New Beginnings

As promised, there have been lots of changes with the New Year and things are picking up speed for us here on La Gonave.

Jason continues with his work at the Children’s Village Aquaponics system and we have seen great results. Madame Soliette told us the other day that because of the harvests, she has not needed to buy any cabbage during the month of January. We are so glad to be able to bless the children and those who work so hard to take care of them in this way. Work in the garden is not without its challenges, though. We continue to have more ants than can be counted, a few watermelons have spilt due to heat, and we have learned that cabbage plants are very mean to beans, zucchinis, and cucumbers. Nicolas and the older kids continue to do a great job helping with the garden and are learning tons!

Harvest day at the garden

We are anticipating some new crops: cucumbers, watermelons, and tomatoes!

I, Allison, have started assisting with the Haitian Wesleyan School of Nursing that meets in a building on the Wesleyan Station here in Anse-a-Galets. I am so honored to be a part of this program that is working to train skilled, critical thinking, and caring nurses here in Haiti. I have been working with anther missionary in the skills lab training the second year students in hands on skills. So far, we have worked on vital signs, bed making, patient transfers, use of assistive devices, basic dressings, personal protective equipment, and sterile fields. There are many more skills on the way, too! It is so much fun to work with these 28 young men and women who are eager to learn, love to have fun, and desire to do their best.

One group of second year nursing students in our wonderful lab

Ready to work in the lab... we''ll see how long these scrubs stay white :)

This semester, I am also working with a group of 12 nursing students from Indiana Wesleyan University who are here for study abroad. These are also some incredibly Godly, caring, and quick learning ladies. I am working as a clinical instructor with them in the hospital for maternal care, pediatrics, and transcultural nursing. They have been very gracious with me as I have not worked in the maternal or pediatrics setting. I am learning a lot right along with them! I have also taken a few of the students to House of Hope. This is a home for the homeless elderly in Anse-a-Galets. The students’ grace and desire to bless those they serve is an incredible example to me. It is such a joy to be able to work with them!

My IWU clinical group after our first day in the hospital

Thank you so much for your continued prayers and support as we seek to serve and glorify the Lord here in Haiti!

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. 1 Peter 4:10

Happy New Year!!!

As I look back at 2015, I cannot believe the work that God has done and the changes we have seen. At the beginning of the year, we were going about life as usual in Indiana with the hope to move to Haiti at some point. Then, we felt the Lord calling us to go sooner than we thought, so we prepared to go for several months. This summer, there was a change in plans and the door was no longer open for us to serve here, so we tried to get back to “normal.” Then, we were asked to rejoin the team and come to Haiti as soon as possible. After much prayer and debate, we made the decision to come and were amazed to see God pave the way for us in just one month!

December has been a fun month of steady progress. We have worked hard with Nicolas and the older kids at the orphanage on care of the aquaponics system. We have new fish that are huge and the kids love to feed. The plants have grown by leaps and bounds and we had our first harvest, including lettuce, pak choi, kohlrabi, swiss chard, lima beans, and a zucchini. It is such a blessing to give this food to the women who cook for the Children’s Village… even if there is some confusion about what exactly a zucchini is and how to use pak choi!

Our incredible growth over the month of December

The kids feeding the fish

Weighing the harvest

We have also been working really hard on language learning with our tutor, Daham, and in everyday conversation. Some days are better than others, but we are getting better at speaking and understanding Creole. This is a great way we can build relationships with people here in La Gonave. We have seen friendships growing with the people around us and were honored to attend one of the Children’s Village staff member’s wedding as well as a Christmas Gala in town.

Us with Daham

One of the girls from the Children's Village at the wedding

We have reached a certain level of comfort and routine here in Haiti, but of course we are now stepping into a time of further transition and new challenges. Craig and Renee have almost completely moved into their new house, so we are working to make this our home and learning to run our own Haitian household. We are slowly and wisely giving Nicolas and the older children more independence with the aquaponics system, which means more of a supervisory role for us. I, Allison, will be starting a few new roles in the upcoming weeks. I will be assisting in skills lab for the Haitian Wesleyan School of Nursing a few days a week. This involves teaching and practicing hands on nursing skills, like vital signs, patient transfers, wound care, and medication administration to Haitian nursing students. I will also be working as a clinical instructor in the hospital with Indiana Wesleyan University nursing students who are spending a semester abroad here.

These changes are very exciting, but present us with new challenges. Please pray for wisdom as we serve, that we will truly be a light for the Lord in this place, and that we will have His wisdom in the next steps. Thank you for all of your love and support and may God bless you richly in the year ahead!

Thankful

I know that we are a few days late on this…. But, I wanted to take a minute to express how thankful we are to be here! We are so grateful to all of you who have helped to make coming to Haiti possible. Although the days here are not always easy and things have not always gone as we expected, Jason and I love life here. We are learning, growing, and being challenged in ways we have not been before.

Two of the biggest things I am learning are humility and dependence.

This is very evident in our learning Creole. We often have to ask people to repeat themselves and speak more slowly and have to be willing to learn language lessons from everyone. This is really a blessing, though, because it helps us to develop relationships with those around us and shows that we value the Haitians we do life with and their culture. We are very thankful for the great teachers we have, including our tutor, Daham, the Janofski family, and the friends we see at the orphanage and around town.

It is also humbling to be learning our aquaponics work from Glynn Barber, who is so good at what he does, and then teaching to people who are such eager learners and hard workers. We are amazed at the team God is developing here.

I am also growing closer with Jason as we learn to depend more and more on one another. There is less communication with friends and family in the States and we have more time together than we ever had before, so we are learning to communicate more clearly and support one another better.

Another lesson we are thankful to be learning is “dousman.” This is a Creole word for slow or gentle. It seems that everything moves more slowly here on La Gonave.  You can only expect to get a few things checked off of your list each day, and we are not nearly as busy as we were in the States. I have started to find great joy in this slower pace of life that allows us to choose to spend more time with the Lord, to just spend time with others and develop relationships in this very different culture, to help one another out, to play with the kids, to enjoy the beauty of creation around us, and to dream about the future.

Thank you all for your love, support and prayers!!!

Bon Travay! (Good Work!)

Jason and I have loved working on the aquaponics system at the orphanage and have gotten into a routine of going there each morning for the daily tasks of water checks, feeding fish, cleaning trays, adding more water, and watering the seeds.

One of our main roles during this time is to train employees and older kids to manage the system on their own. Our main helper is Nehemy Nicolas, a young man who lives in Anse a Galets. He has been a great worker, always gets to the greenhouse and is working when we arrive, is very willing to learn, and has even worked to teach us a little Creole! We enjoy working with Nicolas (we call him this, because he laughs at us when we try to pronounce his first name) and think he will be a great manager for the system.

We also sometimes enlist the help of the older kids at the orphanage when there is a big job to do. Here we are trying to get the renegade fish out of the plant troughs and back into the fish tanks.

As the plants get bigger and require more daily care and harvesting, we will definitely make use of their help more often. It is so fun to see their interest in and excitement about this project! Today one boy came down just to check things out and even helped feed the fish for me. We are very excited to be training others in this work and developing new relationships at the orphanage!

We have had a hectic, but very productive last week! The team heading up the aquaponics project (Jim Swan, Glynn Barber, and Mike Dunn) was here over the weekend and we were able to get things really moving on the system. It is so exciting to have more than just tubs of water in the greenhouse! But, all of this made me realize you may not all really understand the aquaponics system. So, I thought I would take a minute and try to explain this system that will produce fish and vegetables for food without taking any soil and using very little space….

There are 2 large tanks that hold fish. We just put tilapia in the system and they will be ready to harvest and eat in about a year. Theses fish are only in one tank, so we will stock the second tank in 6 months for a staggered harvest. We feed the fish and they, of course, produce waste.

Water is pumped from the fish tanks through a long set of troughs that will soon hold plants.

Individual seeds are planted in a small amount of growing medium.

As soon as these seed sprout, each plant is placed in a hole of one of the growing trays in the troughs. The water full of fish waste is great fertilizer for the plants. The roots growing through the holes of the growing trays will absorb all of these nutrients and clean the water. Clean water is then pumped back into the fish tanks.

The heart of the system is the pump that circulates all of the water, and therefore nutrients and allows for filtration.

With all the added nutrition, plants grow very quickly and we plan to have our first vegetable harvest in about 5 weeks. We have planted green beans, lima beans, beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, large watermelon, sweet baby watermelon, cantaloupe, kohlrabi, swiss chard, cabbage, and lettuce. Soon we hope to be able to plant strawberries, herbs, and vanilla. We also hope to add to the system to accommodate rooting vegetables, such as carrots, potatoes, and onions.

The overall goals of this system are to provide food and extra income for the orphanage, as well as determine if this system will work well in Haiti so that more like it can be started. 

It has been 9 days since we arrived in Haiti and we have been on the island of La Gonave for one week. In some ways this time has been very full, but we are also playing a bit of a waiting game as we adjust to life and work here. Over this week we have had the opportunity to meet many wonderful people and it is so reassuring to know we are not alone in serving the Lord here. There are so many people and organizations working to make life for the people of La Gonave better and show the love of the Lord each day. We met a Haitian-American family who have started a school for Haitian children and a church with both Creole and English services. This is the school that the Janofski kids have a homeschool room in and the church that we went to this week. The faith of this couple for the Lord to provide and complete his work is amazing. There are several new families doing work out of the Wesleyan Compound and with WISH to assist with the hospital on the island, a new library, the school of nursing, and many other projects. We also met another Haitian-American couple this weekend who live in a village up the mountain and run an orphanage caring for about 30 children. Of course, our biggest encouragers and helpers are Craig and Renee Janofski. We have been staying in their home and they have been amazing examples to us. They have helped us every step of the way, including grocery shopping, opening our bank account, learning some Creole, finding a language tutor, helping us to make good connections, navigating the city of Anse-a-Galets, helping with cultural adjustment, and so much more. We are so very thankful that God has surrounded us with fellow workers to encourage and help one another!

*Benden, one of the children of the family who started the school and church, and I got to color together after class one day this week*

I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all making my prayer with joy, because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. Phil 1: 3-6

We just want to say thank you for all of your love and support as we transition to life in Haiti. We have been truly amazed at how the Lord has placed us in such an encouraging community and how people we barely know have chosen to stand behind us as we serve. We made the decision to go to Haiti at the very end of September with our goal departure October 1^st. This is a crazy quick timeline and it was hard to trust that God would provide the funding, endurance, and support to get us there. However, He came through! We have had an incredible amount of help, with everything from a huge garage sale, to learning about our strengths and how best to use them in our new work, to dinners out to help us get away from the chaos, help to sell our car, cleaning and sorting everything we own, packing 3 bags that pushed the 50 pound weight limit, seeing us off at the airport, and, of course, friends preparing a place for us in Haiti. We really wanted to meet with people face to face to share our story and request funding and prayer support, but because of time constraints this was not possible in most cases. The Lord still prompted people to give and we received pledges to fulfill all of our funding needs before we left. We are so thankful to have you, this amazing team of people, behind us, supporting us, and praying for us, while we serve on La Gonave!