Greetings to all of you who are so faithfully remembering us in prayers back in the US. We are finally back online and hope to update the blog regularly from now on, though of course you never know in Haiti if that will be possible from day-to-day. Please also enjoy reading “Kiki Goes Home”, which will be uploaded to the blog in three parts over the coming days. Part one can be found below this post.
We have now been back in Haiti for about 11 days or so, and we are adjusting pretty well to life down here. We would be lying if we said it has been easy, but compared to our first weeks here last year it has been much, much better. One huge blessing has been the availability of a private (or semi-private...will talk more about that in a moment) house for our family, where we recently installed a refrigerator and stove. Mike Plasier (Mission Haiti Board President) helped us get the appliances and helped Cory saw off the bottom eight inches or so of the oven for Lynn. She can now see into the pots and pans she is using for cooking! She's never lived in such luxury in all her life!
Also, special thanks to Tori and Heather who lived in this house all summer and made a great deal of improvements including a new, lowered sink (no running water, but still nice), better screening to keep out bugs, a set up for taking lukewarm showers, and many other creative adaptations. Nice!
The journey here was a bit of an adventure. We checked in at the Sioux Falls airport as planned, and the young lady who helped Cory agreed to check our big bags all the way through to Port-au-Prince. That requires a bit of an explanation. As you may remember we had our flight changed, due to the hurricane that hit the east coast, making us arrive in Miami 12 hours and 15 minutes before our flight left for Port the following morning. According to airline policy, if the gap in time is over 12 hours we would be required to take all 10 50-pound suitcases out of baggage claim and with us to the hotel. Not fun!
So she was sympathetic to our situation and agreed to check them through. This required that she hand-write tickets on the heavy suitcases for the baggage handlers. An extra bonus was that she didn't charge us the $30 per 2nd bag we thought we had to pay (saving us $150). We were elated! We traveled to Chicago with no problems and boarded for Miami. Though we had to circle for almost an hour upon arriving in the neighborhood of South Florida, we were still doing fine and ready to get to our hotel and order pizza.
I wanted to get our boarding passes for the next morning in order to save time, because the flight the next day was boarding around 5:30am. I stopped at a counter and asked about it, and he told us he couldn't print them because our checked bags were only checked to Miami. Ouch! So we went down to the baggage claim, and by this time everyone else in our flight had gotten their stuff and left. Ours were nowhere to be seen. A few more bags came out from our flight, and ours weren't with those either. We left the airport trusting that the bags were still in the system and would arrive in Port as expected, although the downside in this scenario is so much worse than if you were flying domestically. What would it look like if our bags full of our food and clothes didn't show up with us in Port? Would the airline drive them 6 hours out to our village? Probably not.
We had a good night at the motel. However, though we were the first people on the curb for the 4:30 shuttle in the morning, a bunch of people arrogantly walked out of the hotel doors as the small shuttle came up and jumped in ahead of our group, which of course included a woman in a wheelchair and three little kids. Believe me, if we hadn't fit (and we barely did, with Lynn's wheelchair practically on her lap), I would have personally physically ejected all of them from their seats. Probably not a good thing for a missionary to do, but it's okay to pick up a whip and make people move once in awhile, right?
We arrived at the airport and ran into a few more problems. There was a moment where I was pretty sure we were in danger of missing our flight. I had trouble with the self-serve boarding pass machines and got in line to get help. I wanted to ask about the bags, anyway. That line was absolutely not going anywhere, and we were now looking at 30 minutes until boarding, with the security check still standing between us and the gate. I jumped out of line and tried the machine again. This time it worked. We got through security quickly, scarfed a couple of expensive muffins, found out from the gate agent that the bags were good to go, and boarded the plane.
Everything went smoothly in the Port-au-Prince airport after the flight, and soon we were traveling out to the village with Mike and Pam. The kids were exhausted, which took a couple of days to get over, but we were fine, and it was a lot of fun to greet our dog, Cookie. Everyone in Ti-Rivier was happy to have us back and wanted to come and visit us. Even the familiar strangers along the streets greeted us with great passion when they saw us again for the first time. They yelled, “Mwen Blan Yo!” (My whites!)
We just finished our first week of homeschooling, Lynn has been tutoring a troubled young woman, we have already led half a dozen youth group meetings and a church service, Cory has traveled all over the region on the motorcycle, and many many more things have happened along the way. The adventure is off and running. Oh yeah, about the house being “semi-private.” Well, the high school students have to work a little bit for their school sponsorships now. This is a good thing, but we have had faces looking in our windows pretty much all day, every day for this first little while. It drives Cookie, our high-strung, overly protective, racist dog completely bananas.
We'll write more soon. Know that we are doing well, and again we say “thank-you” to everyone for everything this summer.
Enjoy Your Adventure Today!
-The Grimms
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