Caleb’s Update. First Day of Distribution (almost.) 11 May 2010

I’ll confess I don’t feel like writing tonight because I would rather go straight to bed. However, I think I owe those who pray for our work here an update so they can pray accurately. Maybe this can be a simple update – I’ll just explain what happened today.

I got up at 04:30 and was out the door for the ferry to the mainland at 05:15. I intended to just go across and meet some trucks to watch them load our food into the wooden ship we’ve hired. The ferry was really fast though and I was an hour early, enough time to get to Ywam St Marc and watch the trucks load to keep that process counted and accountable. I prayed about it and jumped on a cargo truck full of people bound for a town halfway to St Marc, “Mori,” which means death in Creole. There as I was trying to find my next transport I ran into a guy I know who doesn’t speak English but seems to like me. Three of us rode on his motorcycle to St Marc and I was in time to meet Ywam’s import guy, Ben Fontane, and watch the first truck load up. (We’re emptying the container that has buried 1700 of our tarps for people sleeping in the rain in Port-au-Prince.)

No problem loading, ready to leave. I asked God if He wanted me on that truck or if I should wait to keep number two accountable since there was plenty of time. I really felt like I needed to be on this one so I got in and it crept its wallowing self South, probably overloaded by twice. Just South of Saint Marc we hit a bump and broke some of the lug bolts on the rear dual tire. The most important thing was to get our prized cargo out of sight quickly and we did. We hid it in a walled gas station owned by my shipper. Then, we waited for more than three hours as the mechanic came, worked, and went for parts.

This delay brought us up to and through the time we were supposed to have the food in Anse Galets by boat. I called our economist but couldn’t get him to answer until the very end. At that point my shipper showed up in a fuel truck and said he had two more trucks on the way and the mechanic and parts so we’d just get all three to the public dock at Carias once the other two loaded at Ywam. So much for threading the needle. Still, I think it was good that I went back to Ywam because my count for some of those items was useful later. I think God wanted me in every part of the process today and was willing to allow delays for that to happen.

When got to the docks at Carrias with two of the trucks, after getting fuel for the ship for half an hour, we could only drive them halfway down the steep hill to toward the boats. The second half the way is clobbered with markets and debris. We paid men with wheel barrows to move almost 60,000 lbs of food onto the boat. As they carry their huge loads down the hill they almost run and they yell and scream all the way – it’s like a circus act accept nobody’s acting. This took hours.

During the process some bags broke. Because those bags were broken and I’m clearly not Haitian, some people assumed those bags should be theirs. At this point I was glad for three things. First, that my shipper made it very clear to everyone working that the food was his personal property. Second, that I have three months of culture practice. Third, that God is always with me. I said I couldn’t give people this food. I said this because if I gave out one crumb there would be a crowd of hundreds in minutes and I’m not exaggerating. The people I told this, mostly women, did not like that I said that and they yelled at me as such. There were many of them yelling at once and very loudly; again, it was circus time. Their faces were wildly angry but my intuition was to argue as though they were joking. This worked. I stayed calm and amused asking them how I could do this when many people elsewhere would be very angry with me. It was a hard act to hold for a few minutes and they even hit me with some cardboard. However, the scene suddenly broke and they all started laughing and called me a coconut. You read right.

This sort of thing continued all afternoon. Finally, after a double flat tire held it for more than an hour, the third truck arrived, we loaded it and were under way. Our distribution plan for Anse Galets and the surround was to start on the island around 12:00-1:00. It was 5:30P.M. and we were just leaving by a big 17th century sailboat with two puny outboards. It was dark by the half way point and the sea came up pretty fast. There was a nice Christian woman who prayed and sang and I think rebuked the wind and the waves, literally, if my Creole is right. We got to the dock here with no problems.

Our economist wisely said that unloading the ship of food in the dark would be too risky so he and my shipper worked out that the captain and crew would sleep on board tonight to guard our food. Tomorrow early we’ll start the distribution of it and hopefully at the same time do a repeat of today’s logistics on the far shore.

In the end, this was a fairly intense fourteen hour day but I don’t say that for sympathy. To be honest, I’m very blessed to be given this work for the Lord. Even if its hard, I can’t think of a challenge I would enjoy more.

Please pray for God to continue helping me/us with even the most minute detail. Please ask Him for all grace in this without which we’re already finished. Please specifically pray that no matter what delays come up, we can still go really fast. Finally, please ask God to bless my working relationship with our allies and their relationships with each other. This whole venture hinges on that.