Day 7 - Grace Church and Haiti Deaf Academy

As our week on this island comes to a close, our team of 12 continues to glorify God for the experience He has given to us.  What a gift to be able to be His hands and His feet this week, and we don’t have to do it, but we get to do it.

This morning after breakfast, we traveled to Grace Church in Titanyen for the first part of the church service.  There was singing in Kreyol, and we were able to get the songs translated into English for Meredith so she could interpret for us.  During the service, there was a dedication of a child, probably about one year old, to the Lord.  It was very cool to witness this in a Haitian church.

We headed straight to Haiti Deaf Academy, and met Bob who gave us a tour of HDA and then shopped in their little gift shop while the kids were still in Sunday school.  We were sitting at the table out front playing Tenzi while waiting for the kids to arrive.  Our Tap Tap driver, Derival, joined us in the fun and even learned a couple of signs!  As soon as the kids arrived, they bombarded us with hugs and smiles!!!  The kids were bundles of energy and we spent the afternoon playing with them, including lots of tic tac toe using chalk on their board!  Activities we did were jump roping, writing and drawing on white boards, drawing on the chalk board, and just simply chatting.  The kids enjoyed remembering some of the goers who’ve been to HDA in the past and meeting new goers.  They loved asking us our names and name signs.  It was overwhelming hearing everyone’s names and trying to remember their name signs.  We ended our visit by telling stories from the Bible and had long hugs and goodbyes.   Our team also passed out Valentine’s candy to the kids.  Their eyes lit up big and they were so thrilled to have some sweets.

We had our word of the day and many had wonderful good explanations for their words.  Words included Valentine (the children are my Valentines), runneth over (overflowing heart), turning (turning the jump rope), fulfilled, content, funny, tic tac toe, energetic, precious, smiles, bicycles, and one step closer.  One person said turning because she was fascinated by how the kids were very creative with their rope jumping antics, like the movie, “Jump In”.  Even the kids who were jumping rope with single ropes wanted us to count how many times they jumped and they hit over 100 jumps!

We concluded our evening with a special worship with the other two teams here at Healing Haiti.  Grace sang songs using her guitar – Called Me Higher by All Sons and Daughters, Good, Good Father by Housefires or Chris Tomlin, and All in ALL.   Another team member played and sang How Great Thou Art.  We closed our evening sharing our experiences from the week.  It was great to hear/see how God works in each one of us.  God is good!