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