Hannah's First Day of Bible School

Today was our first day of VBS at Pastor Robbie’s church.  Well, actually, we started the day out with our first “team time”.  Basically, after breakfast we all gathered together to do a quick run through of what the day was going to look like, how the past couple of days had gone, etc.   After that we all got in the bus (we drive a school bus everywhere we go here) and headed over to the church.  It’s only like ten minutes away, which is convenient.   Then we started VBS.  We had about a hundred and fifty kids total, and we divided them into three age groups.  Songs were first, then the group teaching.  After that the three age groups split up – some did small group time, some went to crafts, and some played games.  We, the American team members are going to mostly stay with a certain age group, so we move around to the different stations with the same kids all day.  We have five translators, and they stay in each area and don’t rotate.  (The translators are really awesome – it’s so much easier for us to do this VBS with them here to help us.  I mean, we don’t speak Creole at all!  If we didn’t have translators, this week could never work.)  The main difficulty about this VBS is the topic we are talking about – creativity.  The idea of creativity is a foreign thing to them, because the culture here emphasizes conformity and rote memorization and stuff like that, more than being unique or creative.   We knew this would be a hard topic, but our goal is to help the kids understand that they were made to be unique and different.

After VBS we helped to serve the kids food, and then we ate lunch there as well.  They also served us cold juice!  The coldness factor was super awesome.   We were supposed to go to an orphanage after finishing the VBS today, but it ended up taking longer than we expected so our time ran out.  That’s part of Haitian life – being flexible about timing and scheduling.  We went back to the base in the afternoon, and had a debrief time about how the morning had gone.  It was kind of chaotic, but overall we agreed that it went well.  The translators had some suggestions for how to improve things tomorrow, and we had some suggestions for how to improve things tomorrow, and we expect that things will get smoother and easier as the week goes on. 

So that’s what we did.  Easy to describe that – it’s just facts, basically.  But beyond that…  Well, it’s pretty hot here.  We had a super nice breeze the past two days, but today it’s pretty much gone.  Also we haven’t had any power (except one hour two nights ago), which means there haven’t been fans at night at all.  So the temperature is difficult for many of us.  Another thing we discovered this afternoon as we were all talking on the porch is that most of us are introverts.  Combined with the fact that the Haitian kids are absolutely thrilled to get to hang out with white people and therefore want to touch us and sit on our laps and play with our hair all day, it wears some of us out pretty fast.   Those are the two main difficulties I can think of.  There are lots of positives though – the food here is awesome!  The kids are enthusiastic, the church people who are helping us are invested in what they’re doing, the translators are amazing, and the first day of VBS went well.  You can praise God with us that so far our time has been mostly positive, and you can pray that he will continue to give us flexibility and a willingness to do what we came here to do.  You can also pray that the VBS will continue to go well, and that the kids will have a great time and understand the lessons we are trying to teach them.

Thanks!
Hannah