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Today we are making various trips to town. This is market day so one group is shopping for our food and the school lunches for the next few days. Another group went after propane. Corrie and I are at the internet café in town attempting to send photos and now some text. A group is also supposed to go out to an irrigation ditch to purify some water with the purifier we brought.

There was little to see most of our time in the air, but we could feel the excitement mount when Sara spotted the faint coastline of an island appear in our view. This could be our destination.

We came in low over the outskirts of Port au Prince to a view of a mass of rusted and tarped roofs. The airport was a rush of immigration check points and lugging baggage out into the hot sun where we met One-Arm Jackson who guided us to our transportation.With all our bags and a few people in one truck and the rest of us in the van, we took off through the crowded streets. Our van driver, Johnny, was an expert at weaving his way around and through the lines of outgoing and incoming traffic. Many taptaps drove by with their brightly decorated exteriors and jam-packed cargo – human or otherwise.

Our ride of about an hour from Port au Prince to Thomas took us past too many sites to describe in a few words, but we should be able to include pictures at some point. Just a few of them were shells of buildings, women washing clothes in the river, cows grazing in empty lots, people hauling produce to market on donkeys, bananas and papayas spread out for sale and new bricks being laid.

Our van arrived at the Thomas School where we met Warren McGuffin who is in charge of the Thomas Food Project.He gave us a tour and a quick overview of the project while we waited for the truck to join us. It turned out that it went to the other location that is part of the Project but Johnny retrieved the occupants and cargo. We bustled about unpacking and sorting the 13 bags which made quite a display of pillowcase dresses, toothbrushes, pencils, work gloves and more and more.

Before and after dinner, our first project was to set up our homes for the week. The men bivouac in one of the classrooms and the women have two rooms in the guest house. The guest rooms have newly installed cots and mattresses but the men’s room doesn’t.They set about blowing up the air mattresses we brought and most of the women added them to their beds as well. The occupants of each room met the challenge of installing mosquito netting in their own way. We feel elegantly ensconced in our canopy beds.

Dinner was delicious and a welcome treat after all our travel. Beans and rice, goat meat, beet and potato salad (give us the recipe!), and a spicy shredded carrot salad (namedsomething like pi-clay). We even had real Coke (ie, the kind with sugar, not corn syrup).

We had an inspirational devotional led by Rob. We could only find a Bible in Creole so James read it to us and then interpreted. We sang “Go ye, go ye, into the world” and “Go forth in Jesus Name” and Rob read from Sara’s page in Sue’s devotional book which touched us all. Then Janette asked us to share some of our first impressions. Corrie gave a moving testimony of how much this experience and the people we have already met inspire her and encourage her desire to spend her life in mission work.

Then it was to bed for a sleep that had been on hold since we awoke for church on Sunday morning.

We got up yesterday, went to Palm Sunday service where we were dedicated and commissioned to leave. We did this at MUMC and at S/GUMC. Then we had some pizza at the Williams home and hit the road to Mountain View. In Mountain View we had some time to walk at Shoreline Park, then ate dinner at a nearby Togos. We went to SFO to board the overnight plane to NJ, then on to Haiti. We had breakfast in the terminal, and lunch on the plane. We landed about 1 pm-ish. Got the TONS of luggage we needed to haul here (leaving most of it behind when we leave) went thru immigration and customs with zero problems.
Got the luggage into a truck, with 4 team members then the other 10 drove with Johnny to Thomas.
Got here, unpacked, set up rooms, ate dinner, washed up dishes, hung mosquito nets, had devotions and team check in, got ready for bed… Journaled…..

It is nearly 11 pm here. I think we will probably sleep pretty well

Goodnight!

(Sent from my iPad)

We are now in Newark, New Jersey. The flight, was, I would say uncomfortable because we were crammed in like in a Mercury capsule, and it was really pretty hard to sleep. Otherwise everything on the flight went well. Most everybody is sort of fussing about the fact that they didn’t get much sleep. But now we have a relaxing time here at the Newark airport because the gate that we leave on is the same gate that we came in on and we have 3 hours. Mando and I just had breakfast. And we’ll walk back and see what the other people are doing. I will file my next report, whenever I can communicate.