3 Months

9 months ago I started dating this guy from church named Jimmy.
6 months ago we got engaged.
3 months ago (June 11th) we were married
1 month ago we moved to Haiti.
In 6 months we will have a new born baby in Haiti.

Life sure can change quickly...
As we finished an excellent first week of school on Friday, my husband mentioned that we were done with the first week and that we had more than 18 years left to go. I looked at him quizically and said "18 years! How do you figgure that?" He reminded me that if we are going to school our children and plan to have many of them, than 18 years is the absolute minimum amount of time that this sort of teaching lies ahead of us. That sort of freaked me out. My response... "What happened to my life?!"
Being married, having and raising and teaching children... these are all good things. Just different things, and very permanent things. I am used to thinking about my life one day at a time and as far as making plans/commitments have never ever done so more than a year at a time. I guess those days are gone. I am excited for what's ahead though, and thankful for my wonderful husband.

We have enjoyed an excellent weekend thank you to the Lovely Livesay family who loaned us their car. We were very excited about all the adventure we would be able to find with such transportation.


Friday night we enjoyed a social evening with some of the other younger people involved in Heartline. We got to hang out and eat MEXICAN food and play games. I had been craving such a night since we arrived in Haiti. Much fun! (This would have been impossible without the use of a car since all of the roads were flooded and we can not be out on the motorcycle after 6 pm anyways due to safety and the fact that the headlights don't exactly work.)

Saturday we decided to use the Livesays car to go exploring. After a bit of houscleaning in the morning... you would not beleive how much soot, dust and dirt it is possible to collect in one house in only a week.... We took off for the Dominican border. We had heard that it was not far down a road that runs closely to our house.

Here are a few sights outside our gate. We see them everyday, but have not shared them with you yet.

This is the beautiful trash pile that is always outside our wall.


The market corner of the "intersection" (no signals, signs, or rules of traffic) right by our house.


The flooded streets.


The crowded "taptap" (taxi)...Driving a car with only 2 people in Haiti really makes you feel extravagant/wasteful since most every other car is crowded full and most people are just walking.


So, when we got to the Dominican border, it turned out we were missing some sort of authorization for our vehicle to be able to cross. Of course it was difficult to determine what was really needed, because our Creole is basically non-existant and we're pretty sure everyone was just trying to make money off of us...they wouldn't have minded us not having the paper so long as we gave them money. So after quite a bit of confusion we turned around and thankfully were returned our passports and allowed to leave without too much trouble. We'll have to save exploring the D.R. for another time.

The pretty countryside near the border.


Since we were unable to explore the D.R. after spending some time working on the car due to trouble with the radiator, we still had time to make a trip out to Gressier. This is where JoyHouse Ministries is located and where Jimmy and I had come on a trip with our church in 2010. Gressier is only about 15 miles away, but in Haiti this equates to a 2 hour drive. In order to get there we had to drive through the west side of Port-Au-Prince which we had not been to yet. It was even 10 times crazier than the area where we live! We successfully found JoyHouse and our Haitian friend Fito from our previous trip there. Everyone else was gone and will not be there until this weekend. It was still fun to see all the progress that has been made on the church there and remember our trip. We also got some phone numbers to get in contact with old friends.
The church building that was only rubble when we visited after the earthquake. Looking good!

It was a long drive home from Gressier in the dark, but my husband is an awesome navigator, and we were able to stop near the airport and eat at the restraunt we had eaten at with our team the first time we came to Haiti. Another neat memory. We were stopped twice by policemen this weekend. Seems like some paper for the car needs to be updated. Being stopped by the police is the one time I am thakful not to speak Creole... since they can't speak English and get easily frustrated with not being able to communicate, they let us go pretty quickly.

Ok, so today we enjoyed a great morning of fellowship at church and then went on up the mountains to try and have lunch at the Baptist Mission. However it was closed. So we kept driving in the beautiful mountains. We didn't know where we were going, and the roads were even more horrible than city roads, but the air was cool and the countryside was beautiful, so we just enjoyed the ride. We found lunch around 3:00 on the way back into town.

The mountains


All in all, good weekend, full of driving and exploring and learning.
It is funny how in Haiti you come to expect things not to work out and so you find things that could possibly somehow be counted as a success and celebrate them.