Today I woke up about 5 AM and headed downstairs for some coffee. The sky was beautiful as always and you could see that the day was going to be, as well. Later on, our mission team started pouring into the dining room and we had breakfast together. It consisted of scrambled eggs with spam and green peppers, tang, watermelon, and bread & butter.
This was the first day that we were to serve at the medical clinic. After piling into the bus around 8:30 AM, we made our way down the road. The roads have improved very much since I was last here in October. This was one of the areas that needed much work and I was really pleased to see that the major defects were already fixed.
Once at the clinic, we unpacked all of the medicine and began to stock it in the office pharmacy. EIGHT suitcases jam packed full of thousands of dollars worth of medicine for the Haitian people were unloaded. The staff there was so incredibly grateful for all of this. Before today, they had a very minimal collection of vaccines, immunizations, ointments, and medications on hand. It felt great to know that whether people were coming in to have an ear, nose, throat, skin, or eye infection treated, it didn’t matter. Whatever the case, the care would be available and the problem would not get any worse.
We spent most of the day there helping out in the clinic, painting the inside and outside of it, and assembling a water pump and reserve tank for the center. This consisted of digging the trenches so that the pipes could be properly set, fixing the ends with proper attachments, and running the pipes from the pump up to the holding tank. After we were finished, we had about an hour and a half before dinner was to be served. The 410 Bridge leadership council wanted to utilize this time by showing us a cave just off the highway.
We walked for about 20 minutes around the side of a very rocky mountain. We passed plenty of turkeys, donkeys, chickens, pigs, and goats. Before we got to the mouth of the cave, we passed a hole in the ground that was about 30 feet deep straight down. This was a great premise of what was to come. The opening to the cave dove straight into the mountain at a 45 degree angle and quickly opened up into a giant room with several smaller rooms off to the side of it. Bats were above us in every direction and guano could be seen everywhere on the cave floor. Voodoo writings and drawings were all over the walls and signs of recent campouts were evident. As we walked to the back of the cave, the air got cooler and the light became very dim. Eventually it was jet black with the exception of what our flashlights could pierce. A very small opening at the end of the cave showed the way to another large room that went deeper into the mountain and further down too. There were a lot of bats in this part of the cave and they were not shy about flying extremely close to us. This room looped us around to the front of cave where we first came in and we found our way to the exit.
After this we headed back to the Haiti Outreach Guesthouse and had a delicious dinner of drumsticks, lasagna, corn, bread & butter, and tang. Then we had an excellent group session thanks to Jim Pomeroy’s devotion in which he spoke about his relationship with God and how he continues to understand the bible. It ended with everyone agreeing that God was definitely working in a multitude of ways thru us.
Maurice Chevalier
