July 03, 2008
I’ll be leaving for Haiti tomorrow morning, so I would greatly appreciate your prayers for this trip. Lynn Ann will be joining me from July 13 – July 18 with a team of 18 other people. We’ll be running a summer day camp for children who live close to our land in Lacajou. This is a first for us, and I know it’s going to be great for the children. Joseph Israel, who works for Aslan in Haiti, started a youth group in Lacajou just after I left in early May. It has already grown to 130 children in a matter of weeks!
What’s interesting about Lacajou is that it is not even a village. It’s just an area about 2 miles south of Ouanaminthe. When we host activities there, however, children and adults always appear seemingly from nowhere. The picture above is from our February trip when we distributed hundreds of running shoes through the generosity of our friend, Michael Chirico.
In April we had a group of 12 RNs from New York join us for 7 days. In addition to providing school physicals for over 500 children, these wonderful nurses held a mobile medical clinic in Lacajou. Sixty- five children were treated to some of the best medical care they’ve ever had in their lives. One entire family came to us with bleeding sores, and our nurses were able to ttreat them with antibiotics they had brought with them. They also treated several children with ear infections and other skin infections. The people were amazed by the care they received that day.
Right now on our 6 acres in Lacajou all we have is a small well-house. A few years from now, I hope and pray you’ll see pictures of a Missionary Training School, a clinic and hospital, an orphanage and a school for the children of that area. It’s a big dream. No, it’s really an impossible dream. If this dream one day comes true, hundreds and thousands of lives of “the least of these” will be touched by Christ’s love and compassion.
To echo one refrain from the beautiful theme of Man Of La Mancha, “And the world will be better for this . . . .”
