortunate hair styles The girls always are busy on Saturdays washing, combing, and styling their hair for church the next day! Saturday afternoons tend to look like a spa/salon at Be Like Brit - but it's an adorable routine that everyone looks forward to every week!
What do you think about these looks?
Early this morning the children set off for church at Mission of Hope while Eileen and I went to St. Francois with the four boys who attend school there. Eileen got to spend a little extra special time with her best buddies here in Haiti - Do you think they enjoyed it?
While at church this morning, I noticed a bit of chaos a few pews in front of us. An elderly woman sat down and the people surrounding her began to fan her, opened up her blouse a bit, and started to pour water over her face. As they patted her and continued their frenzied efforts to ameliorate whatever it was that was ailing her, they looked at me urgently. They then picked her up and carried her out the doors of the church.
I turned to Eileen, and without hesitation she said to me, "Go." I ran out behind the group who were unsuccessfully trying to perch this woman on the rear seat of a motorcycle to get her to the hospital. I ran over and instructed them to come with me. We carried the woman to the truck, and I and a group of strangers climbed in and rushed her over to the nearby clinic.
Many days my faith is challenged and I'm always trying to figure out what my larger purpose is. A small event like this today, a friend Eileen from the States down for a visit who wanted to go to mass - and I was there simply by chance. I don't know the outcome or what happened after we carried her in to the hospital. But I do feel like we happened to be there for a purpose today. As we do every day, we work on Faith, Hope, and Love. Today is looking like a faith kind of day.
And we're making progress on the computer room, too! I asked Christ-Love if he wanted a latte with his laptop - Love this so much!
Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
Jonathan
