A FRIENDLY SEPARATION

Recently one of my Facebook posts about a trip to Port-au-Prince that was part of Cowman School's “separation from OMS” raised a lot of questions and I suddenly realized that we have not explained some exciting and challenging changes in the works for us and the school.

Some of our group heading toward our ride to Port-au-Prince for fingerprinting. The police station there is apparently the only place in Haiti where this can be done!

Yes, Cowman is gaining its autonomy from One Mission Society. I want to emphasize that this is an amicable separation. Indeed, it is the initiative of OMS and has been in the works for several years. In the very near future, the School Board will “own” the school.

As part of our documentation, we each had to provide a passport-sized photo. Mr. James and I had photos that got rejected by the authorities because we weren't wearing suit coats! Fortunately, just a short trudge through the mud outside the police station, some entrepreneurs had set up a photo business with spare sports coats and digital cameras. 

There are three main realities driving this separation:

1)  As a global organization, OMS has a long standing history of starting and growing various ministries and then “setting them free” when they are established enough to operate independently. I have always admired this modus operandi: in time it gives more ownership to nationals and frees OMS to move on to new horizons. Cowman was started as a one-room-schoolhouse for missionary kids in the 1960s. The student body this past school year was 180 with a staff of 60. It is as stable as any ministry in Haiti can be and ready to stand on its own.

2)  OMS has no expertise in education or in running schools.  In a sense, Cowman was a “happy accident” – a simple homeschool operation that grew classrooms, staff and a substantial student body as it spread to serve a need within the local Haitian population. There are no resources from OMS headquarters to address the current challenges of cross-cultural education or our unique curriculum and teacher training needs and there's little sense in OMS directing the director of the school. 

Happily, about 18 months ago, one of our School Board members put us in contact with TeachBeyond, a sending agency (not unlike OMS) that specializes in mobilizing and placing missionary teachers in established Christian schools around the world (very unlike OMS). The School Board signed onto a partnership with TeachBeyond which has already resulted in three new teachers – each one mobilized in two or three months rather than two or three years.

3)  Most importantly, though, for the present timing of the separation is a legal consideration. Without going into detail regarding a very complicated situation, OMS Haiti is currently motivated to protect its various ministries from being pulled unnecessarily into any legal battles the organization itself might face in the future. To be clear, there are currently no substantive threats, but suffice it to say this is protection against conceivable future perils.

Melissa had lost her photos, so she got the Glamour Shot treatment too. She refused to put her arms through a jacket that had already had untold occupants. ;-)

It has been a long, complicated, and costly experience, but it is nearly complete. The Board has worked on creating a 501C3 on the state side and Melissa has met for months with a lawyer in Haiti to work out all the details on the Haiti side. Our trip to Port-au-Prince on the Monday after the school year ended, with four Americans and five Haitians, was in order to get our Haiti-side “board” members fingerprinted. (This is a separate board from the governing board.) Hopefully, this is the last step. It will take a few weeks for the prints to be processed and a background check on each individual to be completed.

Here's the guy printing our photos. His printer is attached to a car battery at his feet!

Once the separation is complete, OMS will continue to have a presence and a voice on the School Board into the future. I am sure that the school will remain open to help from the mission teams that come to OMS to serve in various ministries. Many things won’t really change much. But in some basic sense, this separation will free the school up to move and to grow in new ways.

We shall see where the Lord takes us and the school on this new leg of the journey. As always, we appreciate your prayers and support along the way!

(Any questions? Email me at steve_gross@juno.com or call me over the next few weeks while we are in the States at (812) 900 - 2467.)