Yesterday we traveled all day to get here, it is a long ride – we left an hour later than what we planned because of snow and arrived in hot and humid conditions with the threat of rain.
There are three cities that we hope to “get off the plane” and visit for a more in-depth look. When we were asked to bring food and some of the tents we brought on Scott’s plane to Jacmel, we jumped at the chance as Jacmel was on our list of cities to visit.
The first thing you notice in Haiti today is that there is a difference from a month ago. A month earlier there was a sense of emergency and that sense of emergency is way down even though the need is just as high. As you will recall, a month ago when we landed people asked for food. Today when we landed people asked for tents – everyone wants a tent.
When you fly over the city, tents and tarps are everywhere. Everyone is afraid to sleep in their house – even if it is still standing – aftershocks continue and are a constant reminder of the danger of living in-doors. As soon as anyone can get you alone the first thing they ask for is a tent.
Since we had a few tents with us, we decided to go to town with tents and 25 of the 300 Woobies (dolls made by women inmates at the Rhode Island ACI) that we brought with us.
We visited a school that is feeding several families; the load of food we brought with us was going to this school. The children were eating some of the corn meal that Go-Ministries regularly supplies when we arrived, and they were at the lunch table. We gave away all 25 woobies and the little girls loved them. Here is a
Video from that experience.
We then went to a Tent City and it was the strangest site of "haves and have nots" we have ever seen. On one side of the street were shelter box tents neatly arranged – but tents nonetheless. On the other side of the street were people without tents and most of them did not even have tarps. It was so sad to see people in such desperate need.
We handed out the few tents we had with us but it felt like we could have used 200 in this location alone.
We really hope that the main shipment of tents will arrive tomorrow or Thursday as we would love to hand out all 500 that were collected. The people of Haiti will have no problem putting these to use. They will make a difference.
Throughout the rest of the day we transported two Go-Ministry leaders from Jacmel to Port-au-Prince (it is still busy in PAP but much easier in/out than a month ago). We returned to Santiago and then flew back to Jacmel with more food. We brought two people back form Jacmel to Santiago that had been serving in Haiti for several days. We then loaded up with medical supplies and food and went to Les Cayes for a quick drop-off. We could see that the tent cities in Les Cayes were very large and we were told that 10 people died in the big rain of last week.
Tomorrow we are going back to Jacmel, then we are planning a return trip to Les Cayes. This time we will bring some tents and we plan to stay and go into this city.
Keep us in prayer. We are representing you and the offering you made to the Haitian people, or as Scripture describes, "to the least of these among you.”
Scott & Pastor Dennis
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