Day 6 - Finishing Strong

Wow.  What a change.  Today we visited the Little Children of Jesus (Home for the Disabled) first thing in the morning.  Our experience was significantly different than years past where we mostly interacted with the children of LCJ through touching, dancing, playing with balloons, and other activities that focused on entertaining the children.  This trip, however, we actually transformed that experience into being servants.  The LCJ was really divested from Food for the Poor and taken over by Missionaries for the Poor, an organization umbrella of the Catholic Church.  They are brothers dedicated to a life-long service to the poor.  The rules for the visit needed to entail being servants to the children of LCJ.  Part of our team was responsible for feeding the children and another part of the team was responsible for cleaning the dormitories.  For all of us, this was a totally different experience.  Today at LCJ, there are 90+ children, most with physical and mental handicaps, ranging in age from 2 years old to 40.  Those of us that have been there before enjoyed seeing some of the same children.

Today we finished strong on all of our assigned tasks, completing all the cabinetry work in the kitchen, the plumbing, and the painting of the depot.  God really blessed SJLC's servant team.  Many of us are feeling the aches and pains of several days worth of work, feeling many muscles that we forgot we had.  Some of us were not needed for painting so we packaged more meds for the upcoming mobile med group and counted socks. We were all very excited about what we were able to accomplish with the projects and with the opportunities we had to interact at the Village of Hope, the health center, church experience on Sunday, LCJ, and the ride we took to experience being out in the countryside.

Tonight, during devotions, we shared in the Lord's Supper and following that, Debbie B. shared her Haitian funeral experience involving that of her late husband.  Some of the funeral rituals were certainly unique to Haiti and we appreciated that Debbie was willing to share this experience with us.

Our team gelled as a servant team and strengthened existing friendships and made new friendships with the newcomers.  This year's experience is no different than that of years' past because our focus always remains the same - serving God.  We thank you for following the blog and we hope that some of you might considering joining us next year with boots on the ground in Haiti!

Scott

Liz feeding "Kiki"

One of the older children feeding the youngest and one of the Brothers administering medication.

Linda, Saron, Christine, and Yvette counting socks

Scott and Ken finishing up the cabinets.

Debbie B., Richard, Linda, Christine, and Yvette counting and packaging meds.