Another sad day. Dickie is leaving.

Dickie and I must leave the compound tomorrow morning at 3:30 a.m to pick up Luckner and then on to pick up Daniel, our trusty police escort. Dickie was told to be at the airport by 6:40 a.m.

It was difficult to see Don, Ken and Jim leave last Tuesday, but made a little easier because I still had Dickie. Now, it is extremely difficult. Seeing him pack and preparing to leave as I write this is causing wet eyes already.

Dickie has hardly stopped since he arrived. Today, his last day for awhile, he remade the screen door in the kitchen and did a multitude of other tasks, which included servicing the generator.

This week he made a game for the children “Toss the Disc’. They love it, including Ti Luc who plays with his feet of course.

I will have five nights sleeping outside my house without a male member of my family close by and then I will return to Port au Prince on Saturday morning to pick up the 9 person Texas team. It will be good to have their expertise and fun spirits for a week.

The water tower behind my house is going up nicely. We will see the ceiling poured on the first level by the end of this week, after which the second level will start going up. The work continues too on the housingso support missionary helpcan join HATS.

Our school was repaired and reopened last Monday. It is good to see students going back and forth again in the HATS school uniforms. This week Dickie was finally able to present some students with a gift from their sponsors that had travelled down with the January workteam. One of those was a cute little girl, Ismyis, who is the sponsored student of Little Marilyn at Yarmouth Wesleyan. Due to the earthquake, of course, schools remained closed for quite awhile and ours even a little longer due to the damaged walls that had to be replaced.

We are continuing to distribute food and money to the hungry people in the area. This week Dickie was able to present food to the sponsored student of Pleasant Supplies (Brian Bowers) for his family members. Twenty families were supposed tocome for help tomorrow but due to going to PaP they will come on Tuesday. We continue to do a little to help with the needs around us.

Yesterday Dickie and I went to St Marc. As it was a Saturday, it was a huge market day in Pont Sonde and it was not easy to get through there. The traffic which is always nuts is extremely so on market day. We had an interesting TapTap just ahead of us that was filled with pigs with people sitting with their legs on the pigs. It was a case of ‘these big pigs go to market’. Having a pig here is like having a bank account to most families. They feed them until they are huge and then sell them.

Carol continues to provide lots of help with the children and in many other areas as needed. She will be with us until next Saturday when we go pick up the next workteam.

This morning our little Dieunel fell out of the tire swing as it was being pushed much too fast by another child. He arrived at the house covered in blood, but was a tough little cookie. He is suffering but is proud of his bandages.

I trust Dickie will write for the blog upon his return to Yarmouth. I plan to continue blogging but it might not be daily. When the new group arrives next weekend I hope one of them will daily write for the blog.

~Karen