We just returned from a week-long mission trip to Haiti, where we distributed over 2,000 Christmas Shoeboxes to the children of Haiti. Our entire family went along and joined a team of a dozen folks from around the country to spread the joy of Christmas with these needy children.

The trip was focused on the northern part of the country, in and around the coastal city of Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city. We made our base just south of Cap-Haitien in the wonderful little town of Milot, then left each morning to travel around the area deliverying the shoeboxes to the churches and schools of the remote villages.

We traveled with Global Vision Citadelle Ministries, with whom we have served in ministry for many years. Yves Prophete, GVCM’s Executive Director and long-time friend, accompanied us, along with Mac Mularoni and a number of pastors and friends from GVCM’s Haitian churches.

The following is a list of villages we visited, with Google Maps links so you can see where they are located in Haiti:

Church at Beudoret
Church at Terrier Rouge
Church at Dondon
Church at Fort St. Michel
Church at Haut du Trou
Church at Milot

Beudoret

Our first stop was the village of Beudoret, which is along the main road running from Cap-Haitien to Gonaives, near Plaissance. The church rents a small building right by the road, and the children were waiting for us when our trucks pulled up, so we quickly went inside.

Jesse gave a flip-chart presentation of the “Good News”, accompanied by a Creole narration CD playing on a Sony Walkman wired up to a portable battery-powered amplifier. We unloaded the boxes while she finished the presentation.

We then went out on the back deck and made sandwiches for the kids. We had shipped jars of peanut butter and grape jelly along with the Christmas Shoebox shipment from the states and bought bread at a little store on the way out of Cap-Haitien earlier in the day. We all went out on the concrete deck behind the church and made sandwiches and Kool-Aid. The children thought it was a fabulous feast!

After that, we sang songs and said a few words, then handed out the presents. The children took the shoeboxes and sat quietly while we handed them out to the rest of the kids. When we started helping them open the boxes and the toys inside, they were so excited! I remember one little boy who had some glow-sticks and didn’t know what they were. Ryan cracked one and shook it up and his eyes nearly popped out of his head! He had the biggest smile on his face!

It was 2.5 hours out to Beudoret, and getting late in the day, so we needed to head back to Milot to have dinner, clean up and get ready for the next day.

Terrier Rouge

It was just about as far in the opposite direction to go to Terrier Rouge the next day. The church there meets under a tattered blue tarp in a donkey field just outside the village. When we arrived, they already had the tarp propped up with tree limbs and sticks, with a sound system ready to crank out praise music using microphones, a guitar, a Casio keyboard, and an aging drum set. Hundreds of kids were sitting under the tarp, looking for shade from the hot sun.

After introductions and a few words from Pastor Marc Aurel, the praise band played and the pastor led us in prayer. Emily showed the children the flip-chart presentation, the pastor led the children through some songs, then he had them line up to march back to his house, where the Christmas Shoeboxes were waiting. With a battery-powered amplifier in hand, Pastor Marcene started marching towards the house, singing songs on the microphone, with all the children following in a line.

This time, things did not go quite as smoothly. Large numbers of people from the entire village had come to the Pastor’s house, hoping to get a shoebox, and they were all pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line in the street outside his house. It took a long time to get everyone to settle down a bit, then we started taking the children through the gate and into the house one by one. There were so many people, there were not enough gifts, so we told them we would send more the next day. Then, we left to go to Dondon.

Dondon

The humble little church of Dondon is a short way up an alley off the main road, and when we pulled within sight of it, the small crowd of children who had been waiting by the road stood up and started cheering. They took us by the hands and walked us up to the church building while men from the village started unloading the boxes.

The children sang us a welcome song they had worked on all week long, then the pastors introduced us and we prayed and sang some songs together. We then distributed the gifts, and spent quite a bit of time helping the children open the gifts. It was a wonderful time of joy and sharing, but it was getting late and we needed to get back to the Mission to have dinner and prepare for the visit to Fort St. Michel the next day.

Fort St. Michel

This little suburb on the south end of Cap-Haitien is one of the toughest places in the world to have to live. By our American standards, every village we visited was incredibly poor, but Fort St. Michel looked poor compared to the others. Yves had spoken to us about this before we went, and his warning turned out to be an accurate assessment of the toughest gift distribution of the trip.

In the morning, we loaded up the shoeboxes in Milot and drove up to the church to drop them off on our way to Labadee. It was Saturday, the only day the beach would be open, and the plan was to visit the beach in the morning, then return for the services in the late afternoon. However, the pastor told us that many more children were coming than we expected, so we arranged to have some men from the church drive down to Milot to bring more shoeboxes. We spent the morning at the beach, then drove back to Fort St. Michel, where we found all the children waiting for us.

Unfortunately, the men of the church were not able to get the extra cartons of shoeboxes, so we knew we would be about 150 shoeboxes short, so we told the pastor we would arrange to have them brought the next day. The people of the church greeted us and introduced us to the children. We all sang songs together, and handed out the gifts.

This church had never participated in a Christmas Shoeboxes distribution before, and because of their very poor circumstances, the children began to become very agitated. The shoeboxes were marked by gender and age, and the children did not understand why shoeboxes were being passed around them, and they thought they might not get one. Then, as the shoeboxes were almost all handed out and some children were still waiting, the anxiety grew even greater.

The pastors tried to speak to the children and explain, but many of the children were already trying to leave, since night had fallen. But a crowd of parents and people from the neighborhood were outside pushing to get in at the same time the children inside were pushing to get out, so there was a lot of confusion and yelling at the door, raising the anxiety even higher. In the middle of all this chaos the power from the generator suddenly died, and the building was completely dark. The chaotic situation quickly turned into complete pandemonium, with everyone inside and outside pushing and yelling and screaming, while the men of the church tried to control the crowd and get the power turned on again.

It was quite unsettling, and our team didn’t know quite what to do. Emily suggested that we all get together to pray, so we called the team into a back room. The power was soon restored and the crowd dissipated, then we left for the 30-minute drive to the Mission complex. Later in the evening, Mac led us through a group discussion about the events of the day, as he sensed the heavy hearts and the disappointment with how things had gone.

Milot

The next morning was Sunday, and we walked down the road to enjoy services with the church in Milot. They had decorated the church for us, their “honored guests”, and had prepared a number of special musical pieces for us. Chris preached, and it was a wonderful time of worship together.

We handed out the Christmas Shoeboxes immediately following the service, and the children loved it. Many of the team members had brought shoeboxes from their churches, schools and family, and we had saved those all week to hand out today, so we could take extra time to get photos of the children and gifts to take back home.

It was our New Year’s Eve, which is also when Haiti begins their Independence Day celebration, so we had planned a rice-and-beans dinner party for the children that evening. We had given some money for the cooks to prepare the meal, so we left to load up boxes for the final trip out to Haut du Trou.

Haut du Trou

Earlier in the day, we had sent a truck with the boxes out to Haut du Trou while we attended church. We got the team loaded in the vehicles, but had barely gotten down the road when Yves became concerned about the storm clouds overhead. To get to the church, you must drive through a river with no bridge, and if it rains you can’t make it. The storm looked like a bad one, and the team needed to be back in Milot for the party that evening, so we could not be delayed. It was decided that Yves and the pastor and I would go by ourselves and we took the rest of the team back to the Mission.

It wasn’t a long drive, and when we arrived, all the children of the church were gathered together under a pole and thatch roof where they have church, right next to the road among the houses of the village. The pastors said a few words and introduced me, then I said a few words on behalf of the team and the churches who had sent the shoeboxes. Since it was late, we moved very quickly to distributing the shoeboxes.

They men of the church had set up the shoeboxes in one room of a little two-room house. The children came in through one door, took their gift, and left through the other door. With only Yves, me, and a gentleman from the local church, it was a bit hectic trying to keep up with the flow of children, but it went very smoothly. We started running out of boxes, and just as we got to the last few, the pastor came in a said “Finis!” (We are finished!)

We stepped outside and spoke with the pastors a bit, took some pictures, and since it was already dark, we headed back for the Mission. As we walked in the door, the team was just sitting down to dinner, so we joined them. When dinner was finished, we all headed down the street to the church for the Independence Day party.

The Party in Milot

We took the short walk to the church through the deep Haitian darkness and found that the cooks had prepared a huge pot of rice, beans and goat meat. The children and their parents were all assembled under the used automotive company awning they use as a covering for church next to the partially-complete concrete structure they use as a school.

We went into the building to make Kool-Aid and dish out the food to serve to the children. We did our work to the accompaniment of a number of children from the church who sang solos that had been prepared especially for the party. The serving took much longer than expected because of our inability to communicate with the cooks, and the fact that it took 15 minutes to hike down to the well to bring back a couple of quarts of water to mix the drinks.

We handed out the dishes of food with the pastors and the people of the church, which took quite a while in the partial light provided by a generator and a few shop lights that had been brought in for the event. The hungry children gobbled down the food as quickly as we could serve it, and we had to be careful in the end to try to not run out.

Then, we broke out the hundreds of glow-stick necklaces we brought with us, and the kids scrambled madly to make sure they got one. As usual, there was a lot of pushing and grabbing, and some older boys from the neighborhood were taking them from the younger kids, so the men of the church had to go deal with that problem.

But, despite these problems, the party was a great success and the kids had a great time. We got to spent a lot of time enjoying the kids and one another, then headed back to the Mission to pack up and get ready to leave Haiti the next morning.

Heading Home

After breakfast, we said good-bye to the folks at Mission Bonberger who had hosted us all week, took some final photos, and loaded up for the 30-minute drive up to the Cap-Haitien airport to head home.

We got into the airport and through what the Haitian folks call “security” very easily and started processing the passports and tickets at the counter. We were surprised to find that Ryan’s name was not on their list of travelers, the plane was full, and their computers were down, so they couldn’t resolve anythying.

Fortunately, there was a mostly-empty missionary flight getting ready to depart for Fort Lauderdale, so the bulk of the team prepared to leave for Miami while they put Ryan on the other flight. We had a vehicle waiting in Miami to stop by Fort Lauderdale on the way out of Florida, and Yves and Mac were there to stay with Ryan until he got on the plane, so other than Lee’s concern about being separated from him, it was not a big problem.

Once we got through U.S. immigration in Miami, we began to say our repeated good-byes as the group began to dwindle, heading in various different directions for the final leg to their homes across the country. Emily had to leave us immediately to make sure she made her connecting flight, we left Chris a bit further along in the terminal for his connecting flight, then the rest of the team headed out to our car to gather up what they had stored rather than take to Haiti. We said good-bye to Anthony, Kay, Beau and Toni in the parking garage, then Cale and Jen rode with Lee, Jesse, me to pick up Ryan in Fort Lauderdale, and start the long journey home.