Day Two

Hi All,
We officially entered Haiti time when we boarded the plane from Fort Lauderdale to PAP. As the plane was loading a couple with a young baby, in mom’s arms, and the rather strong dad with diaper bag and backpack in one arm and large carry-on in the other headed down the aisle. However at this same time a woman of larger dimensions came bulling up the aisle the other way. It was pure Haitian ballet, if you’ve ever seen the way Haitian drivers, cyclists and pedestrians interact. We did reach PAP safely and got to the Vaval’s home about six. As always Francois fixed us a perfect meal.

This morning we headed to the church to begin helping the Haitian workers apply a first coat of stucco to the school classrooms. While their work was tremendous, ours suffered a little. At first we did the basic jobs; carried the hod (slang for stucco), cleaned up some floors, and moved (rather weakly) some bags of cement. Pretty soon Rick decided to try ‘slinging’ some mud (the other slang term for stucco) at the wall but very little stuck. In fact as we all took turns slinging more mud got on us than the wall. Their lead foreman repeatedly (ALL DAY!) kept showing us how to do it and towards the end of the day we all had ventured into this more advanced work but in the end we were were amateurs, but able nonetheless.
We worked hard today and while it’s only about nine we are all beat. Much work was done today. At dinner as Moise was asking about how the work went, we expressed while we would love to do it tomorrow we were concerned that our Haitian brothers might be a little concerned about our work. Moise assured us that much more was accomplished with us helping than would have been accomplished them alone. Samuel told us that our help with the work even caused our Haitian brothers to work a little harder. So we will head out tomorrow again to stucco. Pray for us that we can even get out of bed in the morning, stiff and sore as we will be.

God Bless, John