Village Bible Church || Aurora | Indian Creek | Sugar Grove | IL

David: On Tuesday morning we were able to get up and have breakfast as usual. This is typically some bread, peanut butter, fruit juice and maybe some banana. What we were able to do after breakfast was our initial plan of teaching a lesson on integrity. For example, in the case of Joseph, he had integrity even though his brother treated him wrongly, Potipher’s wife treated him wrongly, and he was accused of many things he was a man of integrity and did the right things because of his relationship with God.

Emily: It’s interesting that we were able to teach on this, because back in September when we were first starting to plan this trip before the earthquake we were planning on doing huge Vacation Bible Schools. When the earthquake happened we kind of had to drop that idea because, obviously, our whole mission and vision here was going to be different. But it was really cool that what we initially planned we were still able to use.

David: We spent some time doing that with the orphan girls who live on the compound. After that we teamed up with Bishop Juene’s son, Danny, and he is in charge of this whole ministry compound because his father’s jurisdiction stretches father, but they both still live here. Danny is in charge of, basically the mayor over one ninth of Car Four. We’ve been able to eat meals with him, talk and joke with him and one time when we were talking with him he said that we could send a good message to the people. So we did it! What we did was, we went out among the 20,000 people staying here. One of the problems is there are huge piles of rubble and it’s filthy. It’s just sitting there rotting. So we put on our boot and gloves, grabbed some shovels, rakes and wheelbarrows. We decided just to take care of this because no one else was. Danny’s vision was that maybe then the people would then think, “Hey, we should be doing that!” and then take over the responsibility for where they were living. So as we were doing it maybe 25 of us were working and about 500 people were watching. They then began taking over and saying, “This is my country. I should be taking care of it!” It was co encouraging to see them not being offended, but taking ownership of their county. They saw that if other people from another country can serve us, then I can surely serve my brothers and sisters in my own community.

Emily: I think the key is that in Haitian culture you would rather have no money than to potentially degrade yourself. So these people are in a cycle of not wanting to degrade themselves and not wanting to pick things up. We were then able to be an example of these people and show them it was okay to pick us this filth. Then today, Wednesday, we were driving back into the compound we saw the Haitian people still working on the project. That was such an encouragement to us!