A Sad Day

Today is a difficult day.

Today is the funeral for our sweet Maggie. Maggie is one of our children here at our hope house orphanage. She died late Monday night.......

Maggie was a special girl, a very special girl. Almost 6 years ago Maggie was found beaten and burned and left to die in a dump. She was about 10 years old. She was unable to walk properly due to post-polio syndrome and had no hope. After the Hope House (Mission of Hope orphanage) took her in she started to heal, she thrived, she learned about Jesus and best of all she had hope. She lived like that for almost 6 years with the love of Christ in her heart and a hope for her future. She had dreams. She wanted to be a cook. She loved braiding hair. She always helped with the chores. She had many many friends.

This summer she started to get sick. She had fevers on and off and she would get very fatigued. As time rolled on, she had more difficulty walking, she developed severe anemia, bone pain and unexplained swelling in her long bones and joints. Her skin hurt to touch. She started to loose weight. I spent a lot of time treating her body pain, stretching her tight muscles and giving her massages. She claimed it made her feel better. Our doctors here could not figure out what was wrong with her. Her blood work was inconclusive. I took her to an internist in the city and he started the process of ordering more tests. I lined up a psychologist in the meantime. She never got the results...she did not make it back to the internist. Last week she took a turn for the worse, she lost a lot of weight, her anemia and white blood cell count skyrocketed. She stopped eating. She was admitted to the hospital last Friday. In Haiti, nothing in the hospital happens fast. You have to bring your own linens, your own medicine and in our case, your own doctor (Dr. Jennifer our Haitian doc and the internist). It was very frustrating. On Monday, Maggie was in a lot of pain and she cried out for Jesus with every breath. She died later that night holding the hand of the orphanage director Madam Delva.

Goodbye Maggie you will be forever remembered.

It has been a long week. We have had to deal with this loss at the same time as we have been hosting one of our largest North American teams here. They have been very supportive but at the same time it is very hard to find time alone to grieve. This week we have had nights of heart break, holding our little children at Hope House while they wail, clinging to us with all their might.... Today as I said is the funeral. Please pray for the 42 other children in the Hope House today as they deal with the death of one of their sisters. Please pray for Rachel our Hope House activities director as she loved Maggie as her own child. Please pray that the kids will be at peace, that they hang on to God's teaching regarding death and not voodoo beliefs, and that they know God is near. Very near.

Thank you for all your support. Please see the attached picture from Rachel of Maggie before the effects of her illness.
God Bless
Cheryl (and Laurens)

Medical Missions and digging trenches

Today I am exhausted. I know Laurens is too by the look on his face. But we are happy.....very happy. We have just finished day 4 of work with one of the biggest medical and construction teams of the year. It is the first of 2 back to back Canadian Teams. Today was a "day off" and anyone in ministry that works with teams knows how that goes. I asked Laurens, "are you going to take a break?" He said, "I did" and with a gleam in his eye he told me how he dug a trench with the new backhoe. One man's work is another man's treasure I guess!

Yesterday we held our first large mobile medical clinic in Haiti. It went amazing! At Mission of Hope our goal is to raise up strong Christian Haitians and to teach them how

to run programs for their people. At our hospital outpatient, clinic we are so proud that it is fully Haitian run now.  I am still working behind the scenes to facilitate that, but what this has allowed us to do is branch out into mobile clinics with our teams to bring the healing love of Jesus into other needy areas. 

As always we saw cases that broke our hearts. The dental team shown here at one point had a 4 year old boy who had all of his teeth rotted through from sugar. His mother would feed him

sugar water every night to stop his hunger pains. They had no idea that his teeth had "died" and that it was from the sugar. He will need all his teeth pulled or his adult teeth will be damaged too. For our dental assistants, knowing how easy it is to prevent this, it was very difficult for them to keep the tears from flowing for this precious boy.

This little child is the 5th child I have seen in 

4 months with brain damage. This child will never walk, may not talk and will have mental and physical disability for the rest of her life. This is a picture of myself and a Canadian MD examining her. I think the heartbreaking thing for me is that each time I encounter a child like 

this, I need to break this news to the mother. Every time, the mother has no idea that her child has something wrong with her brain, and every time I am asked, "So it can't be fixed?" or "can't you fix it?". That is when we pray.....it is all I can do. I am thankful for the donations of a few special needs wheelchairs that these children will need. 

As we wrapped up from our first mobile clinic I said a special prayer of thanks.

A prayer of thanks for our safety, a prayer of thanks for how our Canadian team integrated with the Haitian staff we took along, a prayer of thanks for the lives that were touched, a prayer

of thanks for the connections made with the pastor of the school we worked out of, a prayer of thanks for our team and a prayer of thanks for this wonderful ministry.

Tonight I go to bed exhausted but happy to be starting all over again tomorrow on a new adventure.

Cheryl

Parties, Weddings, Holiday's and Termites

Post Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!We have had a great last few weeks packed full of interesting things! Let us tell you about them:

We spent a great Christmas here in Haiti with the kids. Teagan made a Christmas tree out of green construction paper and paper ornaments and stuck it to our wall. 

It was great and served it's purpose nicely. Here you can see the kids excited to have received a full stocking for their second Christmas in Haiti (we spent it here last year visiting). 

On Christmas Eve, All 58 orphan kids came up to

the staff housing and guest house for a party and sleepover! It was

a blast full of good food, treats, movies on the concrete wall, hot chocolate and jammies. Our kids had fun colouring and partying with their friends.

After Christmas came Francia's wedding. 

I know what you are thinking....what is Laurens doing in that picture? Wasn't Cheryl the only one in that wedding? Well yes she was until one hour before the wedding when the best man bailed! Not only did Laurens have 4 girls pleading him to be the best man at the last minute, he had to cut his hair, shower, borrow a suit jacket, dress up more than he was planning, rush in to the city to pick up the groom and make it back to the church before the pastor noticed! He was a trooper though and looked dapper escorting the bride down the isle. 

After Christmas thanks to Rachel agreeing to watch our dog, we were able to travel to Jacmel for a 3 day holiday adventure. Jacmel is on the south east side of Haiti and is BEAUTIFUL. There is less deforestation there and so you get a beautiful glimpse of what this great island could look like. It was breathtaking. We stayed in a small hotel, overlooking great cliff faces out to the Caribbean ocean as far as you can see. While in Jacmel, we climbed mountains in our truck and drove along cliffs that no one in their right mind in Canada would pass, we drove through a river (the kids thought this was particularly cool), 

hiked into the jungle and rappelled over a small rock face. Our destination was a beautiful waterfall that cascades down into pools of turquoise fresh water lakes (75 feet deep caverns under water). This picture was taken at the edge of one of the pools before we sat behind the waterfall and subsequently jumped out of it!

It was a fantastic little holiday and just what we needed as we could not afford to go home to Canada for Christmas this year.

We came back feeling refreshed and ready to tackle our work here at the mission. 

Until.......... we realized that termites had destroyed one and a half of our new cupboards that the carpenters were supposed to have treated with termite spray. Boom! Welcome back to Haiti reality...(they hadn't treated the cupboards) Laurens removed the cupboard and now we await for the stores to open so we can purchase the termite treatment so we don't loose the rest of the them......

Well the Canadian Team arrives this week and we will be hard at work, Cheryl will be leading her first medical teams on mobile clinics into more un-reached area's and Laurens will be busily making sure the constructions projects go well. Please pray for effectiveness in our work for the Lord and that He will shine through in all the lives we touch this week.

We thought we would leave you with this cute picture of Bridgely doing his soccer stretches with the kids at our Hope House orphanage.