Haiti Update with Current Needs January 29, 2010
Here is an update on the work that the Lord has set before us at Calvary Chapel Caneille, Haiti.
Caneille is located 45 northeast of PAP and 8 miles SE of Hinche. We currently have missionaries at an established Calvary Chapel Church/School there. The pastor there is a Haitian, Huguener Bastia, who is a graduate of CC Bible College Murietta and who faithfully attended Calvary Chapel of Appleton for a couple of years prior to that. When his father, who was the previous pastor there, suddenly passed away, the Lord spoke to Bastia about taking over the pulpit in Caneille. Bastia married a gal from Calvary Chapel of Appleton, Betty is also a registered nurse. We are part of the relief efforts currently taking place, allowing refugees to flee Port au Prince and find food, water, and shelter in the outlying areas, in this case, Caneille.
Because of the land and resources we have, the Lord has given us a relief camp to oversee. We recently purchased land adjacent to where the church and parsonage are located, had it graded and leveled, and added gravel for protection during the upcoming rainy season. We already have 60 people, including families with children, who are looking to us for subsistence living. They arrived because they heard of this camp, and more show up daily. We have stockpiled food – rice, beans, oil – and a minimal water supply. We had a well but it is nowhere near sufficient for daily needs (drinking, cooking, laundry, bathing) for even 1 family, let alone a relief camp. Our assets include a large dump truck and other transportation options, and today we purchased as many tents as we could with the resources we have. Twenty-five disaster relief tents will be shipped to Florida today, and as we are affiliated with MFI, they have the resources to get them into Haiti. We are praising the Lord for this as most tents are snatched up by international organizations upon availability. You can check out what we were able to secure for tents at
http://www.shelter-systems.com/relieftents/14-relief-tent.html
Even though we have had some generous contributions, our resources are drying up. Our main need at this time is additional tents, and a water purification system. A system that will meet our needs is Aqua Sun International’s “Output S”. http://www.aqua-sun-intl.com/PWP-4C.htm
It is solar powered with a backup generator option, which we can make use of, but which costs more and more to run due to the skyrocketing price of fuel, making solar the most reliable and efficient power source available to us. This unit will purify river water as much as 1000 gallons per day. The cost of this unit is $10,000.
We also have a radio station that is 95% completed, and we wish to purchase 150 hand crank radios for distribution, which also has a built-in flashlight, much needed for a camp situation. The price for one of these radios is $21 and would enable us to bring the gospel to so many via the airwaves, as well as any type of news updates critical to the Haitian people and their situation. We are really seeing the Lord’s hand in all of this, and Betty herself said that when she saw this begin to unfold, she really felt she was seeing the fruit of so much of what the Lord had prepared them for already, in her words, ‘”for such a time as this”.
One additional need would be solar panels so they can avail themselves of this natural resource so abundant in Haiti.
We have set up a fund, “Haiti Quake Relief” for ongoing contributions. All of the latest critical updates from our missionaries on the field, including the dramatic testimony by the pastor who was in PAP at the time of the quake are included on our Calvary Appleton blog, where you can read how Pastor Bastia and his wife saw the hand of the Lord in protecting them from harm during those amazing first minutes: http://blog.ccappleton.org/ . This site also gives contribution information.
Thank you for your consideration. Please pray for the Haitian people and for the Lord to give us wisdom in all these things.
Dwight
Calvary Chapel Appleton
