Food to La Grange

Hungry & Thirsty

On our drive into La Grange, the poorest area in Haiti, there were lush fields full of rice. Goats and bulls gnawing on stalks of rice, children playing in the canal, vendors on the side of the road selling whatever they can to earn some money. 

Then we turned a corner and the lush fields slowly turned into dry, barren ground. There wasn't a goat or animal in sight. Nothing but dirt. Nothing but rows and rows of mud huts with a few trees here and there. I quickly understood why the area was called La Grange, which means "The Dirt." Even our translators, grown up in Haiti and everything, all said they'd never seen poverty like that. As I saw children running to our truck, I began to tear up, knowing they were excited to see that someone had come to visit them, someone had come to care.

After a time of prayer, our team split up to go house to house to mainly pray for families but also to get some information needed for statistics. YWAM is hoping to start Homes of Hope in the area to give each family a home and basically restore the community to liveable standards. So we were there to do the foundational work, for example, this community is known to have the highest infant mortality rate, like 70%, so we were there to find out if this was true. It's all numbers...until you actually come face to face with the lives behind the numbers.

The first house we visited, we met a mother who had a miscarriage and has been carrying the dead baby in her womb for approx. four months. We prayed the Lord would revive that child with His resurrection power and breath life into that child. Nothing happened....yet!

Home after home, we met mothers whose husbands were committing adultery, mothers who had lost at least two children, mothers with at least four or more children with barely enough food to feed even one. One mother said she came home from the market to find her child dead. In another, a child had been suffering from severe scabies and some sort of fungi infection since he was like a month old and hasn't been able to be treated for it because they can't afford to even get to a medical clinic. After a few homes, I couldn't take it. I had to stop, pray and cry out to God and just allow my heart to be pieced back together, my heart was hurting for them.

The stories of suffering and despair continued as we visited home to home, but thankfully, we found out a lot of them know Jesus and are followers...although according to the long term staffers here on the base, there's a lot of confusion where they mix Christianity and voodoo up, they think they're the same thing! A lot of people said we were an answer to their prayer, and many called out to us asking us to pray for them to either be healed or saved!!

On top of this, we ran a kids program for the hundreds of children in this village (see Jon's blog below). At the end of the day as we debriefed as a team, we couldn't believe how hungry and thirsty people are, spiritually and physically. A lot of them had become Christians before, but because they can't get to church for fellowship and aren't being discipled, their zeal and hunger dries up and they fall away...kinda like the parable of the sower! We're excited to have brought hope and joy to this community and are excited to head back there this week to distribute food to them.

During the debriefing, we had to just laugh over the hysterical things that happened. Animals are so starving in this section of Haiti (St.Marc is broken up into different sections and La Grange is in the 5th section), that one of our guys saw a baby pig trying to suck on the nipple of a goat! And as Jon hung out with the kids, he taught them the street slang, "what's poppin'?" It's like, "what's going on?" So all the kids were going around awkwardly saying, "what's popping?" Cause they didn't even really know what they were saying. To be continued...

tami

Light Shines in La Grange

Hello all, this is Jon.  On Thursday and Friday of this week our team ventured into one of the poorest villages in Haiti.  It's name is La Grange which means 'The Dirt.'  Many of the children and women were malnourished.  They had malnourished bellies, so their hair was orange and they kept patting their bellies asking us for food.  I don't know if I have ever seen people so in need of fresh bread and water.  And as I walked around the village I began to pray 'Lord these people need Fresh Bread and Fresh Water.  You are the bread of life, would you bring them sustinance and pure water Lord.'  I was asking the Lord to manifest food because I have never seen a people so in need of it. 

Our team was there doing kids programs and home to home getting to know the people and gathering information.  One of the things that was heart breaking is that they make dirt cookies,which is basically dirt and butter mixed together.  There's a rumour amongst them that this gives minerals they would not normally get, but it mainly gives the children stomach aches and other health problems.  As Tami and Andrea, another team member, went around, they met a grandmother whose 2mth old grandaughter is severely malnourished because her mother can't produce milk. After they prayed over the baby girl, the mother walked in with 1/4 bottle filled with cow's milk...probably unpasteurized.   I was so proud today, while we were at the grocery store in St. Marc, Andrea bought milk to give the baby. 

At the kids program the first day there was roughly 100 kids.  The second day there were 200 and only 8 of us leaders with two translators so normally in Toronto, this would be illegal!  However as we did a play about Jesus ("Jezi" in Creole) all of the kids laughed and loved it.  We then prayed over each child individually, praying and propheysing over them...they also got animal balloons and their faces painted. I kept thinking that is was an amazing privilege to be doing pure religion.  As Jesus said, "Pure religion is this: that you take care of the orphans and widows."  One thing that was sad at the kids program was that many of the children didn't have clothes to come so were naked, and many had embillical cords still hanging off there tummies because they were not cut off properly.  There are so many needs in this community: food, water, clothes, medical and cleanliness just to name a few.  All of which as I said before I prayed that the Lord would bring into the community.  And I am happy to say from tomorrow to Wednesday we are doing food distribution in La Grange and I am going to pray that as Jesus fed the four and five thousand that the food we hand out will be miraculously multiplied to sustain them until their rice crops can be harvested.  I am also praying that some way fresh water can get there because the ground is too salty to dig a well.  As soon as you throw a bit of water on the ground salt crystals form. Pray for this community, pray that the light of Jesus would shine forth brighter than ever and pray that the basic necessities would come in for the people.  He is moving here and will continue to. Peace,

Jon

Worship Breaks Open the Heavens

Sorry for the delay, but thanks for caring enough to catch up on what's going on with us here in Haiti. Last week was incredible, a Burn 24/7 crew came in for a week and brought some fresh fire into our team and on this base.

Lemme e'splain what Burn 24/7 is, they're basically all about starting up houses of prayer around the world that are centred around releasing the Kingdom of God through worship and intercession all day and all night (Matthew 18:7). Here's how powerful worship is...a friend of ours here on the base had a chronic fever and Jasen, a Fire & Fragrance staff member who's been in Haiti for 2 months now, just grabbed his guitar and worshipped outside the guy's room for an hour and a half. When Jasen went back in to check up on our friend, his fever was gone and he felt 100% better!!

So having the "Burn crew" with us was refreshing. A lot of our team has fought through sickness, getting things stolen, it's just been exhausting in every way...and then the heat! My God, the heat!! So last week, we were able to get refreshed, re-energized and re-focused. We held a 24hr worship session for all the tent communities and did 12hrs of worship and prayer in the medical clinic tent community we've been ministering in.  

Various teams rotated through, releasing worship into the atmosphere over that community and praying for the several tent communities across Haiti. Several people from the community heard and started congregating in and around the medical clinic where we were worshipping...a lot of the children even fell asleep from the presence of God's peace. The last 12hrs of worship was finished here on the base and in the end, we all sensed that God's presence swept through the nation in a powerful way. We don't know exactly what God did through this, but the day after, we got a taste of it. We found out YWAM Haiti got a grant to help rebuild the medical clinic tent community we've been in and even enough to get it up and running!! We were freaking ecstatic cause we'd been praying for that exact thing! And as if that wasn't enough, YWAM Haiti's been trying to acquire an abandoned hotel down the street and we found out that someone called Terry, Director of YWAM Haiti, letting them know the hotel was ready to sell!! 

I get goosebumps just thinking about it all...we went straight to the prayer room to just worship God for all He'd done and is still doing. We're waiting and anticipating for the many stories that will come in about how God's transforming this nation through the power of His Spirit. I pray God will give us all burning hearts to see our homes, our communities, our cities and our nations changed through the power of worship and prayer!  

Love,

tami