Food Delivery to Karenage & Mole Families…

KARENAGE

Today Momma Gigi, Elirose, Doumy, Smith, Jose, Asher, Levi, Gabe, & a few other staff kids traveled to Karenage today to deliver bags of rice! Everyone was cheering as the truck arrived and SO thankful!!!

Karenage has been a difficult village to minister to. Teams often have a rough experience serving there.  But we’ve come a long way since we first started visiting – 6 years ago. We’ve developed personal relationships with many of the villagers.

Passing things out is always difficult no matter where you go – there’s a lot of trial and error.  We have created a system that seems to work well…

1. We make cards with date/time/location of where we will be.
2. We have the Pastor and/or Haitian staff go a day early and pass them out.
3. When we arrive and as people gather around the truck-  we start singing. This leads everyone else into singing or at least begins to silence them and focus on the truck. After we sing – someone shares why we are there – how we will pass out supplies – shares a devotional – and we end in prayer.
4. Then we line everyone up in ONE line… we don’t pass supplies to anyone not in the line… we don’t give to anyone who doesn’t have a card… AND…  we don’t even start until the line is formed.  We’ve never had to wait more than 15 minutes. (All of these things though hard on the our heart sometimes – creates order & minimizes chaos.)
5. We have a system set up in the truck where everyone has a job. There is only 1 person collecting the cards and only 1 person passing out the supplies. Everyone else in the truck is support staff for those two people. They sort, stack, & bring the supplies from the back of the truck to the front.
6. When the line is done – you leave. Doesn’t matter if you have extra supplies in the truck. Doesn’t matter if they run after your truck. Doesn’t matter if every ounce of you wants to sneak food to someone who has deeply touched you. Doesn’t matter that tears may stream down your/my face. In that moment – you have to walk away. Your yes has to be yes  – – and your no has to be no.  You try to make mental notes and hope that at some point in the near future you can find a way to reach back out to those who touched you. Sometimes you can… most of the time you can’t.

We’ve now done this system about a dozen times… and “SO FAR” it works well. When we visit the same villages everyone knows the expectations.  They immediately get in line. They don’t run after the truck. The pressure of trying to cheat the system is gone… they don’t have to worry that someone else will somehow get something unfairly.

As you’ll see in the pics below Sophie & Ella went with the boys! They follow them wherever they go! 🙂

MOLE ST NICOLAS

Saturday we passed out 100 cards to struggling families in the Mole. We sang, prayed, & shared the Word with them as they arrived. SO many thankful families. I know how expensive it can be to take care of a big family – many of these mothers have 6+ kids. I’m so glad we were able to pour into them and ease their burden this week.

Everything we do   – we do with the hope that they see the Goodness of God through our actions. That they know God is watching over them. That they know God loves them… and that there’s no doubt that we love them too!