Busy Day at GLA!

We have a wonderful team of 11 volunteers here at  GLA right now.  Part of the group worked at Fort Jacques and part worked here at the main house and painted and worked with the children. They have really worked hard sorting boxes from the container that came out last week.  Dave, our volunteer from Australia, has supervised them and they prepared 375 sacks of donations to distribute to a tent city.

Today, all of the children went up to the balcony and the nursery rooms were cleaned, scrubbed, and painted.  I sent Molly and Joyce down last week to buy paint and told them they could pick the colors.   They decided to paint each room 2 colors and did not tell me, so I was quite surprised when I walked in and saw the rooms!  But they are beautiful and it turned out looking very nice.

Hopefully, they will get the other rooms painted tomorrow.  It is so nice to see the rooms painted and clean!  With our new cribs donated through Bethany Christian Adoptions, the rooms are beautiful!

The  children all stayed on the balcony and played and even took their naps together on the floor.  In the afternoon, it rained a lot.  We hear there is a tropical storm here in the Caribbean and it has rained a lot the last few days.  I do not remember another rainy season like this one in the last 19 years!  We have received a LOT of rain!

I had visitors today who wanted to know a little about starting a mission in Haiti and wanted to see an American run orphanage. They were helping a Haitian run orphanage in Carrefour.  It is always difficult to know what to tell someone about what is needed here.  I gave told them what I thought just from my experiences but told them to be open to God’s will and God will open doors and show them what they should be doing.

This morning, Ernst got a call from our agent getting our containers out of customs and he told Ernst that we needed to send people to the port in Port-au-Prince for an inspection of 3 containers!  There was a strike today for public servants but one customs agent said he would inspect one of the containers today and the other two tomorrow.  So Ernst, Erick, Wadson, Patrick, and Dave hurried to Port-au-Prince to unload the container and let the customs agent inspect each and every box on the container!  This container has several kitchen appliances on it along with washers and dryers to replace some of our appliances that are worn out.

The heat was 105 F (40.5 C) and very humid today at the  Port!  Patrick came back to the house exhausted and dehydrated!  All of the guys looked a little worse for wear when they returned to the orphanage.  They are NOT looking forward to going to the port again tomorrow but they have to!  They will hopefully get there earlier tomorrow and take lots of water with  them!

We finally received 6 passports for children going to French families!  What a journey this has been for all of us!  We are so thankful that these children will be joining their “forever” families very soon!

Look how big Jerrensia is getting! We have had problems getting passports for some of the children with medical issues.  Their parents lost all of their identification papers during the earthquake and it has been very difficult to replace any lost papers.  Hopefully, we are almost done getting the paperwork ready for Jerrensia and Ken.