The Highway to Haiti

In the last post we briefly introduced the playground project and would now like to give more information on what we are trying to accomplish and how you can get involved.

We are currently working to raise funds to build a playground in our community. We envision this playground to not only be a safe place for children to play, but also provide a common area for families in the community to enjoy together.

To help accomplish our goal, we divided the project into three steps. In Step 1 we need to raise $2,500 for a community-size swing set. Step 2 will add in a play structure: fort-like towers, slides, a teeter-tooter, a sandbox, monkey bars and a zip line! And Step 3 will complete the project and create a family-friendly environment by providing a shaded pavilion, picnic tables and benches.

The playground project started with my sister and bro-in-law, and their desire to find a tangible, creative way to teach their children about giving sacrificially—a project they could participate in as a family. The families in our community will be involved in the building of the playground, and we’d like to invite your family too! Our blog posts will contain a “Hey Kids!” section where we provide fun, educational stories and pictures so that, if you have children, you can invite them to be a part of this process too.

If you are interested in participating with us, click here.

So without further ado…round up the kids and read on!

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Hey Kids!

Have you ever wondered what kids in other countries do for fun? We have learned that kids are kids no matter where you live, and all kids love to play and have fun. Here in Haiti, kids are incredibly creative and enjoy making their own toys out of things that they can find. They have taught our kids how to make a lot of neat stuff!

In this picture our neighbors are pulling each other around in a little wood car that they made entirely out of scraps from a construction site. How cool is that!

In this picture, our friend FeFe is teaching Silas and Luke how to make a battery-operated propeller. I wouldn’t have known how to do that!

They have shared a lot with us, and we would like to share with them too! That is why we are working to build a playground for all the kids in the community. Now, to give you an idea of what we are trying to build, I enlisted my boys to help out. They can build just about anything out of Lincoln Logs, so I put them to work and this is what we made for you to see…

We have already put up a fence to keep all of the cows, goats, chickens and pigs out of the playground! Our next project will be to build a big swing set…

Then we would like to build some fort-like towers with slides, a sand box, teeter-tooter…

…and maybe even a zip line!

And lastly, some shaded areas, picnic tables and benches for the mamas and daddies to enjoy…

We believe that kids can make a difference too. Come join us!

Recently, during one of our weekly phone chats, my sister, Jen, told me that she and her husband, Jeremy, have been looking for a creative, tangible way to teach their children how to give sacrificially. She asked me if I had any ideas of something they could get involved in as a family. Here in Haiti, we are never short on ideas. We have endless ideas and dreams and “maybe someday”s. So I told Jen that I would get back to her soon on this one, and I began to think about which idea would be most appropriate to get kids involved in—teaching them to give and showing them that they too can make a difference!

One of our “maybe someday” ideas has been to build a playground for our community. Our dream has been that our own kids, along with kids in our community, could help to build a place for kids to play and families to enjoy. How perfect! My sister and our team loved the idea, and so began: the Playground Project.

So here we go! In the coming weeks and months, this blog will serve to tell the story. So round up the kids and come visit! Read stories of other families who are finding creative ways to contribute to the project. See our community coming together to get the job done!

Interested in getting involved? Check back next week for more details…

Thank you Jeremy, Jen, Laekin, Micah and Brynn for getting this project rolling!

Click here to learn more about “PHASE 1″ at www.paulosgroup.org

by Eddie Ogan

I’ll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy was 12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was to do without many things. My dad had died five years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money.

By 1946 my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter the pastor of our church announced that a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give sacrificially.

When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering. When we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as possible and didn’t listen to the radio, we’d save money on that month’s electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and both of us babysat for everyone we could. For 15 cents we could buy enough cotton loops to make three pot holders to sell for $1. We made $20 on pot holders. That month was one of the best of our lives.

Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we’d sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the church would give them. We had about 80 people in church, so figured that whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times that much. After all, every Sunday the pastor had reminded everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.

The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all our change. We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so much money before.

That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn’t care that we wouldn’t have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the sacrificial offering. We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning, rain was pouring. We didn’t own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from our home, but it didn’t seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet.

But we sat in church proudly. I heard some teenagers talking about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich. When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us kids put in a $20.

As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our fried potatoes! Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn’t say a word. She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one $10 and seventeen $1 bills.

Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn’t talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash. We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have our Mom and Dad for parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share silverware and see whether we got the spoon or the fork that night. We had two knifes that we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn’t have a lot of things that other people had, but I’d never thought we were poor.

That Easter day I found out we were. The minister had brought us the money for the poor family, so we must be poor. I didn’t like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so ashamed–I didn’t even want to go back to church. Everyone there probably already knew we were poor!

I thought about school. I was in the ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had finished the eighth grade. That was all the law required at that time. We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the money. What did poor people do with money? We didn’t know. We’d never known we were poor. We didn’t want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn’t talk on the way. Mom started to sing, but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun dried bricks, but they needed money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a church. The minister said, “Can’t we all sacrifice to help these poor people?” We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a week.

Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the offering. When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn’t expected such a large offering from our small church. He said, “You must have some rich people in this church.” Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that “little over $100.”

We were the rich family in the church! Hadn’t the missionary said so? From that day on I’ve never been poor again. I’ve always remembered how rich I am because I have Jesus!

We sit and talk on the step under the warmth of the morning sun. I strain to hear her over plastic dumps trucks hard at work and children’s laughter filling the yard.

She finally asks. I was hoping she wouldn’t this time. Hoping she just came to visit. But she asks still and that is okay. She needs money, again. She has scrapped up enough for her daughter’s school bills, but needs a little more for supplies. I ask about her aunt, the one living in Miami whose sporadic generosity determines the bulk of decisions she makes in her life. She shakes her head. Nothing from her for a while now.

I am weary, at a loss for what to do. I have helped here and there, but deep down, I know I am not really helping her. And what is worse, she is learning to live only for the band-aids she can scrape up.

I sit quietly for a while, thinking, praying. I know the statistics. I wonder to whom and to what she will turn if desperation begins to tighten its nasty grip. I agree to give her some money, but we talk long. I remember the words of hard-working, middle-aged Haitian friends who say that there is work to be found for the one who really seeks it. I ask her gently if she’s seeking. I search her eyes as she looks away. Knowing that she swallowed a piece of her dignity in coming to ask me in the first place, I don’t want to push the issue. I give her the money and tell her that I know I don’t really understand what she is going through. That I really cannot relate to the struggles of a 23 year-old single mom. But I do care.

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The back door opens. Papo comes to play and my little boys’ English ramblings turn to Creole at the slam of a door. I smile. They play and we love Papo. We paint. Luke teaches him how to do a puzzle; Silas shows him how to flush the toilet.

Papo is eight. His mom: twenty-two. I do the math and my heart aches. The boys get to work making paper airplanes and I start on lunch. “Mama…” I look down at my compassionate four year-old. “Papo said he’s hungry and his mom isn’t making food for him today. Can he eat lunch with us?” I love his simplicity. “We’ll see bud, okay?” He returns to his paper airplane and I throw another cup of rice in the pot and cut the chicken a bit smaller. I quietly go about my work, my mind wrestling again with the complexities of poverty.

I wonder what is better, to feed the boy or teach his girl-mom to care for her son? And yet I know, that at the end of the day, at the end of the line of careless choices and irresponsible living, it’s poverty’s children who suffer its consequences. Even deeper down, I know that without the grace I have received, that girl-mom could have been me.

These are the tough questions we face each day. These are the questions we don’t always have answers to. But we continue to wrestle, think, pray, seek and learn. How do we love God and love our neighbor in this deeply rooted, tangling, thorny mess? How do I tell my neighbor about Jesus when her mind is preoccupied with survival? How can we give without destroying dignity and squelching desperation’s drive to find work?

We give ourselves. We roll up our sleeves and jump in. Their problems become our problems and their toils our toils. Together we push and we pull, we sweat and we hurt. And at the end of the day our heartbeat is to make disciples and our prayer is that this earthly toil will birth greater things, eternal things.

Development and discipleship: in the fabric of our lives here in Haiti, the two are so tightly interwoven. The kingdom of God to which we belong is both for today and for days to come—and for when our days are no longer. Christ our Redeemer is our hope for today as well as tomorrow. So through development, we pray that doors might be flung open wide to make disciples. And through discipleship, that we might develop followers of Christ who understand that the Gospel has everything to do with everything.

Side by side, we live and work together. And we pray that when the Savior beckons “Come”, they might leave it all to follow Him.