Hello all, Jessie Here. I hope you all are in for the long haul, because this is going to be one long blog to include all the activity that has been going on around here. Before we go any further, Seth and I want to announce the winner of the Easter room name competition. There were a lot of wonderful and hilarious admissions. It was very tough for us to choose. We have, however, decided upon a winner.
And the winner is…
Karen J with “Resurr-egg-tion Station”. Congratulations! and please send us a photo or two to sethandjess.hatshaiti@gmail.com and we will add it to our Easter photos in the next blog.
Last blog, Karen’s house was in the process of getting cement put on the outside of it to make it stronger, prettier, and easier to paint. This has been finished, but instead of making Karen’s house prettier, we decided to put that on pause. (The group will be down in a month to fix it all up.) Since we have to wait to paint, Seth has been fixing up a house for her new inverter batteries and a new house for her air conditioning. Everything is getting a prettier look around here, other than Karen’s home. Soon, though, Karen, Soon! 🙂
Seth just finished up building and organizing the plumbing room. It had previously been a mess! If you needed a piece, you would have to take an hour break from your work to go look for the piece inside the room. Seth built shelves and racks for the different plumbing and electrical supplies. The room is now fully functional! 🙂 Seth has yet to decide whether it is organization for plumbing or a tarantula condo.
I have been doing tons of odds and ends as always. Seth designs and builds, I paint. I have painted the house for the inverter and air-conditioning, and have started on the kitchen cabinets that Seth recently renovated. The most important paint job I have done recently, though, was the key paint job.
For about a week, I got to wear multiple hats. I felt like an inspector and designer, although I really didn’t do any of those things. (I at least have to make my job sound important. :)) We have numerous keys laying around here at the HATS compound. Someone had previously organized most of them which helped a ton! However, there was still a lot to be done. So, for the first two days or so you would see me pacing back and forth across the compound trying to fit keys to certain doors and examining keys to see if they matched. Once I had the majority of the keys label, it was on to step two. I had to dip all the keys in various colors of paint corresponding with their houses and hang them on the line to dry. I had just watched the new Charley and the Chocolate Factory, so this was the perfect thing to do. The paints looked like different taffies and candies and to top it off I wrote a number for each door of the house on the key in a chocolate brown color, so I felt as if I was decorating it with a special chocolate design, just like the oompa-loompas. Maybe the Easter Bunny will hire me next year. 🙂
Seth and I have been very disappointed lately with the weather. The rainy season was suppose to start April 15th, which we were told would cool down the evenings! It has only rained once since then and it resulted in this…
In the spare time we have, we have been working on a certain “Ragaslush” campaign for our Texas Team. The Ragaslush was a paired invention by David Nance and Garrett Wooten. Dave was known for freezing his Poweraids for a cool refreshment. We decided as a good way to promote his new business (baseball recruiting in Haiti for the Major Leagues) we would combine Haiti’s famous energy drink, the Ragaman with a slushy consistency, therefore the Ragaslush. Here are a few pictures we have developed for the company. (P.S.- we have been scouting for you, Dave, and we have found some boys with sweet arms who can hit any mango in a tree, no matter what the height!)
The kids are as cute as always. It has moved into Mango season, so we frequently see children with a mangos stuffed in their mouth and and their bellies covered in juice. 🙂 Today, Luckner treated them to a bucket of mangos while the boys got their hair cut.
We are slowly getting the children more and more used to animals, especially lizards and frogs. Almost daily the children are yelling at Seth to catch a lizard, frog, snake, and yesterday a baby chick. They are all going to be zoologist before we know it!
To aid in them liking frogs a little more, we have developed a game we play with the children almost every other afternoon. Krapo, Krapo Eske W’ap domi? Frog, Frog are you sleeping? In the United States, we often played a game with my school kids, Mother Bear, Mother Bear, are you awake. The children tip-toe to the bear and until she wakes up and chases them back home. If she tags you, you become her cub. Well in the process of describing the game with my limited Creole, I got stuck on bear. They probably have never seen a bear and I didn’t know the word for it, so I tried acting it out, no luck. Then, Seth had a brilliant idea to use Krapo as the animal. The children instantly understood. So, the game continues, although come to think of it, are we just aiding their fears? haha 🙂
Children’s Church has been going great! I love doing it. This is something I live for. Puppets, fun games, and finding a way to make it all real to the children. Last week, we had a Palm Sunday Service, there was a short puppet skit and a lesson, followed by a long period of praise. We danced, marched, shouted, and waved our palm branches.
The students have had quite the break from school these last few weeks, but will be returning this week. While they were off, the students went to school one day to receive their report cards. The children did very well. Mirlande and Ti Luckner even received first in their class! A huge deal! We were so happy for them, especially Karen of course!
As I close out this post, I will leave you with a few pictures of what we have been doing at the close of our days, playing with the kids! Oh, we love them!
~Jessie
