Family and Friends,
The following is a snippet from Cory's journal from a couple of weeks ago...just thought you would find this interesting...
Dec. 14, 2010- “A Wide Open Door” (I Cor. 15:9)
Today was one of those amazing days in ministry that only come along once in awhile. As you progress step-by-step through the day you are overwhelmed with a feeling that God is leading you at all times, and sure enough, at the end of our day a huge door for ministry was flung wide open. I'll get to that in a minute, but first I'll reflect on how we got to that point.
The last few days, as we have tried to recover physically and emotionally from helping the mission team that was stranded here and praying with them to be able to return home safely, our family members have all gone through times of “throwing fits” in the way the each of us does that. For Alexandra, she simply throws a real fit, like any preschool age kid. For the bigger kids it takes the form of disobedience and negative attitude. For us adults we are mainly just exhausted and annoyed with each other at times.
But we should have remembered that God always allows you to go through the desert in order to reach the promised land on the other side.
Today Patchouko and I needed to go to Les Cayes, the nearby large city, to get various groceries and supplies for our families and the orphanage. Both of our propane tanks ran out on the same day, which is actually kind of nice, because we went and got both of them filled at the same time. After that we went to a huge market and got fruit and vegetables. I really enjoyed doing that and wish I had more time to reflect on that experience. Sometime soon I will.
Next was a visit to the grocery store I mentioned in an earlier post. That place was pretty picked over after the recent political events. It seems people make a run on the grocery stores here when there are riots just like they do back home when a storm is coming. However, I was able to find some nice items to tide us over until the next teams come down with more food.
After that we went to look for a bike for Patchouko's son. He asked me to stay in the car until he was finished, because whenver a white person walks up the price doubles. He was able to get the bike.
Our final stop was at the general hospital to visit a sick girl from the village. The general hospital is run by the government for people who can't afford the “good” hospitals. I'm sure you can figure out from that statement that this hospital is not the best. I was there a week or so ago but couldnn't find the girl we were looking for at that time. We had the same problem today. You go around asking people in the hospital for information, but all they say is, “I don't know where she is. Why don't you look around in all the rooms and try to find her.” Gee thanks. The last time I was there we did look around in a lot of the rooms, and we stumbled upon so pretty grizzly scenes. We went into the ER and discovered several people sitting in pools of their own blood. Nice. I wasn't too anxious to repeat that experience again.
Pretty soon, though, we found ourselves standing outside the cholera ward, which turned out to be exactly where God wanted us to be. Zachary from Ti-Rivier had joined us at this point after running some errands in that area. The three of us decided we should pray for the sick people inside. At first I thought we would just stand outside the tents and pray for the people all at once, but pretty soon we decided to see if we could go inside and find people with no family to care for them.
We went to the entrance, and their was a guy stopping everyone who was going out or coming in to spray a mist of some chemical on them. We figured out that anyone could enter for no reason (which seems strange in retrospect), and soon we were standing in the midst of half a dozen tents filled with cholera patients. At first we were all a little bit stunned by the gravity of the situation. The smell was overwhelming, the traffic between the tents of medical staff and various people was somewhat frantic, and just peeking through the doors was enough to see that we better be emotionally prepared for whatever was about to happen to us.
We started at the back of the property and began looking for people to talk to. Right away we found a young man who was alone on a cot. He looked pretty rough. We talked to him for awhile and found out he had been there for almost three days but was given very little attention. He didn't even have an IV yet. The people without family members present don't get much attention, and the hospital has no program to offer them food. That is just standard procedure in Haiti in every hospital...if you don't have someone from the outside bringing you food and medicine and advocating for your care, you get nothing.
We gave him some bread and juice and helped him take his last three pills of pain medication. We prayed with him for awhile, and then Zachary and Patchouko started singing some well-known hymn in Creole. It was an inspiring moment...many of the staff and other patients and family members joined in and a kind of peace washed over the whole place for just a moment. After that I asked the guys to ask the young man if he had trusted Christ for salvation yet. He said he had and he thanked us profusely for asking and for sitting with him for awhile.
After that we went into some of the tents and saw many small children in various stages of dealing with Cholera. It was very sad and very difficult to look at. At one point I saw a couple of white doctors in a side room talking about something. I decided to duck my head inside and introduce myself. They said “hello” and we talked for a few minutes. One of the guys seems to be down here long-term, and the other one was on a mission team. I'm not sure if they are doctors or not, but they explained that they are the only ones working in the Cholera camp...the general hospital itself isn't the one working with these patients. Soon the mission team would be leaving, and that will leave only the one doctor. I would estimate that there was around 80 patients there with cholera.
We told the guys that we were there to encourage people, especially those with no family. They told us that most of the people don't have family there, because families are afraid to be in the camp, and many people have no access to any food at all. What the camp needed most was some food for the people, and he asked if we could help at all. I told him I would see what we could do to help. That was our wide-open door!
So on the way home Patchouko and I started scheming to find some solution to the problem. We have a whole depot filled with vitamin-packed rice and bean packets for the school program, so we coud dip into that resource quite a bit and still be fine. After all, the schools have barely met for the last month, so we have to be a little bit ahead on supplies. Of course the next step will be to talk to Pam and see if we can get the green light for doing that. Hopefully if we can tide the medical team over for a few weeks they can get some long-term program to help them out, such as World Relief. That is who they are trying to work with now.
Patchouko and I both agreed that whatever we may have been stressing about over the last few days, it didn't seem like such a big deal now. I hope we can help those patients with a little bit of food, and when we do we will go through family by family and make sure everyone hears the gospel message and has a chance to commit his/her life to Christ. God dumped this great opportunity in our lap and we are anxious to prove faithful.
Dec. 16, 2010-
Yesterday we went to the General Hospital to give the cholera patients some lunch. It went fairly well I think. About half of the people were able to eat. The other half were either too nauseated or unresponsive to eat. We saw some bodies off to the side, and a few others looked like they would be joining them soon if they didn't recover in the next day or so. The hardest to see, of course, was the children who were sick, especially those with no parents present.
The Doctor, a man named Patrick from the US, called us later and told us “Thank you” for the food. We left a whole 5-gallon bucket of rice for later, and he told me that at night more people were ready to eat, and it was a hit. He asked if we could continue to bring food. I told him I would see what we could do, but I had heard there might be more political demonstrations, and we are about 40 minutes drive away as well. Pam is contacting a large ministry in Les Cayes to see if they can take it from here. After that we are hoping a large international food relief program can supply the food until the cholera outbreak is over.
I will probably write more about that cholera experience sometime soon, but for now I think I'm still a little bit in shock over the whole thing.
To finish the story now 2 weeks later...
We never heard back again from Patrick, the American Doctor at General Hospital, and so we assumed he finally got a regular supply of food lined up. That was quite an experience. I was especially proud of the Haitian guys who went in there with me to do ministry. Everyone here is very scared of Cholera. That is why most of the family members don't even go in the hospital with their loved ones who are sick.
One other strange thing that happened...I was visiting someone's home recently and they had the TV on. The news was showing footage of the cholera ward at General Hospital, and I saw all the patients we had visited. The news report wasn't good, though. It seems they are just piling up the bodies of the victims and driving them in trucks out to who-knows-where. Sad. But it was nice to help out a little bit that one day. It kind of encapsulates ministry here...you can't fix everything but you can touch a few lives in the midst of the struggle.
God Bless,
-Grimm Family Adventurers
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