Saturday, September 10, 2011

Vocational Training Centre and a New Church in Haiti

After a summer filled with many hours of travel by mini-van with the family, I'm stepping onto an airplane once again to fly to Haiti.  This will be a return trip to serve Haiti Arise, this time to provide a new master plan along with new building and infrastructure (water, sanitation, power) design for their existing vocational training centre which sustained some severe damage during the earthquake of 2010.

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The bonus to this trip is that our team will also be there to provide a new design for a large church in the same city that was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.  The facilities for Heart to Heart Children's Home were badly damaged, some beyond repair and they have rebuilt or repaired most of it.  But their large church/conference/training centre is a large, two storey structure that took years to build and minutes to render useless by the powerful quake.

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It will be a little odd to return to the same location in Haiti without Caitlin with me.  I had an amazing time travelling with her (see her blog entry below this one) and know that it was a good way for her what I do on project trips and see the work of eMi first hand.  It also did wonders in expanding the borders of her world beyond what she knows in Canada.

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We will once again visit the construction site for the new school that El Shaddai Baptist Church is building in Bon Repos.  This construction has received attention by Haitian building professionals and has been visited by Haiti's Ministry of Buildings and Works.  They have even declared it to be an example of good construction practice for the future of Haiti.  I'm so proud of the work of that team!

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Please keep us in prayer as we travel in the air and on the ground and also remember my family and the families of each of our eleven team members as we are away for this project.

You can visit the following links to see the two projects:

http://www.emicanada.org/projects/projectprofile_10024.shtm

http://emicanada.org/projects/projectprofile_10026.shtm