We are exactly one month away from our highly anticipated trip to the U.S.A. for the first time as a family of six! We are so excited to be reunited with loved ones and experience new things as a family. The plan is for Eric to be with us for a few weeks and then return to work in Haiti until at least mid May. He will then join our family for our summer furlough and fundraising. Our need and commitment is to return to Haiti sometime around the end of August or early September. We have been working through planning an intensely packed travel schedule that we believe will allow us to connect with both current and hopefully new supporting friends, family, and churches. Our goal is to come back to Haiti fully funded with a support system that will enable us to continue full time ministry in Haiti. Our home is still in Haiti.
Our house (and everything in it), pets, and the Haitians that live and work with us will stay behind and take care of everything while we are away. KOFAEL women’s microloan ministry will continue under the leadership of our friends and Haitian co-founders. We will continue regular meetings with them through phone and computer. Eric will be with us over Spring Break but is returning to Haiti to help wrap up the school year admin duties at El Shaddai Learning Center, preach at a couple of churches, teach pastors and English classes and finish up some discipleship responsibilities. Then he will make sure everything else at home is ready to leave for the remainder of the summer months. The students and teachers at El Shaddai will be out of school for the summer months and will resume in September. English classes and discipleship ministries will resume after the summer months.
There are some needs we will have when we first arrive in Texas and throughout our summer travels. We are looking for friends and family who can help us out with any of the following:
Immediate needs upon arrival in Texas:
- Large vehicle that can seat at least our family of six with seat belts. We would need use of the vehicle March 18th-April 8th(or at least some of that time). We will arrive in Austin and will be traveling no farther than the Dallas area between these dates. The vehicle would need to come from the Austin-San Antonio area.
- U.S. phones and service plan. If you have an old smart phone (unlocked iphone would be best so we could later use it in Haiti as well) you are not using or have room on your current plan just to add us through the summer this would be very helpful.
- Clothes and shoes for each member of our family. We will not be bringing much with us from Haiti. The clothes and shoes we arrived with or have acquired are mostly completely worn out or no longer fit our children. If anyone has hand-me-down children’s clothes and shoes or wants to take us shopping or gift us clothing store gift cards that would be awesome!
- *Girl’s clothes sizes junior 12-14. Girl’s shoes size 6.
- *Boy’s clothes sizes 6/7, 7/8, and 8/10. Boy’s shoes sizes (Need to wait on this one; they keep growing so this could change in the next month.)
- Haiti ministry video. We need help from someone who has the computer software and know how to take our Haiti video recordings and pictures and create (alongside Eric) a well done ministry video that we can present at churches during our summer travels. This needs to be accomplished between March 20th-April 1st by someone living in the Austin-San Antonio region. San Marcos or New Braunfels would be preferable since that is where we will be staying.
Other big needs:
- Yearly rent on Haiti house due. The rent for our house in Haiti has to be paid on a yearly basis. Rent for our house from May 2014-May 2015 is $8,000. We need to pay for this as well as 3 months of bills and supplies to keep the house running before Eric comes back to the states in May. We are praying for provision to help meet this upcoming financial need. The monthly amount for this payment is in our budget in order to save for this payment each year. However, our current monthly support is only at 17% of meeting our total budget making paying this in full very difficult.
- Large vehicle (needs to seat 6-8 with plenty of room for luggage) to rent or borrow for our long ministry road trip. We will begin and conclude (if needed to return vehicle) our road trip in Illinois. If you are in central Illinois area and happen to have such a vehicle that would be available for us to use May 21st-second week in July or you have connections with a company that rents vehicles that could give us a super deal, this would bless us tremendously.
- Place for our family to stay near Venice, Florida May 22-31st.
- Please pray for our upcoming travels and transitions. We have some other prayer request regarding transitioning our family back to the states and will share our thoughts on that soon. We are committing in the next month to pray and do our best to prepare our kids for what is to come. Please pray for us during this time of planning and preparing to the best of our ability. We look forward to seeing many of you very soon!