Bonswa…Kòman ou ye? (Good afternoon/evening…how are you?)…
Special note: If you are not able to view this email with the pictures showing up embedded in the text I have set up a blog where I post this same information. It can be found at: http://intimatewarrior.blogspot.com/
Hello again from the Projects Desk of ESMI. Sorry for being late this month with this update. The ESMI Executive Team had the opportunity to participate in the Spanish River Church Glocal Church Planting Conference last week in Boca Raton and I am still catching up on all of the work that got away from me. This event was a wonderful opportunity to meet with close to 300 church planters and their families from around the world.
Spanish River Church is in Boca Raton, FL and is one of the friendliest churches that Laura and I have had the opportunity to worship at in a long time. It was so wonderful to participate in a large church and be treated like we were one of the regular attendees. This church’s mission is to plant churches around the world and across the United States and Canada. If you are ever in the Boca Raton area I highly recommend visiting them. We were also blessed by being able to stay with Tom and Dee who took great care of us. Thanks to all of the Spanish River Church family for adopting us for five days.
Now for some updates:
CHERETTE RIVERBANK PROJECT
I do not have the final pictures of the project yet, but we were able to get this very important project taken care of. Thanks to the hard work of many local Haitians and the supervision of Pastor Louis and Mario the site at Cherette will be protected from the encroachment of the river.
Second row of gabions being placed.
Another view of the gabions.
FAYETON PROJECTS
Fayeton, in the Gonaives area of the Artibonite Department is one of our larger facilities. We have a church, an orphanage, a medical clinic, a bakery and a community school. We will also be setting up a staging area here for shipments coming into the country. This past month we worked on several projects here. Below are some pictures with explanations of the projects.
Cistern under the church.
The Gonaives area is a very dry, almost desert like place. Our facility is very close to the bay and so far all of our wells have been spoiled by salt water encroachment. We finished a cistern under the pulpit area in the church. We will start by collecting rain water and hopefully in the future be able to connect with a regional water supply line under development.
School addition.
We are doubling the size of our school. This will be the first school for ESMI that will be using our new construction standards. The picture above was taken at the beginning of the month so new pictures being taken this week will show the school almost completed.
New playground structure.
One of our short-term teams took a couple of days out of their home construction trip and installed this wonderful play structure for the children at our orphanage and school.
HOME CONSTRUCTION
The roof has been added to home #9 and the keys turned over to the owners, Pastor Smith and family. We also completed home #10 and turned it over to Pastor Avin Pierre and turned the keys over to them.
Home #9.
House #10.
We have received the funds to start home #11 and the team should be starting on it later this week. We cannot thank our friends here in the United States enough for supporting the construction of these homes. We have been able to keep our team of 7 Haitians employed for an entire year now and have put 10 families into a permanent structure. Another exciting part of this activity is that John, our Haitian contractor has informed us that he is ready to split his team so that we can start building two homes at a time.
If you, your church, or your business/organization would be interested in sponsoring one of these homes the cost is $4,500 and you can donate at our website.
ASSESSMENT REORGANIZATION
As many of you will remember, last September I had the opportunity to visit 65 of our sites for an assessment trip. I am in the process of reorganizing them by location within Haiti and will be using these to track our work at each site. Below is a map from Google Earth that shows a snapshot of these sites. When I get this task completed I will be publishing pictures for the sites on my Flickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/david_b_short/collections/) as well as publishing the Google Earth map with associated links. I will let you know when this is completed.
Our sites are labeled in white.
UPCOMING ACTIVITIES
I can certainly use your prayers over the next few months. I have a meeting in Chicago in 10 days and I need to have a school and a medical clinic design ready to present to a group of churches there. In 4 weeks I will be heading down to Virginia Beach, VA where we will be presenting our ministry at a denominational conference. And then Laura and I will be heading back out to California mid-July for a family reunion and my youngest daughter’s wedding in August. While in California I hope to be meeting with some churches, a couple of partner ministries, and possibly a quick drive to San Luis Obispo to meet with some professors at the university about helping with our work in Haiti.
God has been good and we are seeing a lot of wonderful work coming to pass in Haiti. And yet, there is so much to be done. We sincerely appreciate having each of you on our team and supporting us with your thoughts, your prayers, and your resources.
For those of you that have been following our support raising progress here is a breakdown of how the support has been going as of the end of last month. I needed to report this to our Board of Directors so I broke it down into a few different categories this time. As you can tell it is our friends like each of you that it making it possible for us to remain in this work…THANK YOU!!!
Monthly Support
Pledged per month 43% of goal
One Time Gifts 23% of goal spread across 2011
Total 66% of goal
Sources
Source % of support
Churches 27%
Organizations 8%
Individuals 65%
Contact Response Analysis
Total Contacted 466
Responded 255 55%
Positive 52 21%
Negative 201 79%
Thanks again for your interest in what we are doing in Haiti. If at any time you would like to be removed from my mailing list please let me know and I will take you off.
