The medical and sponsorship teams went into Cazeau again today and managed to see over 200 people.  Every child in the SAEDT sponsorship program was accounted for save for one who was killed in the quake.  This is the sad reality that so many Haitians are affected by; Joanne was able to embrace the mother of this child and give her the reaffirmation of the promise of salvation and that MTH Canada would continue to support their family.  The medical team experienced some unique cases today as a young boy presented with a recently broken femur (upper leg bone).  They were able to provide him with some crutches and some advice and money to help toward the surgery he would need to properly address this issue.  Another woman who had lost her house in the quake and whose husband had just had a stroke was given a new tarp for shelter and some money to buy food.  Again, the need is so great here and we are doing what we can for the Haitians but it is very obvious the aid deployment must continue for a very long time into the future.  We are all very tired but very content in the peace of doing what we can to help.  Please pray that we may use every last bit of our energy tomorrow to continue to move forward in our work.  Blessings and much love to all of our friends and family wherever you are!  To view photos from today click here.

Another event that has occurred here is the purchase of 21 goats yesterday and 25 more on Friday to distribute to local families.  This was made possible through fundraising done by students in Springville, Arkansas.  The idea is to buy female goats and have them breed and when she has babies the owners are to give these babies to others in need in their community and by doing so will share in their blessings.  The first batch of goats was given away last night and was a huge success as evidenced by the mile wide smiles on the faces of the recipients.

For now those are the updates of the day as I must drop into a hole and give one of the construction crew a break.  Please pray that we may continue in God’s grace and favour and have safe travel as we visit Cazeau again tomorrow.  To view photos from today click here.

Another part of the construction team has been working with a Haitian crew to dig the footing for the concrete pad that will be the base for a “prototype house” that MTH Canada is planning to use in the near future.  Using this prototype house design a local crew of Haitians will build multiple copies of it in the coming months and years to provide shelter for a number of Haitian families.  The sponsorship team continued to distribute your gift boxes to the children at the local school in Messailler as well as take updated photos and determine which children had been displaced by the earthquake.  They also documented and took photos of all of the children that are staying in the orphanage at this time; they are looking to get sponsorship for these children so the orphanage can financially sustain itself and provide care and education for these children.  We were also able to provide a medical and dental examination for each of these children and for the most part they are in excellent health which is likely a direct result of the excellent care they are receiving at the orphanage.  A woman who attended the medical clinic today had been displaced to Cabaret from Port-au-Prince with three of her children due to the earthquake.  This woman had a few fractured ribs, had no shelter whatsoever and no food.  The medical team was able to provide her with medication, a tarp for shelter, some food and money and were able to find sponsors for her three children!!  This is an amazing example of how we are able to touch the lives of those in desperate situations.  The medical team also saw an elderly woman with a broken hip and have taken her to a local hospital to receive more advanced medical attention as we do not have the facilities and equipment to deal with this; we intend to see that she gets the care she needs to get her mobile again.  We encourage you to leave comments as they provide the team with much support while we are here.  Blessings to you all and thanks for your prayers and support.  To view photos from Tuesday click here.

We have a 29 person relief team headed to Haiti from April 10 to April 17 to undertake medical clinics, construction, child sponsorship and food distribution. Medical Clinics will happen at Cabaret, Christa College and Foveau with a group of 16 medical volunteers. Construction of a Haitian residence and footings for the new bridge will be completed by 7 construction volunteers that will be accompanying at least a dozen Haitians to work together during the short one week duration. The Child Sponsorship group of three volunteers will be meeting with each of the schools to sort out the child sponsorship programme and discuss the start of school for the four schools that are supported by MTH Canada. We will also have a reporter from the Daily Sentinel Review Newspaper in Woodstock who will accompany our team, to report back to Canadian about the efforts of our team. Two people will be travelling throughout Haiti visiting the Haitian to bring greetings and continue to look at needs for the Haitian people as well as supporting the mission team. Food Distribution will be undertaken during one afternoon, by our team at one of the school’s that we support.

We ask for continued prayer and support for our Mission Teams. Please look elsewhere on our website for future Mission Team dates that have just been opened up. Application forms and Orientation Handbooks are also available on-line.

We are continuing to collect tents large and smaller for the Haitians since the rainy season is starting. We are also focussed on obtaining larger tent structures (approx 32’ x 50’) to be used as temporary school facilities to get our schools operational for the kids. Any monetary donations can be sent through PayPal on our website or cheques / money orders to our mailing address Mission to Haiti Canada, P.O. Box 39, Norwich, ON. N0J 1P0

Feel free to drop us a note on our blog, so that we may receive your encouragement and share in the work of MTH Canada.

Blessings
The Board of MTH Canada

After a great lunch, we played with the kids at the orphanage before leaving on a short excursion with Pastor Charles.

Pastor Charles took us to the area where they had the mass graves with over 200,000 people buried. WOW, speechless ……

Click here for the blog of Adele – 91.5 The Beat.
Click here for the blog of STIMMA

• Our first stop was to do the food distribution at Christa College. The beans and rice had already been bagged and prepared by the ten young Haitian men that had offered to assist us. We arrived a Christa College to find 300 families from the school and community that we support sitting orderly inside of the Church. The rice and beans were unloaded quickly from the truck and placed on tables outside of the Church in the school yard. In groups of ten people at a time they came out of the Church to pick up enough beans, rice and oil for a week’s worth of food. It was exciting to hand the food packages to our sponsored children and their families in order to provide for them. Once we finished the food distribution to the 300 families we still had about fifty portions left so we re-arranged the tables and then started to hand out the food to the small crowd from the community that had gathered around the school.
• While doing the food distribution, we were able to assist and provide several crutches for people who had been hurt and were walking around with canes.
• Next we met with the board of SAEDT to discuss their needs for the Children and families of their sponsorship programme. They reported that one of their students and a teacher had perished during the earthquake but the remainder of the community was recovering. They are actively looking forward to getting the school open again, but there are some challenges and uncertainties how that can be accomplished.
• We then met with the director and the vice principal from Christa College to review the school building and grounds. Two outside walls on the second floor have fallen over along with several interior walls. Overall the concrete post and beam structure was still in place with no signs of stress, cracks or concerns. We told the director that we would be able to repair the school in about three days with our April team. To our surprise, we were told that the government and the education system in Haiti has told all schools that they must temporarily relocate to tents and that they cannot use their buildings until Codes have been put in place. This is a requirement for all schools regardless if they have sustained damage or not from the quake.
• We proceeded to leave the school and go with the Director to a piece of property close by that a local Haitian had offered to the school as a place to set up a large tent for the school to resume. The school is forced to relocate due to new government regulations however the government has not provided the tents for them to do this. This means that we are now faced with having to find tents to suit about 200 children for school. We told the Director that we would see what we could do in order to assist and that we would stay in contact with him to help find a solution.
• Our next meeting was with Michelle who was a construction supervisor who had worked with Mission to Haiti Canada for many years. We sat down with him to explain our vision of building houses for the Haitian people that were 12′ x 20′, two room houses to provide a living accommodate for a Haitian family. Our vision was to build twenty of these homes initially using Haitian workers and our technologies to build stronger homes as a place of refuge for the families. We will have them start with several members of our April construction team to build the first prototype house and then they will continue from there.
• We then travelled to the home of one of the sponsored families to visit the damage from the quake and to see how we could handle repairing the house for the two parents and the six children. The building needed a new roof and some floor repairs so we made arrangements that Michelle and his crew would start to work there in the upcoming week to repair the residence.
• We then broke for lunch and picked up some extra food to provide to people as we continued our travels around the City.
• Next we headed downtown to see the conditions that had been left by the earthquake. Many of the same pictures that we have seen on the TV reports are still in place. Several areas within the civic squares have been bulldozed flat and large gravel pads have been created to develop tents cities. We met with a Canadian police officer (Christian Ouellet) from Montreal who had been stationed in Port au Prince since last July and he was in charge of the security for a tent city that housed over 40,000 people. We talked with Christian about the conditions of the tent cities and the Haitian people at this time. He explained that even though many Haitians have lost many things including family members that they are resiliently trying to carry on. He was pleased to see that we as Canadians had been helping for many years prior to the hurricanes and earthquake and that we were continuing to come now rather than abandoning the Haitian people.
• We travelled further to the Palace area to see the devastation. It was quite astonishing the number of political dignitaries that were visiting the area and taking pictures of the palace while less than 60 feet away behind their backs people were camped out in tents made from blue tarps. We parked on a quieter side street and handled out the remaining tarps and left over lunch that we had to several people in the area.
• As it was starting to get towards the end of the afternoon we headed back to the camp so that we would not have to travel in the dark. The City was very congested as vehicles winded their ways around the rubble and debris of fallen buildings.
• After dinner at the camp, we sat down with Pastor Charles for several hours to discuss the situations at Cabaret and Faveau schools/communities. We were once again surprised to hear that even these two schools would have to meet outside in tents temporarily even though their buildings had no structural damages from the quake. A need for tents for 500 and 100 students respectively are required. We continued to review the needs and plans for these communities as well as discussed the work to be undertaken with the April 10-17 relief team.
• After a long day with plenty of things to absorb in our minds, we retired for a well deserved sleep.

Click here for the blog of Adele – 91.5 The Beat.
Click here for the blog of STIMMA