What it's like in Haiti.

Last summer I spent some time on campus at Asbury Seminary where my wife and I met a lady who was visiting from Haiti where she and her family work at a Christian school. I asked if we could be on her email list, so we've been getting periodic updates on her and her family's experiences this fall. Pasted below is her account of life in Haiti over the past couple of months.

With all the details of Haitian struggles in mind, I'm ashamed at the trite things that frustrate me in a typical day:

Dear Friends and Family, Now that I've started doing weekly prayer request emails, I've neglected doing updates. Here's a brief look at what's been going on in our lives lately.

We're just about to finish the first quarter of the school year. We have a good staff, including some new people, and a larger student body than last year. We had a wonderful staff retreat at the beach in September. We have had some great chapels with strong responses from the students.

Though things have been going well at school, at home we have had a series of problems with our utilities. I told you back in August about how our electricity was out for several weeks over the summer. Two weeks after I got home, that was fixed, but shortly after that, our transformer blew. Some workmen from EDH, the power company, came to look at the burned-out transformer (after we begged them to do so for a few days), shook their heads, and went away. EDH doesn't have extra transformers or money to buy them. The neighbors got together and decided to buy a transformer. Once we had done this, we waited for three weeks before the power company came to install it. When they finally did, they put it in wrong, and it didn't work. This was repaired but the power at our house still didn't come on. Finally that was fixed. Please understand that between each sentence of this account I am leaving out weeks of discussion, phone calls, spending money, and general frustration. In addition, our telephone doesn't work, and to complete the picture, while doing road work last week, the mayor's office broke our water line.

I wish I could say that all these setbacks mean nothing to us in light of all the blessings we have, but I fear that we get rather upset. Not only are we paying for our utilities, but we have to pay for backup systems too - cellphones because landlines are unreliable, generator and inverter because city power (even when it works) is only on for a few hours a day, water trucks when city water doesn't come. It seems sometimes that we spend as much energy and effort on keeping our household utilities functioning as we do in our jobs! Add to that the slow response time when things don't work, the frequent requests for bribes, and the bills that either don't come at all (but you'd better somehow know how much to pay, otherwise you'll be disconnected) or are thrown over the gate for the dogs to drool on and eat, and you can see why we get tired of dealing with these issues!

My prayer request emails lately have been full of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work" and this week I promised to stop listing all that stuff. It's boring for you to read and depressing for me to write. But I couldn't resist a brief overview of the situation. I hope it at least encourages you to enjoy your utilities at your house!

Trying to count it all joy in Port-au-Prince,