November 2012 Haiti Mission Trip

Greetings from your second Michigan Servants for Christ team to travel to Haiti this year. We are preparing for our Nov. 2 departure from Detroit to Miami, stay over that night then arrive in Port-Au-Prince on Saturday morning, Nov. 3 at 8:15am.   Our hosts from Conscience International will meet us at the airport, where we will be joined by 3 brothers from First Baptist Church of Cap-Haitien, Norde Haiti. All 17 of us and our luggage will then hop in the back of open bed pickup trucks for a 2.5 hour journey west to Grand Goave. This is very near Leogane, the epicenter of the January 2010 earthquake. We will be staying at the Haiti Housing Network in Grand Goave. Our accommodations will be quite good and include showers (cold) and flush toilets so we are very fortunate and grateful to be sure.

For many on the team, this will be their  first mission experience of any kind, for others it is their first international mission experience and then there are some who have been to Haiti and other impoverished countries to serve others in the name of Jesus. We are a group of 8 women and 6 men from 11 different American Baptist Churches in Michigan and we are grateful to God for this opportunity to serve the people of Haiti, worship -with them, work alongside them and become their friends for life. Speaking of friends for life, one team member from First Baptist South Haven has served in Haiti before and hopes to reconnect with a Pastor friend there. We pray this works out.

You may be asking what we are going to do there.  Have you heard of a rubble house? You can learn more about it and even watch a video at www.conscienceinternational.org, but basically we will be bending wire and re-bar and busting up concrete chunks into smaller bits, filling a bucket with these concrete bits, climbing a ladder and pouring the concrete bits down into a wire formed wall, kind of like the width of a block wall. Once the wire wall form is full of concrete bits, we spread a concrete slurry over it resembling a stucco finish  then 2x type top plate goes on top of the wall, then a stick built gable type roof is built and finished with tin. There are window openings and a door, but no plumbing or electrical. The house will be 14x20 with a poured concrete floor. By Haitien standards, this is a really nice home and we are glad to be able to sponsor one home at a cost of $4,000. We hope to work alongside the family that will live in the home, but are going with an attitude of complete flexibility and will just go where God leads us and do what we are asked to do.

This trip is possible because of the generosity of church mission funds, individuals in the home churches of our team members, the American Baptist Women of Michigan, the ABC Central Area Leadership Group, the Michigan Region of the American Baptist Churches who put a significant amount of money in their annual budget and the Endowment Fund of First Baptist Church of Royal Oak, now Genesis the Church, who has provided matching funds. We also want to acknowledge and thank Mr. Doug Landers of Landers Hardware in Bangor, MI who donated nearly $500 worth of tools and materials that we will carry down in our luggage including 80 lbs. of various types and sizes of screws alone not to mention another 40 lbs. of hammers, snips, trowels, tape measures and more. Please pray that we get through customs without these items being confiscated or taxed. The total value is $881 and it is desperately needed.

God has provided everything we have needed thus far and will continue to pour out His blessings on this team. Please keep us in your prayers and check this blog daily while we are there. We are committed to blogging every day, but it will depend upon available power and internet connectivity which are intermittent at best.

God bless,

Lynne Punnett

Team Leader