Two of Morning Star’s leadership team members, Bob Bixby and Jeremy Scott—along with Jeremy’s wife Anouk, Jack Bender, and Joy McCarnan—left very early on Monday morning March 15th to travel to Léogâne, Haiti, to the FSIL nursing school where Pastor Bixby stayed during his first trip after the earthquake.
Our 5 people joined into the work of two other teams who were there already. We spent time talking with nurses, nursing students, and clinic patients who are still dealing with grief, traumatic memories and lingering anxieties. Most of the men and college-aged girls from the teams there sorted through the rubble and hauled concrete at a church, and cleaned at the closest hospital and at the nursing school. A couple of the women we were with were nurses who helped at the hospital. Many played with and cared for the children at the orphanage where Jeremy delivered some supplies back in February. Some spent time beautifying the grounds around the school and watering the garden areas in preparation for a future memorial service, or working on plumbing and water heaters and getting a washing machine functional. Still others poured hours into improving the internet connectivity and installing software on computers for the school’s classrooms.
Pastor Bixby preached a couple of times, and all 5 Global Grace team members were able to make some visits out in the community to see the progress of various efforts in the community and surrounding region (the Charles’ clinic in Léogâne, the construction of a new hospital, a children’s club and discipleship outreach in an outlying village, a mission outreach in a poorer area, etc.) and spend more time talking in-depth about the Gospel and future vision with some of the likeminded local leaders who have been undertaking and overseeing these efforts.
The team arrived home in Rockford early Tuesday morning, March 23rd. God answered our prayers—not always how we asked Him to, but always rightly. Various team members might be posting up their own accounts of how the trip went. It looks as though we have lost most of the photos from the week because of a computer crash, but we are trying to collect a few from other Americans who were there at the same time. Here are a few of the few we have left:
