Day 5 June 16, 2011

VBS Craft (notice the stickers on their faces)

Day 5- This is day two in Beauchamp, and we all woke up bright and early as there were multiple roosters crowing way before the usual 5 a.m. we were used to back at the mission in St. Louis Du Nord. Before breakfast has even started a couple of my team members are telling stories from the night before about weird things that happened to them in the night. Everyone can agree that someone was snoring really loud, so loud that the girls could hear “him” clearly from the other room. Two of the guys in our group had an even funnier story than snoring. Alex woke up in the middle of the night with a dog in his bed and he called out to John and said look what is in my bed, and John replied with you have to options cuddle with it or push it away. Now it was a little black dog and John couldn’t see well in the dark, and he thought it was a small Haitian child, needless to say Alex did not want to cuddle with the dog, and the next morning all three of the boys woke up with sand fleas (who knows if it was from the dog or not). Then there is the story Alexis who was sharing a mattress with me and another girl Kimberly because she didn’t have one. She tells me that in the middle of the night she woke up and though I had been murdered and dragged out of the room and there was a Haitian laying next to her, so she grabbed on to Kimberly and said she stared at me for about an hour and I turned over and she saw my blonde hair and realized I was still very much alive.



VBS Beauchamp



We all got a good laugh at each other’s stories all the way through breakfast. After breakfast we had lots of work to do to prepare for VBS that day at two. We had to cut construction paper, glue papers on the construction paper, and punch holes in the paper and feed pipe cleaners through them (you can see a picture of the finished product in the picture with the kids). We had a pretty efficient assembly line even though some of our group members clearly did not learn how to glue in kindergarten. When we finished we all decorated one and then we practiced our skit that we did for the children to show them the difference between good and bad and God and Satan. By the time the preparations were done it was almost lunch time, to kill time before lunch we played with the kids hanging around the mission with jump ropes and frisbees.



Frisbee



Jaqueline and her jump rope!



After lunch we all walked down to the market but we were disappointed when there was nothing really there and the translators explained the market comes on Fridays (it was Thursday). By the time we walked back to the mission it was time for VBS, so we headed over to the church. They did the usual singing and then our skit and then we made our craft. We had stickers to decorate the craft, but most of the children preferred to put the stickers on their faces or ears (to look like earrings). The children still shock me by how well they are all behaved and how well they listen. You can never get American children to sit down and be still yet the Haitian children sit down and wait for instructions and you don’t even have to ask them to.



After the mud fight; they had to all get into a huge bucket
of water just to get all the mud off them!



After VBS it started raining AGAIN (the place that never rains huh?) and some of the group went to the soccer field. One of the girls in our group came back from the field early and was REALLY sick. When everyone else came back later they were covered in mud and explained they not only played soccer but had a mud fight as well. The girl that was sick was not doing any better, matter of fact she was worse and everyone was really worried about her. We had group prayer time more than once praying that they could come up with some kind of medicine she could keep down so she could begin rehydrating and healing before we had to head back to the main mission the next day. With a group member sick it really made us all stop and realize that this was a very serious situation as we had no doctors around, we finally could grasp that this is how it would be like to live here as a Haitian; a simple stomach bug could become a serious ailment. Before bed her health was improving and we all could rest a little easier knowing that she was healing and would be able to make the trip back with us the next day. Today I am thankful for doctors, hospitals, nurses, and the amount of medicine available to us at home.