God is GOOD!

By Pastor R

Here are some of my thoughts on Haiti and specifically how God prepared the team and I for our trip. It was (and still is) an incredible journey of seeing God move and work. I hope that you'll come back throughout the next few weeks to read my blogs on Haiti as we will continue to post them every few days. You'll also be hearing from some of the members of the team and what God did in and through them as well.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 & 11– “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.” and “He has made all things beautiful in His time.”

I knew that my mission when I returned home was to deliver the coffee samples I had collected to the President of Just Haiti. I felt sure that they would adopt the Baptist Block as they had produced a coffee that the French and Japanese loved.  They had 42,000 pounds in their warehouse ready to be shipped and they were already organized into trade associations.

So last Friday I sat with the President of JustHaiti.org.  I showed her three samples of coffee.  The first sample I showed her was from Cap Haitian; which is from an uncle of a Food for the Hungry staff member who had grown the coffee.  However, JustHaiti.org wasn’t interested in working with Cap Haitian.

So the second sample I showed the president was from the Baptist Block.  And to my surprise she rejected that coffee as well! Only this time she said it’s because their coffee is already an international grade coffee; which is really awesome.  So understanding Just Haiti’s mission (which is help families break loose from the economic injustice at the root of so much of their poverty) they didn’t want to work with the Baptist Block because they can already sell this coffee to a buyer very easily.

The third sample I showed her was from the town of Belladere; where our church was working and partnering.  Some of the beans were black.  Some of the beans were speckled.  The eyes of the president of Just Haiti lit up when she saw these coffee beans.  She said “this is exactly the kind of coffee we found in Baraderes when we started’.  She explained that we can greatly help them by taking their growers and train them how to grow export quality coffee.  It may take us optimistically two years or realistically 5 years but this is the group I believe we can help.

We are seeing how beautiful the heart of God is!  We see the hand of God orchestrating, arranging and working.  We are in the process of building a partnership with JustHaiti.org, Food for the Hungry, and Grace Community Church to spiritually and economically help the people of Belladere.  This will involve Kim, President of JustHaiti.org and the growers of Baraderes traveling 8 hours up to the mountains of Belladere and explaining how to grow export quality coffee.  This will involve building relationships and learning to trust one another.  Eventually when they know we are sincere and they begin to produce export quality coffee their town of Belladere will be transformed.  We will pay the farmers the fair trade price and they will be incentivized to increase their production.  We will use the profits of the sales in Haiti to build schools, hire teachers and buy curriculum.  He has made all things beautiful in His time!

Haitian Coffee

By Pastor R

Here are some of my thoughts on Haiti and specifically how God prepared the team and I for our trip. It was (and still is) an incredible journey of seeing God move and work. I hope that you'll come back throughout the next few weeks to read my blogs on Haiti as we will continue to post them every few days. You'll also be hearing from some of the members of the team and what God did in and through them as well.

John 19:30 “When he had received the drink, Jesus said ‘It is finished’.  With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.”

By now it was Good Friday and we were in Haiti.  The day before I had met with the mango growers.  What I did not know was that we were staying right beside the Belladere office for Economic Development.  The President, Emond Jean Resis, had heard that I was looking to find the subsistence coffee growers.

Somehow, Emond arranged a meeting with a coffee grower, Reliva Jolibrun.  He and his wife travelled 19 kilometers to see me carrying a 30 pound container of fresh ground coffee from the mountains.  His town is called the Baptist Block.

Before that meeting the mayor and his two assistants had come to the Guest House and we sat together for 2 hours while he listened to me share my heart.  The mayor gave the proposal his full endorsement and support.  I was feeling that God was orchestrating and superintending the process.  I learned that this was not ordinary coffee.  It grows in the chalky limestone of the Haitian mountains and has a deep rich flavor.  The Japanese and French fly in and buy their coffee and take it back to their countries.

I told them about JustHaiti.org and their desire to pay coffee farmers a fair trade price giving them the best hope for the future.  In that future farm families can break the stronghold of poverty that has choked the development of rural Haiti for hundreds of years.  In that future farmers would build economic independence and social justice.

We bought their coffee for $3 a pound, that is ninety cents higher than the international fair trade price promised.  I would arrange a meeting with JustHaiti.org to see if they would be adopted.

Haitian Mangoes

By Pastor R

Here are some of my thoughts on Haiti and specifically how God prepared the team and I for our trip. It was (and still is) an incredible journey of seeing God move and work. I hope that you'll come back throughout the next few weeks to read my blogs on Haiti as we will continue to post them every few days. You'll also be hearing from some of the members of the team and what God did in and through them as well.

John 4:25 “I tell you open your eyes and look at the fields.  They are ripe for harvest.”

When we arrived at the town of Belladere, we stayed at the Germain Guest House.  Right across the street was a 60 foot tall mango tree laden with mangoes about 25 days away from harvest.  I had read the Catholic Relief Service Assessment on the Value chain of Mangoes before I left.  I had learned that the mango is the most exported fruit in the world.  Asia, China, India and the Philippines export the most mangoes.  In the Americas, Mexico, Brazil and Peru import the most into the U.S.

It began to dawn on me that God has blessed Haiti with 10 million mango trees and 80% of their harvest goes un-harvested.  They have so many mangoes they feed mangoes to the pigs!  They sell them in their markets a half-bushel of mangos for a dollar.

I asked Odines and Wilson if a meeting could be arranged to meet with the mango and coffee growers of the Belladere region.

On a Thursday afternoon I sat with the mango growers under a mango tree and we talked mangoes.  I explained to them that in America we pay $1 to $2 for a fresh mango.  They looked at me like I stepped off a space ship! They were selling their whole tree of mangoes to the Dominicans for $10 and then trying to take them to the market and selling a whole basket for a $1.

I explained to them I did not know how we could make this happen but would they be willing to pray that we could find a way to pay them ‘the fair trade price’ for their mangoes, dehydrate them, export them to America and then return some of the profits to them for community development.  Then we prayed and asked God to move a mountain.  When we finished one elderly mango grower with a big smile on his face said “Can you make this happen in my lifetime?  I am an old man and I don’t know how many more harvests I have.”

It was an amazing encounter.  By now Wilson, my translator, understood the concept very well.  He was explaining that we were only in the talking and the praying phase.  I left hearing their hope for a better life, their dream of educating their children, their faith in a very big God began to grow.

Travel to Haiti

By Pastor R

Here are some of my thoughts on Haiti and specifically how God prepared the team and I for our trip. It was (and still is) an incredible journey of seeing God move and work. I hope that you'll come back throughout the next few weeks to read my blogs on Haiti as we will continue to post them every few days. You'll also be hearing from some of the members of the team and what God did in and through them as well.

John 2:5 “His mother said to the servants: Do whatever he tells you to do”

So on Monday, April 2, our team of 14 members & myself tried to make the journey down from Washington Dulles Airport to Port au Prince, Haiti.  The airplane we were supposed to fly didn’t make it.  But the airline said they had a replacement.  The problem with the replacement was that it was fueled to fly to California.  It had too much fuel to fly to Miami and therefore; the airline would have to take fuel out of our airplane.  The only problem was all of the fuel tankers were full!  So we had to wait for one of those tankers to remove the extra fuel on our plane so that we could finally depart!

When it was all said and done our plane was delayed an extra couple of hours.  That would have been okay except once we got to Miami, we had to catch our connection flight to Port au Prince right away.  When we arrived a couple of hours later, our connector flight had already left.  So we wound up spending the night in Miami!

While some may find such a moment upsetting, I found it quite encouraging that we were encountering opposition from the earliest part of the journey.  Our enemy is relentless in his quest to discourage God’s children from doing God’s work.  The reality, however, was that we had one less day in Haiti!

When we finally arrived in Haiti we met our Food for the Hungry Program Director, Odines and translator, Wilson.  I began to tell them what God had put in my heart to do for Haiti and it was amazing to see God at work through them as our hearts became more and more unified.