How does your garden grow?

One of our biggest goals at Good Rest was to start a garden so that the kids can eat more fresh vegetables. The ground here is very hard and difficult to work with, but after Tropical Storm Isaac it has softened considerably. 

Seeds that we bought or were donated to us for the Good Rest garden.

The kids at Good Rest have been working with Carl and one of the older boys, Odney, to lay out a garden area. Carl took some seeds over to them today and talked about how to plant each type of seed. Some we will need to grow into seedlings before they go into the ground, and all of them will need to be watered and cared for.

Taking a break from digging!

The garden extends behind the girl's dorm for plants that will need shade.

The kids have been excited so far about the project! If you are looking for a low cost and easy way to help the kids, please consider picking up a packet or two of seeds and mailing them to us at our Florida address. If they are in a regular envelope I don't think they will get stuck in customs. It would be great to stockpile seeds and have the garden producing as soon as possible!

Our Florida address:

 Carl Fielstra 
 3170 Airmans Dr.#2176-CHILD 
 Ft. Pierce, FL 34946 

Still raining!

These boys were a great help in their Chaparral HS soccer gear!

It has rained non-stop all day. The kids are in good spirits still, sporting their best rainy weather gear and working together to clean up the facilities. Carl has been running back and forth all day. It isn't even 4pm here yet the skies are dark and it feels like night time.

Clean-up crew!

When facing a tropical storm, it is essential to look your best! Isn't Daphne adorable? :)

Even little kids pitched in to help clean up the mess that the storm made.

Still Smiling...

Carl went over this morning to check on the kids at Good Rest and to assess any damage. One of the older boy's tents was completely demolished by the wind and rain. He is trying to move into the unfinished dorm room. Even more worrisome, a large tree branch fell on the church/school tent. Carl stopped by home to grab our saw and he is back over at Good Rest taking down the tree branch and helping the boys get an unfinished dorm room water-proofed so that they can sleep in it tonight.

Everyone calls this smiley face Dominica because his family came from the Dominican Republic.

A huge tree branch knocked over the church tent.

The little tent that could! While the bigger tent next to it has been completely destroyed, this small tent made it through the storm!

Waiting for Isaac...

We are waiting for Isaac to hit! 

Carl ran around town doing errands today for Good Rest and picking up our last care packages. He also went and carefully walked the grounds at Good Rest. We still have some kids kids living in tents and he wanted to check to make sure that the tents would be secure for the night. We really need to get the last few dorm rooms built so that all of the kids have a safe place to sleep. 

It is dark now and we are getting ready to bunker down for the night. We keep getting gusts of strong winds and spatters of rain, but the storm has not really hit yet. Carl is making some JiffyPop popcorn for the kids while the power stays on, though it went out as soon as I started typing this update! Don't worry, the Jiffy Pop turned out fine :)

The kitchen sure isn't pretty, but it beats cooking under the mango tree like we had to do our first couple weeks!

Our hearts and prayers are with all of the Haitians living in tents. We hope that they are able to stay dry and that we all come through the storm safely. We will update you tomorrow as soon as we can to let everyone know how the kids at Good Rest fared over the night.

Good night all!

Before the hurricane...

So tomorrow night Mr. Isaac will hit us,we are nervous about our very first hurricane! We feel prepared with only a few things left to do tomorrow to get ready. Among them, we have to take one of the Good Rest boys to the dentist tomorrow, his tooth is hurting him. Our options are a hospital that is about an hour's drive away or another visit to the Cuban clinic. Hmmm...

We are happy to report that after a week where food was scarce at Good Rest, money has come in and the kids will have food and gas to get them through the upcoming month. We have been talking to them about how to save any possible extra to build up a reserve for hard times, but so far we have not seen progress in this. On Monday Steve from our organization will be here and we hope that he will have financial and other solutions to help improve everyone's quality of life. Safe travels, Steve!

Thank you to our family Matt and our friend Jeni for donating money to us to buy food, we are spending it where it is needed the most!

Mangoes and Rolls, the breakfast of champions!

Beater cars and birthdays!

Well, we just can’t make it anymore without a car. We need to be going over to Good Rest and we are worried about our family’s safety walking on the road. So... we said yes to the cheapest possible car rental that we could find. Today we took the car out to try to get money that had been wired to us for the Good rest kid’s school, more food, and necessities. On our way, three people leaned out of the Tap-Tap in front of us, waving frantically to let us know that our front tire was falling off. We cut off the truck headed our way and bumped up onto a “sidewalk” so that Carl could tighten the TWO lug nuts that tire had. What is the Creole word for lug nut? We had no idea. There is no air conditioning. It is hot. HOT. People are staring at us, but this time I am convinced it is not because of the color of our skin, it is because we are literally driving the crappiest car in Haiti.

Western Union’s servers are down. We bump through traffic looking for another Western Union that looks relatively safe. Three stops later, we have to give up. All of the servers are down right now. The Good Rest kids are surviving on just a little bag of rice. We are stressed about letting them down and not getting money to them today.

Tomorrow is Amelia’s third birthday! We will spend our morning going back to Western Union to get the money for the kids and also taking breakfast over to Good Rest kids. Hopefully we can accomplish this relatively quickly so that we can have a small birthday gathering for Amelia later in the day.

She loves everything pink!!!

Happy third birthday to our amazing Amelia! 

Sleeplessness, security, and shoes

This week was our most nerve wracking week here in Haiti. On Monday we heard that two kids had been kidnapped down on the Bon Repo side of our street. Then we also heard that the same group broke into a house just a couple minutes down our street and kidnapped at gunpoint the wife of a local Haitian pastor. The details of the break in were really scary, and our contact at Good Rest, Sherlie, even stopped by that night to tell us not to go out and not to walk on our street in case the gang of kidnappers saw us. We were really nervous! The local American missionaries in the next town over suggested that we stay with them for a couple nights since both kidnappings happened right on our street. They have security wire and more dogs. The husband is a former marine and they have been in Haiti for 5 years, yet he was worried about safety. We said, "Yes!"

We couldn't sleep. Carl spent a lot of time on our roof with a flashlight and we prayed and tried to untangle rumors from truth. We never got the full story on the kid's kidnapping. The words Sherlie said to us ring in my ears, "Watch your children, they know Americans love their children more than anything so that is why they try to take them!" My worst fear, my very fear.

Carl and our dog keeping watch over the yard.

Things began to calm down after a late night prayer meeting. The ransom for the pastor's wife was paid and she was returned to her family. It was a miracle, truly, that she was unharmed! We heard of no new kidnappings. According to the locals, kidnappings and robberies are more common at this time during the year as people are trying to get extra money to send their kids to school. We are back in our house now, but I will not be walking with just myself or with myself and the kids out on our street. This is so upsetting because it cuts down on the time I can spend with the kids at Good Rest. I was walking over by myself almost every day. We really need a car. We are trying to find a rental car while Children's Heritage looks into buying options. It is just not safe to be out on the road unprotected. Please pray that we are able to get transportation so that we will be safer and so we will be able to get out of the area if we need to. We can also then get to visit more local organizations to help get more food for the kids. We also need prayer that the food will come in to Love a Child, their containers are still stuck in customs at port.

We rented a Tap-Tap yesterday to take us into town. We had to pick up boxes from MFI, get some groceries, and go to MSC (the Home Depot of Haiti) to get security lights and some other things to make our home a bit safer. I put some pictures of our trip on our Facebook page :)

We have so many positive things to focus on, and that is what we will do to recover from the stress of this week:

1. Shoe drive at Chaparral High School to buy shoes and pay for shipping so that each child at Good Rest will have a new pair of shoes when they start school. Contact Emmett (ekeith-jones@tvusd.k12.ca.us)or Michele(mloza@tvusd.k12.ca.us) for more information if you would like to help or donate!

Kids start school here in Haiti at age 3! This will be Clarence's first time to go to school.

2. Amelia's third birthday is this Thursday!!! I can't believe my baby is growing so quickly!

3. We hope to make more progress this week regarding food for Good Rest, also we want to start getting the kids ready for school!

4. I am going to start homeschooling CJ (3rd grade) and Trenton (Kinder) this Monday!

5. We have had such love and support from friends old and new back home. Thank you ALL!

Craft Day

We are trying to make every Saturday a day of fun. We have done a movie night, coloring days, and today we painted. The kids had a great time!

After the painting we got to watch some of the boys make homemade kites out of little bits of plastic, reeds, and trash. They are so creative!

Then tragedy struck: a pipe broke and Carl had to get busy fixing it!

All in all it was a fun morning at Good Rest! 

For the love of learning...

I have to be honest, I was REALLY nervous about today. In fact, I put off starting our English class from last week and almost cancelled it. I spent a few desperate minutes hoping that a terrible storm would come and make it impossible to start my class. I considered postponing for no reason, pretending to be sick, and just plain hiding out in the hills. Basically I was like every other teacher that I know across the globe on the day that we have to start classes.

It went great! I mean: we all had fun, the kids/young adults participated in the activities that I had planned, and I learned more than I had to offer them. I always love to learn from my students, it's the best part about being a teacher. I spent days agonizing over how to get kids to participate in activities and do written work when I don't speak their language and I had no idea if anyone would come, and if they did, they could have been anywhere between ages 2-32. It is a testament solely to the awesomeness of the kids here at Good Rest that so many of them came. They all had smiles. They all wanted to learn English. They all wanted to teach us Creole and laugh with us, not at us, as we learned together.

CJ was a great helper!

All of these kids could have been playing soccer, sleeping, or doing anything they wanted, yet here they voluntarily sit, trying to learn English. It is so humbling to see their love of learning!

There was a tense moment. One of the kids was penciling something onto the back of the bench in front of him. My teacher-senses were tingling (these are much like spidey-senses, but I can't shoot webs and I am terrified of heights.) In seven years of teaching at California public high schools, I have seen A LOT of horrifying things scribbled onto desks and chairs, but when I checked on him, this sweet kid was drawing a heart and wrote "We love God" in the middle of it. I couldn't help but smile. What a blessing these kids are!

Scenes from a Tuesday

 Here are some pictures from our day today:

The food we have in storage for the month of August.

Carl helping to rescue a homemade kite from the rebar.

C'mon dad, we want a turn!

A love note for Amelia from one of the girls.

Mango tree sap is beautiful!

Random numbers

Numbers for the day:

0: The amount of naps taken by our children! Ahhhh!

1 ½: the amount of hours it took us to get into Port-au-Prince to meet up with our ride. This included a Tap-Tap ride, a 30 minute walk down crowded streets where we were not sure that it was safe for us to be, and a random pickup and ride from a very nice local American and a pastor from Colorado (they saw us standing on a street corner and let us hop in the bed of their pickup!)

2: The number of times it came in handy today that I speak Arabic (??? random)

19 people in the back of one of these!

19: How many people (14 adults and 5 children) that were crammed into our Tap-Tap – a record for us, but certainly not a record for Haitian Tap-Taps!

250: the number of tiles that we helped Marie from Hope Givers purchase to refinish the bathroom on site at Good Rest.

Priceless: spending the evening with American friends who arrived here in Haiti the same week we did and getting to discuss with them how to keep our sanity in a country where buying tile takes up an entire day of our lives! The best part of our night was sharing various things that we brought with us and that we were given in care packages. I can’t explain the joy of sharing Jolly Ranchers in Haiti. It is just amazing!

August Plans

Today is the first day of the month, and we met with people at Good Rest Mission to plan together what we will work on this month:

1. Carl will be tearing down an old outhouse and rebuilding it as a trash incinerator. (I am glad he is doing this job and not me!)

2. We will be rearranging the things that have accumulated on site and moving junk out of the way. This is a huge job! We will also be looking into how to buy trees and to replant to make the campus more beautiful. We are trying to find trees that will work as both shade trees and will provide food.

3. I will be teaching an English class twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays. I will also be having craft time with the little kids every Saturday and during the week as time allows.

4. We will inventory everything in the food storage room (not that much right now) and see how we can build up a food storage so that we do not run out at the end of every month. I checked the storage room last week, and there was one day when they only had enough food for the next day. We need to get the proper paperwork and then we can officially apply to more local organizations for food support. I don't want to rely on that, even though we need it right now. Carl and I are researching ways to start a chicken farm and/or Tilapia farm. Other local organizations have done so. I want to set up systems where Good Rest Mission can become self-reliant.

5. We have to get the kids ready for school. We have 52 kids on site that are going to school on Sept. 4th, and more in the village here that have sponsors through Children's Heritage. The people here like to dress up and look nice, they wear very fancy dresses and shoes to church and to school. We need 25 pairs of girl's shoes and 27 boy' shoes. A HUGE thanks to Temecula Dance Company for helping us to accomplish this, they are sponsoring a shoe fundraiser beginning on August 4th. Shoes here in Haiti are very expensive, it is about $25 for a used pair! We also have to pay school enrollment fees, buy books, and buy material for them to make their school uniforms. This will be a very busy month!

I hope we can accomplish everything that we have planned!