Spring in Haiti- Thunderstorms, Blustery Days, and Flooding

We finally have rain again in Haiti! It's been a long, dry winter and now we're into springtime weather. We're starting to experience impressive thunderstorms throughout the night. Hopefully our cistern is filling up quickly. 

Melissa in the entryway watching the kites

The kids are having fun watching kids in the community fly homemade kites. Joan (our amazing tutor) has helped the kids make kites out of rice sacks, twigs, and plastic bags. We're trying to find some fun things for the kids to do with limited areas to run around.

Steevenson flying a kite

Billy's kite

We are blessed to have an amazing home that we are renting. The home has no yard and literally goes straight up with just a concrete walkway around the house (and razor wire around the perimeter). The first floor is basically an above ground cistern that holds our water. The main floor has 1 bedroom, the kitchen and living room. The top floor has a little balcony, an area for homeschooling, and 3 bedrooms. We're able to hang our clothes out to dry off the balcony and also apparently fly kites.

I went to town today with Beth (co-founder of Mountain Top Ministries) in search of large quantities of medications. We hope to begin purchasing many of our prescription medications locally if possible. We saw over 800 patients last week and go through a TON of medications. We are trying to do some price comparisons when we have time between medical teams. We have a few days to run around and try to figure out some of these details before the next team arrives. I also stopped and bought more plastic bins and various storage containers for the pharmacy. We're so thankful to have amazing help in the home. Joan is a huge blessing to our family and has just jumped right in with the bulk of the homeschooling so that Ron and I can dedicate time to other tasks within the ministry.

Christelle's homemade kite

Billy's homemade kite

                                                           

The Lord has been good throughout this whole process of moving our family to the mission field. We expected to move into a 3 bedroom house, but were blessed with this amazing rental. Although it has some logistical challenges with water, electricity, etc., it is an incredible blessing to our family. We're thankful to have the extra space with 12 of us living here. Only 10 of the kids are with us here in Haiti. It's hard to believe that we have 4 children that are grown and out of the home. David will soon be out on his own as well (moving to China in the fall) and we'll be down to only 9 kids. It seems like a small family in some ways.

Rain draining off the roof and coming into the house                                        

We seem to have struggled with water in various ways for the past 7 months. Figuring out the whole water system was a bit challenging. We were boiling our water to drink, but thankfully an amazing young woman stepped forward to sponsor our water. We are now able to buy 5 gallon jugs of drinking water which saves us time and also the expense of propane to run the stove and boil water. But...for months and months we have been hauling buckets of water for everything in the house (dishes, toilets, laundry, hand washing, etc) because we haven't had running water. Then there were times where we would get a burst of water and it would be EVERYWHERE. Well.....we're back into that challenge. We finally have "kinda sorta" running water (still flush toilets with a bucket, dishes, and laundry with a bucket due to no water pressure), but we do have some water coming out of the pipes to wash hands at least. 

Ron, David, and Julia sweeping water out of the room

But now, we have the rain pouring in throughout the house. In fact, I think I've heard it more then once, "You keep saying you want water Linda. Well...we have water!"  We now have water up to our ears.  The rain has flooded the kitchen consistently over the last few days and is now coming into the upper floor as well. We're not sure what's going on, but the pipes running off the roof must be plugged. OR it may simply be raining harder and faster then the drains are equipped to handle. Rain water should be draining down into our cistern instead of onto the porch and into the house. We've been sweeping the water out and using buckets to catch water in different areas before it comes into the house. We had various school supplies in the path of water, but most of them were in plastic bins thankfully!