Safe in the arms of Jesus

I received word this weekend that our dear little baby Grace passed away.

Grace

Her life lasted about three short weeks. I don't know if she was in pain. I don't know if she could sense the love of those who cared for her. Was she conscious of a caressing hand, a soothing voice? Was she comforted by the presence of those around her? I don't know.

But she couldn't have been aware of the way she changed me.

She changed me?

How could she do anything? She was a little baby. She couldn't interact with anyone.

"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength"--but she couldn't even talk.

"But God hath chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His presence." 1 Cor. 1:27-29

Weak, despised, abandoned, and almost forgotten--this was baby Grace. Yet God used her to send me a special-delivery parcel, gift-wrapped in heaven and addressed directly to me. Inside was a special dose of Jesus's love. I accepted it, not without a pang, because opening your heart to love also opens you to be vulnerable. It planted itself in my being and bore fruit--a greater ability to see as He sees, love as He loves, and give as He gave.

Now she is safe. She is warm and comfortable. She can laugh. She can run. She can sit on Jesus' lap and look into His eyes. She will never be cast out or rejected again. She will never be hungry or feel pain. Her life, though short, had a purpose, even if it was just for one random American girl in Haiti.

Just now...

Just now I felt like I wanted something, but I didn't know what. I wasn't really hungry, but I wanted food. I didn't really want to go out, but I was restless. So Kate and I went down to the snack bar to get something.

As we passed the buffet on our way to the snack bar, we looked up and noticed guys in military fatigues lining the sidewalk between us and the buffet. There were 6 or 8 of them at regular intervals, standing at attention and holding big guns.

We looked into the dining area of the buffet, trying not to stare. There was the president of Haiti, right there. He was sitting within 10 feet of us, eating his lunch as we walked by.

We proceeded on to the snack bar and bought a 6-piece order of chicken nuggets for $3.

The mundane juxtaposed with the exceptional.

That pretty much sums up life in Haiti in a nutshell.

Coast Guard boat that is anchored just offshore, part of the President's security force while he is here.

Lose vs. Loose

The field next to the creche

The Grammar Nazi is coming out in me today. I have seen this error one too many times and I don't want you, dear reader, to be a part of the bunch that causes inner Grammar Nazis everywhere to rise in protest of your (innocent) trespass of written usage.

Lose means to misplace. It also means the opposite of "to win."

"I can't give away my books; they're too good to lose."
"If you don't put your keys in the same spot every day, you might lose them."
"Practice hard so you don't lose the competition."
"I don't want my team to lose the championship."

Loose means "not tight."

"Can you wait for a second? My shoestring is loose."
"His parents never let him hang out with friends who had loose morals."
"Your tie and your belt both look too loose. Please don't dress sloppily."

The same thing holds true for losing vs. loosing.

"After losing 100 pounds, all her clothes were too loose."
"I am loosing the strap on my sandals because they're too tight on my feet."

Many people make the mistake of hearing the "oo" sound in lose, and putting in 2 o's when they write it. Spell check doesn't tell them that this is incorrect, because "loose" is also a word. But there is a pronunciation difference. You would never SAY one for the other--so don't write one for the other.

Thank you. The Grammar Nazi is retiring for the time being.

Haitian food

A typical week's menu of the food we are eating might consist of the following:

Monday
Breakfast: Spaghetti with ketchup
Lunch: Corn flakes and milk
Dinner: Beans and rice with fish broth

Spaghetti with ketchup

Tuesday
Breakfast: Spaghetti with ketchup
Lunch: Porridge of flour, water, and sugar
Dinner: Beans and rice with hot dog broth

Beans and rice with hot dog broth

Wednesday
Breakfast: Patés
Lunch: Roll of buttered white bread and milk
Dinner: Beans and rice with fish broth

Patés

Thursday
Breakfast: Cornmeal mush flavored with chicken broth
Lunch: Popcorn
Dinner: Beans and rice with fish broth

Cornmeal mush

Friday
Breakfast: Spaghetti with ketchup
Lunch: Cornmeal mush with fish broth
Dinner: Beans and rice with hot dog broth

Cornmeal mush with fish broth

Saturday
Breakfast: Spaghetti with ketchup
Lunch: Porridge of flour, water, and sugar
Dinner: Beans and rice with fish broth

Beans and rice with fish broth

Sunday
Breakfast: Local fruit selection (mango, papaya, avocado, banana)
Lunch: Spaghetti with ketchup
Dinner: Beans and rice with fish broth

Local fruits

I love everything except the spaghetti! It's not the taste of the spaghetti per se, just the fact that it's wheat and doesn't particularly agree with me. I could eat the cornmeal mush and the beans and rice (with whatever broth) every day. So far I haven't gotten sick of them, but a number of the other Americans who have been here longer than me say, "Oh, just you wait." I don't know...I don't see my repetition tolerance wearing out anytime soon on these dishes.

However, notably absent from the menu are fruits and vegetables, so we try to supplement for ourselves by getting our own personal stash of fruit from the market. Going to the buffet here at Club Indigo is also a nice way to get fruit, vegetables, and meat, but it is quite pricey to eat there, so we don't do it often. Breakfast, for instance, offers omelettes, fresh fruit, yogurt, oatmeal, bacon, egg casserole, homemade donuts, muffins, coffee, juice, hot chocolate, and some typical Haitian dishes (they had a "soupe giromond" the day I went).

Breakfast at the Club Indigo buffet

In addition to the above "regular food," we tend to go a step above when we have mission teams come down. Here was one mission team meal:

"Picklies," patés, watermelon slices, bananas, avocadoes

I have also eaten some gorgeous concoctions a couple of times at local restaurants.

Gourmet hamburger at a local restaurant

Sauteéd Conch--illegal to serve in the US

"They would say..."

Today we rode a moto to school for the second time. We packed 4 people on it for the second time! I remember watching to see if I could ever see 4 people on a moto in the Dominican Republic, and we finally saw one after two weeks--and here, my very first ride on a moto was a 4-seater!

After school, Leann and I took the children to the local beach, which is right around the corner from the creche. We took two kids at a time and took several trips, allowing each group to swim for about 15 minutes before returning to get another group.

It was loads of fun and we had idyllic conditions. The sky was blue, the air was hot, and the sparkling blue Caribbean waters were crystal clear.

But the company was not so idyllic, and some rude Haitian guys were making loud comments to us in Creole which we didn't understand. One of the older boys from the creche was with us, and he took care of answering the guys for us. Later I asked him what they had said.

"Those guys were asking me to tell you girls that they love you," he said.

"Oh?" I replied. "And what did you say?"

"I answered back, 'I'm sure if I told them, they would say that they love you, too,'" he said.

Ha!

My classroom

You've got to be charmed and delighted with this one-room schoolhouse.

The classroom

Someone built these wonderful cubbies that keep all our supplies organized.

Notice in this picture that you can see the entire length of the classroom. The entire room is open to the air on one side, so we have plenty of flies, heat, and sunshine!

I know the pioneer girls did it, but I don't know how, so I'm going to just list some of the teaching challenges that I'm facing. If any of you have any ideas at all for this, please feel free to chime in (and pass my questions along to any teachers/homeschoolers who may be willing to help!)

• I have 18 students (and the number may soon increase, because we may be getting some additional older kids). They range in age from 5 to 15. They range in grade level from Pre-K to 3rd grade. There is a pretty even mix of boys and girls.
• None of the kids are fluent in English, although all of them speak some. The longer I am their teacher, the more they will understand, but right now, at the beginning, most of them are struggling to understand basic directions. My job is to teach school in English since they're being adopted to the US and will need to speak English when they arrive. 
• I envision myself running the school on a one-room-schoolhouse model like in the old days, where different classes take turns coming up to recite or receive instruction--but how do I keep all the other classes busy and silent when I am not directly interacting with them? 
• About 5 of the 18 children know how to read. I have to teach the rest to read in a language that they scarcely understand yet. Teaching a child to read is an all-absorbing task in itself--how do I juggle that with all the other subjects in a day that require knowledge of how to read? So far they know the alphabet but not the sounds of the letters, so we have been doing phonics drills and simple consonant-vowel blends (ba, be, bi, bo, bu). Blending sounds has not yet clicked with any of them.  
• I have some "Brain Quest" workbooks and some other little activity booklets that people have donated to the creche, but I have no textbooks. The workbooks and activity books offer educational material, but it's all just a fun, supplementary thing to their regular schoolwork (which, it is assumed, they are getting from another source--like school). So I basically have to come up with every day's lesson from scratch and try to match it appropriately to their level without it deteriorating into too much chaos. I need some good textbooks--even if it's just one math book per grade--but until I get them, I'm going to be struggling to make do.
• Most of the work in the Brain Quest workbooks is geared to someone whose native language is English. A page will say something like, "Circle the pictures that have the short /a/ sound," and then there is a picture of a hat, bed, cat, glove, bat, and mat. It's kind of hard to do when you don't know the English words for those pictures. Or, in the older children's workbooks, several sentences will have blanks that you fill from the options in a word bank in a box at the top of the page. But their English comprehension is not good enough to take a sentence like "The ____ floated quietly across the lake" and pick "boat" instead of "show" or "told." So how do I offer appropriate activities that are doable and also stretch their abilities?  
• At practically every moment of every day, there is a screaming baby within earshot...although this is not as much of a distraction as you might think, because the kids are so used to it. 
• Time is not a concept here. No one has a clock or a watch. So implementing any sort of routine is a difficult thing to do. Even though I have a watch, there are elements of the schedule that I can't control, like the kids' mealtimes. This is always unpredictable, causing me to have to be flexible enough to stop and start what I am doing at a moment's notice. It also makes recess breaks difficult to control (15 minutes invariably turns into 30, etc.) 
• Seating is extremely limited. Look at the two mini picnic tables that are in the classroom and imagine kids crammed together side-by-side in the 90-degree heat and humidity. (We also have a third picnic table not visible in the picture.) So I can't separate people by grade and have boys and girls separated and seat people where they can get along with the person next to them, at the same time. It's a matter of creativity and balancing of priorities when it comes to seating. 
• Keeping things nice is a major battle all the time. I have to protect the markers, pencils, erasers, etc. 

I think my biggest challenge is keeping up the energy and strength to fight for making this school the best it can possibly be instead of settling for mediocrity. It would take so much less effort to just give up from the outset and say to myself, "Ah, it doesn't matter if they learn anything or not. I'll just keep them seated and quiet and give them busywork and let the day go by however it wants to go by." I think the thought that threatens me is the thought that, "You can't possibly give yourself to all these children at the level that they all need, so why try?"

I will not get daunted. I will not give up at the outset. I will not say to myself, "why bother?" I will prepare for the impossible, and throw myself into it, and ask God for wisdom, and watch something incredible happen, rather than forcing myself to be content with nothing, simply because I never tried. 

Impossible life, here I come!

Prevalent destruction

Destruction is used to prevailing over preservation here. Darkness is used to prevailing over light. Death is used to prevailing over life. 

It's hard to understand how and why. "Why can't people just keep things nice?" you might wonder. 

Case in point: 

It's amazing how hard you have to fight just to be able to keep things nice. You basically have to lock them up and watch every time anyone gets them out, closely supervising their use and training people how to treat them properly.

For instance...
•  Someone donated about 20 paintbrushes to the creche. I found them in the storage room with the paint dried in the brush. From the looks of them, they were probably used once, but now they're beyond hope.
•  The kids got the markers out and wrote with them and then threw them on the floor with the caps off. Life expectancy of markers: one use (because they will be dry for the second use).
•  I found the pages of a book scattered all over the yard. Someone had torn them out and allowed them to blow everywhere. (See the above picture, where the pages are compiled and stacked up in order. This is the spine of the book.)
•  I have been playing "Memory" with the older kids. The game was brand new when I got it out, and by the end of the first round, some of the cards were creased, one had the corner chewed off, and all of them were grimy. And these are not just glossy paper cards that you could shuffle--they are like board book material; very durable and well-made. So I had to stop the game and point out the fact that "No, we do not treat our game like this," and carefully explain the difference between a still-good card and a messed-up one. The kids were very receptive to this training, but I still had to repeat essentially the same message every round for about 3 days before it started to sink in.

So pray for patience and understanding as I try not to get frustrated with what seems to me senseless and needless destruction. Destruction of things is accepted as the status quo here. No one thinks anything of it. It's so normal for things to break right away or be stolen or lost that no one bothers to fight against it. It's tiring to have to fight so hard just to stem the tide of waste and loss and maintain a semblance of normalcy.  So how much harder would it be to actually advance and prosper?

Thankfully, we serve a big God, and the darkness will never prevail against Him. When He fights for a cause, He never tires or gets discouraged.

"He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment in the earth: and the isles [Haiti!] shall wait for his law." Isaiah 42:4

Roadside Views in Haiti

I rode in the back of a tap-tap the other day and got a chance to get some pictures--and though they're not incredible quality, a few were actually semi-in-focus. So enjoy seeing the sights that are becoming common and familiar to me.

These photos were taken on the way to St. Marc, the nearest city, so you can see somewhat of a progression from rural territory to city and back.

I finally got a picture of a couple of banks. I found out that this is nothing like a bank as we know it, just a place to sell lottery tickets. So I find the above picture incredibly sad on two levels: 1) that someone would exploit Haitians in their dire poverty by selling them lottery tickets, and 2) that they are invoking the name of Christ on this one ("Christ Capable"), as if to say that Jesus will help them to choose the right numbers or lottery ticket or whatever they do here to strike it rich.