August 13, 2004

Once again Sharyn and I greet you both as friends and co-workers, and we bring greetings from the hundreds of people you worked with here in Haiti this past week. Some really exciting happenings took place because through your prayers and gifts you showed you care. I can say God, the people of the CODEP project, and we especially are grateful.

Summer school reminds me of the ocean. What you see is awesome. It is teaming with life. The closer you look the more amazing it is. And like the ocean, summer school has some powerful currents. One of the more sinister ones appeared this past week.

In fact, this has been a pretty amazing week in many ways. We had a group of 75 volunteers from the mountains come to help our local church folks in L’Acul build a wall around some property adjoining the guesthouse. This land has been owned by the Episcopal Church for years. Some very audacious local government officials and some powerful yet corrupt “businessmen” have manufactured some fake paperwork that appears to give them title to the church land and a larger adjoining tract. Using this paperwork, they have sold the same land several times. As you can imagine, the absentee real owners, the new “owners,” and the “businessmen” (supported by local police) get into quite a discussion. Because of all the armament involved, it has been fortunate all these parties never arrive at the same time. The local Episcopal Church has decided to put a fence around its piece of ground and 75 CODEP workers, many from Episcopal churches in the mountains, came to help them get started. After digging footers and then carrying six dumptruck loads of rocks on their heads for about 100 yards each trip to place as the footer, they finished about 4:00 p.m.

Here is the good part. The truck that caused the accident is owned by the Nissan garage and the owner of the garage is a friend of mine. Only someone who has tried to deal with an accident in the Third World can begin to understand the frustrations this has saved.

Being limited to one truck hasn’t been too bad because the L’Acul “mud hole” has been causing major problems again. The water under the road is unable to drain away and now the road has totally collapsed. Some of the holes are ten feet across and filled three feet deep with water. Once again thousands of vehicles are backed up. For some unknown reason, periodically everything will get unstuck and traffic can carefully pass thru. One never knows until getting there if the road is open or not. And worse, we ask, “will it be open when we try to return?”

We finally bought another generator for backup at L’Acul. After buying it, we found out all the custom inspectors in Haiti are on strike and the generator is stuck in customs. Hopefully this problem should be rectified in a few days.

Our cell phone system collapsed and a refrigeration unit broke. That’s a few of the highlights for this past week. Oh, I still need to finish the summer school story.

Saturday our teachers had a teacher-training seminar. While learning how to present biology as an agricultural class, they were digging in the school tree nursery. They unearthed a very significant voodou sacrifice that had been recently placed there as a curse on the nursery and the DVBS/summer school program.

On Monday, a practical joke required us to fire one of our teachers. While his class was working in the nursery, the teacher took some rags and fashioned a doll. He sent it via one of the children to the director of the school saying it was another voodou doll found in the nursery. A number of the kids laughed nervously. Local people got very angry. The school director, a couple of local leaders, and all directly involved decided that because the joke was so adamantly opposed to the message the summer school presents, the teacher would need to be dismissed.

For the next couple days the school kids discussed the dismissal of the teacher, the results of even joking about that which is opposed to God, and the need to stay away from anything that could cause others to fall. As I listened to some of the fourth graders, I was both convicted and awed. I wish I could let them share and preach to our American churches with all of you.

This has been an interesting week with a lot of amazing twists. Do continue to pray for the summer school children and teachers. Also pray that the difficulties mentioned earlier would be quickly resolved. And we thank God that evil and error and problems will always be overcome with Good.

For those who might be interested in visiting CODEP in the future, please contact Jim Pease (http://www.haitifundinc.org). If you need information from the field, please write us directly. And please, please, print hard copies of this note to share with your friends and church families. Missions is one of the best-kept secrets in many churches—share the good news of what God is doing.

In Christ’s service with you,

Rodney and Sharyn

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 136