Spring Break 2011
After our 1st trip in November of 2010, we came back with an even greater burden on our hearts to carry a message and to continue to have an impact on the lives of the Haitian people. We quickly started planning for the second trip over Spring Break of 2011. The stories and experiences from our first team had a powerful impact on those who took the time to listen. One of the most challenging aspects of returning for our trips is how to share the powerful experiences with others. It is especially challenging because people often don’t know what to ask or aren’t willing to take the time to listen. Some ask “How was Haiti” and expect that the question can be quickly answered with a “good, amazing, cool, etc” when the reality is there’s so much to say that our team members often don’t know where to start. Experiences that forever change your perspective on the world, faith, and people can’t quickly be shared.
Well, we returned to Haiti with another team over Spring Break of 2011, again with open hearts, new faces, and a desire to serve. We returned to Leveque to see many homes that had been built and houses standing, with families living in them, where we had cleared the land and dug foundations only a few months earlier. We painted our three Avondale homes and were excited to paint two homes side by side in purple and yellow. We didn’t know yet who would live in those homes, but we were excited to prepare the way for the arrival in their new homes. It was amazing to stand on the hill overlooking Leveque and see a community forming before our eyes and look down on a little bit of Avondale in Haiti. These were homes that changed lives, and were built with money raised by Avondale students through t-shirt sales, wristband sales, bake sales, dances, and donations. It was amazing to see the power of kids working together to change lives and slowly change the world as they realized the impact they can have upon others. It was a concept inspired by Avondale’s Leadership program, under Aaron Donaghy’s leadership and vision, and a concept called GO. A belief that kids CAN change the world… It’s a belief that we must be bold, aggressive, dream big, and believe that WE can impact others whether we are at home or abroad.
While we worked, painted homes, and played with children in villages, the most powerful experience was a visit to an orphanage in Barbancourt. It was amazing to see our team pour into and love on those precious children. Each one of our team members loved in their special ways, whether it was holding children that desperately needed to be held and loved, or playing soccer with teenagers, or teaching them how to shoot a basketball, or creating games to bring joy and laughter to Haitian children. It was an orphanage I had been to myself a number of times before but the visit wrecked our hearts as we struggled to leave behind so many children who were sick, malnourished, and poorly cared for. When even your Haitian translators are shaking and weeping openly knowing they need to leave those precious children behind, you struggle to have any answers to how best to handle the reality of those children’s circumstances and the reality of millions of children worldwide who face similar circumstances. It forces you to wrestle with how you can have the greatest impact, and what you can do once you return home. However, the reality is you really struggle to return home because you truly wish you could stay and care for those precious children. Well, we left Haiti in the Spring of 2011, with heavy hearts and a conviction to have a significant impact upon our return to Avondale.
After our first trip in November of 2010, our hearts were burdened with how we do more with the realities we encountered in Haiti. That led us down a path to hold a Kids Against Hunger event and set a crazy goal of raising $28,000 so we could pack 100,000 meals, so we could send 2/3rds to Haiti and 1/3 to the Baldwin Soup Kitchen in Pontiac. Well, we returned from our 2nd trip with a fierce determination to raise the necessary funds and inspire the community to join us. When you see first-hand how children’s lives are saved and sustained by Kids Against Hunger meals, it challenges you to step out in faith, challenge others, and GO impact the world. It was amazing to see kids move and the community rally behind our efforts to impact the world from Auburn Hills, Michigan. We were blessed to see all the amazing circumstances which enabled us to reach our goal of packing 100,000 meals!
Thanksgiving 2011
We returned to Haiti over Thanksgiving week in 2011 with more new faces,
selfless hearts, and a desire to serve the Haitian people, while knowing that
our experiences would also shape us in powerful ways. We were blessed to return to Leveque and meet
two of the families living in the Avondale homes. Hearing their stories of how their lives had
been changed by their new homes and their thankfulness to the Avondale
community was a definite highlight of our trip.
It was amazing to finally see the results of our post-earthquake fund
raising, our work in Leveque, and how it was impacting Haitian families. Unfortunately, one of the challenges the
mothers expressed was how difficult it was to get water for their
families. Something we take for granted
every day when we turn on the water tap or step up to a drinking fountain was a
hardship for these families. Although they
had better housing their water source was distant, not even for clean water,
but for water they needed for cooking and washing clothes. That conversation put a burden on our hearts
to return to carry water for these families.
We returned later that week, with large buckets and a desire to make the
mothers’ lives a little easier, if only for a day. While we knew it wasn’t a long term solution,
we knew we could ease their burden and love them through our service. We set out to the aqueduct to fill our buckets, yet after walking nearly ¾ of a mile, we arrived to discover there was no water. Life in Haiti… We traveled another half mile up the aqueduct to the bridge, only to discover there still wasn’t any water. So, we pressed on even further until we finally found a riverbed where we could get enough water to fill our buckets. As we carried our water back, struggling with the weight and valuing water as never before, we ended up walking at least two miles before we returned to the homes. We carried the water carefully, not wanting to waste any, and tried to grasp the reality that our morning project was daily life in Haiti. That day we gained a new perspective on a world where water was precious, a struggle to acquire, yet still not clean enough to safely drink without parasites that could develop into stomach worms. Those worms so often grow in the stomachs of Haitian children and adults, consuming valuable nutrients needed by a people already struggling to eat daily. We are grateful the community has since been given a consistent water supply, but our experiences that day will forever be etched on our hearts and perspective of our world.
Meeting those families and carrying water were two of the most powerful experiences of the trip. We continued to serve through painting homes, hauling shelving and supplies to a new warehouse and hauling sheet metal onto the roof of MOH’s new warehouse. We again had the bittersweet experience of playing with and loving the children in two orphanages, including Barbancourt. While in Haiti, we never know how we will be asked to serve, or what experiences will break our hearts and cause us to look at our world and our lives differently, or how they will change team member’s hearts to change the world. One experience which I will never forget was when we visited a very small Haitian school with very little resources. I watched the reality of the contrast between these children’s lives and our kids experiences in school come crashing down on one of our team members. He sat, struggling to grasp why these kids should be born into this world while he was blessed to grow up in the Avondale community, with all the resources and opportunities it presented to him. Yet, my eye turned to a beautiful 10-11 year old girl on the outside of the fence. I could see this precious child, who looked longingly into this poor school, wishing she could attend except her family didn’t have the money to pay tuition. Almost all schools in Haiti are private, and so many children lack the opportunity to get an education and better their futures because their families may not even have the money to feed them let alone send them to school.
Our teams always arrive and serve with amazing hearts, challenged to keep their eyes and hearts open to the things they need to experience. We do our best to serve and have a significant impact in Haiti, but we are humbled by how much Haitian life and the Haitian people impact us. Our challenge will always be to bring those lessons and hearts home and seek ways to have a greater impact once we resume our North American lives.
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