I think we started the day with breakfast around 7:30am. We’re encouraged to be “flexible” since we’re operating on “island time” so I don’t even wear my watch. Breakfast was boiled-egg halves, spaghetti and sauce, papaya, mango, banana, corn flakes and milk, and of course, coffee. After breakfast, sometime between 8 and 8:30am, we watched the school children arrive at the church building, raise the flag of Haiti, and sing the Haitian national anthem. When the children had dispersed to their classrooms, we prepared to distribute the first water filters by drilling holes in the buckets and verifying that the filter packages contained all 10 components. People from the community began arriving for the clean water presentation around 9am.
Rodney opened the presentation around 10am with a hymn and a prayer from Keith. The presentation is largely pictorial and elementary but very informative and powerful information about the water cycle and how a water supply can be contaminated. He concluded with a demonstration of how to use the Sawyer water filters that we are distributing here in Mellier as we distributed water filters with buckets to the 30 households that were present. When the children finished school, they came into the church building around 12:15 pm for an animal cracker snack with water and a bead bracelet craft. For me, interacting with the children is always the best part of coming to Haiti. While we worked on the craft, music played in the background. It was fun to hear the children sing along with two popular songs; the translated titles are “Father, Here Are Your Sons” and “God I Need You Right Now”.
Lunch is typically our smallest meal of the day. We had spam, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, chips, Laughing Cow cheese, and cookies early in the afternoon, probably around 1:15 pm. Most of the rest of the afternoon and evening we played outside with the children; frisbee, soccer, puzzles, jump rope, whatever…just play! It was big and it was sweaty but it was so much fun! We were called in for dinner arounf 6:30pm. It was a feast to behold of broiled pork, beef stew with peas, rice, pickling, eggplant casserole, potato salad with beets and carrots (yum!), fried bread fruit, some sort of fried root (yum again!), fruit cocktail, cake, two kinds of fruit juice, and probably several other things I’m forgetting. It was awesome! Later, Daniel led our devotion time where he encouraged us to tear down the walls and boundaries that we often build between one another and embrace that which we have in common. We’re all members of God’s family and each of us plays a part in his plan. May God bless us all!
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