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 HAITI ENDEAVOR We believe every disciple must mature into serving others.
Jesus spent time teaching his disciples to learn to live as God intended.THEN... Jesus sent his disciples out to live what they learned through serving the church (other believers) and through serving the world (the poor, the afflicted, the abused, the hurt, the lonely, the forgotten, the outsiders).
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
We have undertaken four initiatives to improve the lives of our Haitian family.
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1) On The Ground
We send a "servant team"- comprised of students and adults - to Haiti each year. We partner with St. Joseph's Home for Boys outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti through the organization Hearts with Haiti. Our journey includes service at the Mother Teresa Children's Hospital, the Sisters of Mercy Home for the Destitute and Dying, and the Wings of Hope home for physically and mentally challenged children, among other activities.
NEXT TRIP: 12-18JUNE 2011
Trip Leader: Rob Patterson
Open to rising grades 11 and 12, college, and adults.
Archives:
2010 Haiti Team
2009 Restavek Trip
2008 Garber Haiti Team
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2) In The Hand
Each year our Student Ministries launches a micro-finance project to raise funds to provide micro-loans to Haitians through the Fonkoze MicroFinance Organization in Haiti (more below). In 2008, our students raised over $1000.00 through their own self-designed entrepreneurships.
For more about Fonkoze and how micro-finance works, click logo or visit www.fonkoze.org
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3) In The Water
In Fall 2008 Garber UMC began an annual project to raise funds to deliver BioSand Water Filters to Haiti (more below). We have delivered over 200 so far - Yay God! Our annual goal is for each family at Garber UMC to provide one BioSand filter. |
4) In Our Arms
Our high school students have adopted Steve, who lives at Wings of Hope, and provide him monthly support. You'll get to meet Steve when you go with us!
Meet Steve [click picture]
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 SHN Making a Difference in Haiti
We also support Haiti through involvement with Stop Hunger Now. In 2008, our church packed over 35,000 meals to go overseas. Some of those meals went to Haiti and the Blanchard School where we do school projects during our "on the ground" trip.
Video courtesy of United Methodist Communications
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 I asked him what his hopes for Haiti were.
“I don’t have any that are based on analysis or numbers or hardheaded interpretation of the best available data,” he said. “But I have hopes for Haiti.”
This passage expresses our Haiti Team’s feelings. We aren’t sure what the results will be from our endeavor into Haiti, but we have hope. We take this irrational hope with us… and we’ll act boldly.
The title Mountains Beyond Mountains comes from a Haitian proverb and is a metaphor for life’s challenges. Once you have scaled one mountain, you reach a place where you can see that there are always more mountains farther away: you will never stop climbing, never be finished.
In the case of Paul Farmer, whose visionary spirit is the subject of this book, his mountain is the struggle to provide medical help to all desperately poor people. In fact, the man Tracy Kidder writes about in this nonfiction account is something of a secular saint, for Paul Farmer really only comes alive when he is tending to the illnesses of people the rest of the world has forgotten.
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