In the meantime I will post some highlights from my trip to Haiti from July-August 2017. (Unfortunately my teaching career gets kind of crazy during the school year and I have not been able to update sooner.)
In late July I returned to Haiti and stayed in Grand Goave at Ikondo, a mission guest village run by The Hands and Feet Project.They run retreats and good portion of their trip fee supports the many great projects they do to support Haitian children and families. We poured into the local economy with a market day, we hiked to a waterfall, we hosted a party to children and families in our mountain neighbourhood with songs, a water balloon fight, face painting and a bible story. Local translators gave us daily Kreyol lessons and a local band came to the resort to lead a worship party.
The guest village is also the site of Haiti Made, the Project's leather goods store that provides much needed employment opportunities. We helped an employee lay the foundation of his house and also visited the teen home which is in a separate neighbourhood as well as taking a day long trip over the mountains to Jacmel where we enjoyed the artisan markets, restaurants and beach. We got to tour The Hands and Feet Project's Children's village. It is set up in a way that is much healthier than a traditional institution. There are houses that each have a dorm mother and around 5-8 children, they do chores and eat meals as a family unit. This helps prevent attachment issues and the children don't run out to visiting strangers. (Their houses are also set back up higher on the mountain for privacy. We stayed away from those.) We toured the store, dining room, school rooms, hydroponics and fish hatchery. They make a lot of their own food on site and I think even food for the neighbours! The organization really focuses on family reunification and creating opportunities to keep families together. One of their houses was actually now empty due to successful family reunifications and they were turning it into a free daycare for struggling mothers, so that a mother must not make the difficult decision between working to survive or keeping her child.
The Children's Village in Jacmel
The houses are across the moat up the mountain with a lot of privacy
Hosting a party in our neighbourhood
Haiti Made Workshop
The next week in early August I returned to Renmen Foundation to visit my dear friends. It was so nice to catch up with the children and young adults after three years. I discovered one of them had become a real renaissance man and had a passion for art. The last time I visited him he was very frustrated with his canvas. This time when I brought paint he was painting every surface he could get his hands on, including adding some nice decorations outside the school. I helped some of the girls create a mural outside the bathroom. Another highlight was translating and reading bedtime devotionals to the teens and tweens.
Painting a mural by the bathroom at Renmen Foundation
