Saturday, November 5, 2016

Our First Look at the Damages

I’m sorry to be keeping you in suspense... it has been a busy week of preparations for our first team following the hurricane and internet was out most of the week, again, which makes it extremely hard to make any blog posts. Since I have a little bit of time before the team arrives at our house for lunch today, I will see if I can get some pictures posted for you:)

The following pictures were our first peek at the damages after the winds and rain started to die down:

As we opened the back door for the first time, we realized that the back wall between us and our neighbors had fallen into our backyard.

When we scanned the other side of the backyard, we saw that most of the trees in the backyard were down. The breadfruit tree that our cook had prayed that God would save was still standing... kind of. It now has a sharp slant to it. We don’t yet know if it will survive or not.

From the back corner of the house, we could see more trees were down and many of the shrubs were also mangled from the winds and rain.

The other side of the house looked even worse.

Then, there was the view from the front of the house once it was safe to venture outside.

The Christensen’s, who had weathered the storm with us were anxious to venture up to their house since one of their Haitian friends texted that he had been to the house and said that part of their roof was gone, so several from our two families ventured in that direction after we took a brief look across the wall. Here is what we saw...

This is the street on the other side of our wall, which leads to the other hill on the mission center. We could never see the area that looks like a lake to the left of the picture. That is how many trees went down.

This is the view as we turned in the opposite direction (toward the city of Cayes). Again, all of the water that you see there is usually not there and we could never see that land or the buildings because of the trees and other vegetation that had been there. Our neighborhood had changed completely in just a few hours.

The walk to Christensen’s house was not an easy one. The road was blocked with fallen trees and brush.

We felt like we had been on an obstacle course till we got over and under all of the downed trees, wires, and other objects in the way.

The first look at their home was not what any of us had hoped for... much of their roof was gone, along with almost all of the roof of the adjoining house where the Ferris’ had lived before returning to the states this summer. Needless to say, Heather and her family were glad that they had chosen to weather the storm somewhere else. Several other missionary homes sustained significant damage as well. The first few weeks, the missionary community pulled our resources together and worked on getting each family into safe housing for the days ahead.

Now, a month later, we still have a couple of families that are not back in their homes, but some of the roofs have been repaired and teams have come in to help with some of the recovery efforts. All the houses have electric again and all but one have water back in working order. The Christensen’s are the only ones that have not had their roof repaired yet, as they have been able to temporarily move into another house until those repairs can be completed.

Thank you for your continued prayers as we have been able to start reaching out into the communities around us to help with further clean-up.

Lastly, I want to update you on some prayer requests that we sent out last week. Please continue to pray for Vonel, our RMI mechanic. He continues to be in the hospital, following his motorcycle accident last week. The doctors here have decided to wait until some American orthopedic surgeons come in this week to look at his case to determine how to treat him. Vonel is not a man to sit when there is much to do, so please pray for patience and rest for him.

Mikencia, our housekeeper’s daughter, is also still in the hospital. She has had an infection this week and we had some trouble getting her the medications that she needed, but we were able to find them and yesterday was the closest that we have been to seeing her precious little smile.

Lastly, Joel and Laura plan to head back to Haiti early this week after spending almost a week with Laura’s family while her mother was in the hospital. Her mother is now settling into an assisted living home and seems to be doing well, in spite of all that she has been through.

No words can begin to express our gratitude to each of you for your prayers and concern, not only for our immediate family, but also for our extended family here in Haiti.