Whitehorse Goes To Haiti
After several years of waiting, praying, and with a growing yearning to be involved in missions, a team of eleven people (six women, five men) from the Whitehorse Church of the Nazarene (including one we adopted from Kelowna) were blessed with the opportunity to serve and be served on a work and witness trip to Haiti in March 2015.
After our 24 hours of travel from Whitehorse, we were greeting by Darin and Tonya Kucey, our coordinators in Port–au–Prince. After navigating a maze of people at the airport, we had the time of our lives riding to the Nazarene property in a “cage truck,” seeing the sights and hearing the sounds of Haiti for the first time.
Our plan was to do some work at a school and church in the Gonaives region of Haiti, in the small village of Docine as well as another location at Petit–Goave. During the week, by the grace of God and the help of God's people, we were able to:
Contribute funding for the church to pour a concrete floor for the building they had built themselves.
Construct 20 pews, 24 large school desks, blackboards, an outdoor kitchen and a preaching shelter.
Participate in the showing of the Jesus film to over 200 people.
Paint the inside of the office building another team had worked on.
The trip was all that we had hoped for and far more. We found the people extremely welcoming and gracious, including a lovely welcome song sung by the school children when we arrived. The community had clearly gone out of their way to make us welcome and comfortable. We found the children especially warm and eager to love these strangers who came into their midst.
We returned home having completed our task, but much more importantly, having connected with the people. We returned blessed with a new understanding of missions, a new appreciation for the hardships people endure which, for them, is “normal,” with the realization that so much of our own culture is excessive, and with a desire to return and participate in their lives again. It was indeed difficult to leave them and return home.
The coordinators in Haiti as well as the support staff at the Guest House were extremely well prepared, hospitable, and ever cautious for our security. We have every reason to be humbly proud of the Nazarene Church in Haiti. We would absolutely love to return at any opportunity we have.
For more information visit http://www.whitehorsenazarene.org/work--witness.html
