It's been really neat to see the excitement here at the Children's village. The staff here at HAF in Jacmel consists of Dr. Ken & his wife Diane and their 18 year old daughter, Emily. Also, there are 2 interns here as well, Stacey & Cameron.
The past few days we've been hanging out with the kids and learning the ropes. To get an idea, a typical day usually looks like the following: Each morning (except Sunday) we have a staff meeting/devotions at 6:30am. Then they give us 30 minutes for a workout. After that we all work on various projects while the kids are at school. The kids come home from school around 1-2pm. Then they have some time with Jose-way? (I'm not sure how to spell it yet:-) He is a Haitian man who speaks pretty good English and is in charge of the children's spiritual development. He does devotions with them in the morning, makes them memorize Scripture and tutors them in the afternoons to help them with their homework. Then the cook fixes them dinner and they have a little more time to play before their bedtime at 8:30pm. That's pretty much the routine.
They also try to take a handful of kids to the beach on Saturday. Yesterday was Faith's first day at the beach. She looked really cute in her bathing suit, but doesn't particularly love the water yet :-) They now have a nursery at Jacmel and they have 8 babies! They are so cute!!! As a staff, we will watch the babies on Sunday morning so that the nannies can go to church. We usually will have a worship service ourselves on Sunday night or go to the Sunday night service at the local church. The rest of our Sunday is spent relaxing and resting, which is much needed around here!
We start our language classes tomorrow. We will go from 2-4pm on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday for 6 weeks. They also have 2 paid translators here at the orphanage, so we might try to see if one of them would be willing to work with us for a few hours a day as a language helper. We are really excited and anxious to learn Creole.
We're going to put some more pictures of our apartment on facebook. We are in an apartment in the guest house. We have a bedroom with a closet, living room, kitchen (with stove & fridge) and a bathroom. We also have an a/c unit in our bedroom- which has been a tremendous blessing since we don't have our fans yet!! We only turn it on at night though because of the amount of electricity it uses during the day. It's pretty warm down here (low-mid 90's), but we're gradually acclimating.
Another big question we've been asked is about the food. We have a cook that prepares all of the staff's food (different from the one that cooks the food for the kids). She is Haitian and we've had a lot of chicken legs and rice. We also have a lot of bananas. The other day we had these plantains that were smashed into thin patties and then fried. They almost tasted like french fries, but much healthier- according to Dr. Ken. We have plain oatmeal for breakfast just about every morning, which is alright. I've been learning to put peanut butter in it to make it taste a little better :-) I think that's about all the updates I have now. Thank you guys so much for praying and all of your support in the last week before we left! We had so much help from friends and family- we couldn't have done it without y'all!!!
Praises:
- We're finally here! God was watching out for us all along the way! We had a few belts break on the Deuce on the way to Florida, but God provided the belts we needed with the help from some great friends.
- Praise the Lord we had a safe flight from Fort Pierce to Port Au Prince, and that Faith did well!
Prayer:
- Pray that we would adjust quickly to this new culture and language. Pray for understanding as we start our language classes tomorrow.
- Pray that God would continue to keep us all healthy, especially Faith.
- Pray that the Deuce with all of our stuff in it would be able to be shipped out soon without a lot of problems. (It's a long story, but it is still waiting to be shipped out from Miami.)
- Pray that we would be able to find a way to communicate with family and friends, other than email & facebook. We thought we'd be able to skype, but because it's all satellite based, skype crashes the system.
- Pray for the staff that are going to eventually be at Grand Goave (our future home)- translators, spiritual coordinator, nannies, cooks and interns. Pray that God would be preparing them for each of those tasks and that we would be able to have a real connection with each of them!
Thank you so much for praying!! You have no idea how much we feel your prayers back home- THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts!
For His Glory,
~Andrew, Angie & Faith
So glad to hear that you guys got there safely and are settling in! You're been on our minds and in our prayers! We haven't been able to find you on FB so please friend request us when you have a chance so we can keep up with how things are going.
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