CHRISTMAS BREAK - AND NOT A MINUTE TOO SOON!

School is out for two weeks and Melissa and I welcome the break with open arms!  It's not because we dislike our jobs - we're loving teaching here - it's just that we're so looking forward to having some flexibility in our days, the opportunity to do some new things and a bit less stress.

Speaking of stress, Wednesday we topped off our last few days of classes with the traditional Cowman School Christmas Program. 

A good chunk of MONDAY morning was spent next door, upstairs at Radio 4VEH, where there is a reception hall big enough to accommodate all the students and their family members.  This was to be the locale for the program, so it was important to get the kids on stage there and test out the sound system and all.

The program consisted of Christmas carols interspersed with a few short skits illustrating how some of our favorite carols came about in the first place.  Caleb (on the right) played the man who wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem and his buddy Jake Bundy played the man who composed the tune.

TUESDAY was our final day of classes and the kids showed up ready to learn!

 

Here's a great shot of Melissa, her class, and her aide, Miss Rose.  They had a crazy busy day, finishing up crafts, unwrapping gifts and watching The Polar Express.  Melissa was excited because we found a woman in the marketplace last weekend selling cute little resin Christmas trains for the equivalent of 50 cents each, so that's what Melissa bought her students.  (You never know what you might find in the market!)

After school Tuesday was my final adult English class of the year and I had promised my students a Christmas party.  Melissa and the kids - including the Bundys - had helped decorate them the night before.

My students went to town on those cookies.  Even though the general consensus was that sugar cookies with icing are a bit too sweet for Haitian tastebuds, I brought home ONE cookie.  One! We had a great time singing some Christmas carols together, too.  A lot of fun.

WEDNESDAY was the big day - the kids were to start arriving at 1:30 with the Christmas program itself scheduled for 2:30.  Some of us were tasked with keeping the kids busy outside while final preparations were made inside.  It was supposed to be a quiet time of making crafts and playing some lowkey holiday games - parents and children interacting together.  Instead, it was largely chaos.  Kids were running wild in their dressy clothes. Parents sat inside in the air conditioning.  And finding the right kids to organize costumes and prep for the program was nearly impossible. 

But the kids had fun!

Everyone was dressed in his or her finest!

Including our Hannah - looking very mature for an 11 year old!

Melissa and Rose had their hands full in herding their students and making costume changes.  But the cuteness factor was worth all the effort.

 

Samuel's character was the sickly composer of "What Child Is This?"  Everyone agreed he does the best fake sneezes. (He told me his secret - as if he'd given it a lot of thought - you have to say A-SHOO instead of A-CHOO.)

 

Waiting for the big show to begin...

 

Mary was ready for her big scene...

 

The "What Child Is This?" skit:

Hannah was narrator for the skit on "O Come, All Ye Faithful".  And she did a lovely job!

 

"O Little Town of Bethlehem"

 

 

The Big Finale: "We Wish You a Merry Christmas!"

 

 

 

 

When it was all said and done, we enjoyed refreshments together, wished each other Merry Christmas, and then all the teachers and aides and Miss Erica (who directed) and our principal, Angie Bundy, all went home and collapsed.  (Just a guess.)

THURSDAY AND FRIDAY: Now we're in full-blown break mode and the kids have already enjoyed a couple of sleepovers and some family movie time. 

(Tomorrow we are going to the beach - and that means I need to get to sleep soon.  One needs to be as alert as possible while driving to the beach!)

We are looking forward to what surprises and challenges God has in store for us here during our first Christmas away from family.  As always, we would appreciate your prayers ... especially for our kids.  And we wish you and yours a very merry and meaningful Christmas!

DANIEL

A common misconception holds that people here in Haiti sit passively and wait to be helped by outsiders.  Even if this were true, could we blame them?  Resources are TIGHT here. 

But it's NOT true.  Many Haitian churches and individuals give - sacrificially - to minister to their neighbors.  The man who started The Potter's House orphanage GAINS nothing material from the enterprise - he simply couldn't bare seeing the children wander alone and helpless.  Our friend Pastor Civil dreams of starting a school at his church on the hillside - certainly not as a source of income, but rather to reach out to families who can't afford to send children to existing schools.

And then there's Daniel.

A few weeks ago, this young man caught me as I left my afternoon English class, introduced himself and asked if I would be willing to help him practice his English skills.  I get requests like this all the time and I usually explain that I have a wife and four kids and a full-time job and so I can't make any promises or big commitments, but I would be willing to do what I can.  We exchanged phone numbers.

This past Friday night he called me and asked if I would be interested in coming to his house Saturday morning to see how he ministers to the children in his neighborhood.  A mutual friend, Jane, has connections to food programs and sometimes gives him bulk food with which he feeds several dozen children who live nearby - on a regular basis.

The idea certainly appealed to me, so yesterday morning Daniel came by our house and I joined him on a tap-tap towards Cap Haitien.  We jumped off at the National gas station and headed towards the river.  It's my experience that the closer to the river one lives, the greater the poverty. 

Daniel is a university student, studying law - with fewer resources even than the typical American college student.  But he's a follower of Christ, which is why he couldn't just ignore the hungry kids in his neighborhood.  We left the main street, traveled a short distance down an alley and then squeezed down a narrow passage way to a SMALL courtyard outside the two rooms Daniel calls home.  There we found his good friend dishing up vegetable soup for dozens of boys and girls.  Most had already been served and the serving bowl was almost empty.




Daniel was quite proud of his friend for his willingness to help out while Daniel had left to fetch me.



I asked Daniel to show me what was on the menu for the morning.

 

 Many boys were still standing around the courtyard while they finished their soup off.

While many of the smaller kids sat on the floor of Daniel's bedroom out of the sun.

 

 

 When I say "courtyard", it probably brings the wrong images to your mind.  It was just a slab of concrete surrounded on all sides by cement walls, with just the narrow passageway back towards the outside world. It was littered with the shoes of kids who had removed them in order to sit on the floor of Daniel's room.

Daniel's dad was there helping out too.  Off to one side of the "courtyard" was a well, covered by a wooden plank.  This water isn't clean enough to drink, but Daniel and his friends use it with a bit of bleach to wash the many dishes once everyone has been served.

 
After all were fed, Daniel's dad sat down to eat the burnt scrapings from the bottom of the cooking bowl.

Once the kids noticed me taking pictures, they got very playful.  I'm guessing this little guy's camera had long ago ceased being operational - but he got a kick out of pretending to turn the tables on me.

I caught a pic of some of the girls coming out of one of Daniel's rooms with their empty bowls - I didn't see a bit of that soup wasted anywhere.

As always ... when God opens my eyes to further needs here, I had a lot to think about as I headed home. 

Over lunch today I told the kids about my experience and how Daniel would love to somehow host a Christmas party for these kids later this month.  Caleb, Hannah, Samuel and Sarah agreed that maybe getting involved in making it happen would be a great way for our family to celebrate Christmas this year. 

I will keep you posted.

"LOOKING" LIKE CHRISTMAS IS NOT THE PROBLEM

It's beginning to look a LITTLE like Christmas around our house.

Our question is: How do you get it to FEEL like Christmas when you are surrounded by coconut trees and lush jungle?  And your tree sits in front of an open window? And it feels like you're stuck in a perpetual summer?  I doubt that night-time temps have been below 74 degrees yet. (I'm not complaining ... or attempting to rub it in either.  It just takes getting used to.) 

So we've done what we can to get a bit of holiday spirit around here.

We put away ALL of our Thanksgiving decorations:

And dragged out the couple of totes of Christmas decorations we brought with us in August.  The first thing to come out was a sheet of Grinch cling stickers which Sarah excitedly plastered on the wall above her bed.

One of our family traditions for several years running has been the building of a gingerbread house. Actually, this tradition falls after Christmas - when the prepackaged gingerbread houses go on clearance for half price.  Last year we found a FOAM gingerbread house on clearance and packed it away for this year. A smart move since A) there is no Wal-Mart within a couple hundred miles and B) a candy house would melt, mold and/or be eaten by ants if left on the kitchen counter for any length of time.  (Back in Indiana we only had to worry about the family dog, Oreo, who once managed to knock a gingerbread house off a shelf and proceed to eat enough walls, icing and candy décor to make herself sick.)

It wasn't long before the gingerbread house attracted the attention of Johnny...

 And then Mikenn and Ruysdael.

But even with that many "cooks in the kitchen", it turned out pretty cute!

 
We bought a new tree last year to bring with us. On clearance after Christmas. For $19.95.  This isn't it.  This tree was left behind by the Lenkers, the previous occupants of the house. It put my tree to shame. (So my tree found a new home in Melissa's classroom - far from any embarrassing comparisons.)

We all enjoyed sorting through the ornaments we brought with us.  Lots of special memories from Christmases past.

And then securing them to the tree. Melissa warned the kids to be careful with the ornaments, saying the tile floor would be unforgiving of fragile ornaments.  She then proceeded to accidentally demonstrate her point by dropping a ceramic ball ornament bought on a trip to California several years ago!  She was right.

Meanwhile, at school preparations are being made for the annual Christmas program, coming Wednesday, December 18.  Caleb and Hannah are both excited to have speaking lines in a couple of short skits about the history behind some famous Christmas carols.

And Melissa is making crafts with her students.

Melissa will tell you - because it's no secret - that I have been a bit of a Scrooge regarding Christmas over the last few years.  That's because in the midst of all the hyper-commercialism and overboard decorations and the pressures to cram more-more-more into your schedule, it's been about as easy for me to "keep Christ in Christmas" recently as it would be to read a Bible while sitting in the center of a video game arcade. 

So in that respect, I am truly looking forward to Christmas this year. 

Having said that, I anticipate internal struggles greater than ever this year.

A few nights ago, we showed "my Haitian sons" the old animated version of "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas". At first I wondered what they were thinking of all the made up Seussian words and if they were aware that a lot of what they were hearing wasn't real English.

But when it finished, I REALLY wondered what they made of the cartoon's message: that it's possible to celebrate Christmas without all the trappings of decorations and presents and feasting.

Maybe it struck them as a rather obvious point!

As I walked them down to the front gate in the dark after the movie ended, Johnny broke the silence and said softly, "Christmas in Haiti is not so good."

He paused a second, then added, "My family has no tree... no electricity."

But the baby Jesus didn't come into the shopping mall world 2,000 years ago.  IF I meet Him this Christmas - if any of us meet Him, it will likely be far from the decorations and parties.

Perhaps in the world of no tree, no electricity.

Come, Lord Jesus.

SCHOOL SPIRIT

A few weeks ago the staff of Cowman International School had the chance to evaluate where we currently stand as an institution and to plan for the future.  We all agreed that Cowman is a great school ... with room to continue growing in greatness.  I believe it was our principal, Angie, who mentioned that Cowman alumni, years down the road, often rave about the school and appreciate the solid Christian education they received and the godly atmosphere.  And yet many current students often seem to have an attitude more like this: "meh". 

We decided that one thing we could work on as a staff (with very little budget impact requirements) would be "school spirit" - building some opportunities into our schedule to build morale with some fun and competition - and the chance to model good sportsmanship as a bonus.

And the cheapest and easiest way to kickstart some school fun?  A staff vs. student soccer match. 

My 6th and 7th grade students eat and breath soccer.  Almost literally.  In fact, most days the majority consume their entire lunch at our 9:15 break time so they can devote their whole lunch break to the soccer field.  As soon as the posters went up a week ago, interest was HIGH. 

It was great timing, actually, at least for some of us.  Thanksgiving Day and "Black Friday" were otherwise regular school days and the soccer match helped take our minds off of what we were missing "back home".  Even the students' internet science curriculum seemed to be mocking us!

The students were excited to have a day off from uniforms and they were out on the field practicing before the first bell!

Coach David went all out and created boundary lines for our field, doing his best to exclude the mango tree roots.

And as game time approached, the kids were more than happy to help move picnic tables to use as bleachers.

We even had a cheerleader...

And a trophy that the students were so anxious to get their hands on ...

(Coach David found it in town for about a buck fifty!)

Ready for kick-off!

Our kids were laughing later that evening about the fact that in the first ten seconds of the game, one teacher and our principal both landed on their bottoms in the dirt!

But not Mrs. Z.  She was tough.  The students were caught off guard by their 70-something teacher intimidating them on the field.

Samuel managed to get the ball past her, but just barely.

I promise we are keeping Samuel well-fed.  He's not quite as skinny as this angle makes him look!

 
At halftime we had the younger kids on the field trying to kick a ball past their teacher.  Melissa's students got such a thrill out of scoring on her.

When all was said and done though, the staff walked away with the coveted trophy. 

And the students asked for a REMATCH.

Praise the Lord, it turned out to be a whole lot of fun - and we never had to use the first-aid kit.