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Home | News > Mission Possible - Haiti 2011

Mission Possible - Haiti 2011

03/16/2011
By Bruce Nelson

The Northern Illinois Conference has one more mission team working for the people of Haiti.  Rev. Christina Vosteen, NIC Disaster Response Coordinator has returned to Haiti with 6 missioners to help rebuild  a school in the Banique area of Haiti through our worldwide network of UMVIM. United Methodist Volunteers in Mission.

Our team has worked together for the last six months to prepare for a one week time of service and work rebuilding walls for a collapsed school and leading children’s programs for those youngsters in the community where we will live and work for our time in mission.

Our trip began on March 16 as we all met in the Miami airport.   Boarding our flight to Porte au Prince, Haiti, we left our comfort zone, our electronic umbilical cords of cell phones, our computers and our instant communication via face book.   We left our comfortable homes, our stocked pantries and refrigerators, our clean drinking water and our plush life style for a week to join the people of Haiti in the difficult working and living conditions they experience as everyday life. We disembarked from our aircraft in Porte au Prince and looked into the smiling faces of God’s precious ones who have lived this year without adequate shelter, enough food, clothing or a means to earn a living.   Today we traveled to our work site and began our projects.

Why did we all come on this mission trip?  It is different for each and every person on our team.  For me, it is to reach out in Christian love, to offer myself for a week to make a small, ever so small contribution from my blessed life I live in the Northern Illinois Conference.  I go to work with my hands and to try to make a difference for someone else because the Lord Jesus went on a “mission trip to the cross” to help (save) me many years ago.

What the physical and spiritual results of this time in mission will be, I do not know for sure.  What I can tell you is that God had already been working on and in me as I prepared for this mission trip.  I know that my eyes have been opened to see His people in need and the devastation from the earth quake 14 months ago. My heart aches for the people of Haiti and their daily life as the poorest country in our hemisphere. Yet my mind is in anguish over how slow the progress seems to move for a people who need so much. I know my soul will be filled to overflowing as I live and work beside my Haitian Brothers and Sister who persevere in their daily strife with the love and compassion of a faithful people while praising and thanking God with their very being.  Oh, to have the faith the size of a mustard seed as the Haitian people do.

Will you join me on this mission trip this next week by praying for our group in the coming week?  Uplift our mission project, our safety, our health and most importantly, the people of Haiti and their journey. 

This mission team will return home on the 24th of March.  Each of us will have experienced the Love of Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives through the work we do and from the people we came to serve.  Many of us will be available to interpret our brief experience to you and your church after we collect our pictures and reflect on our personal experience of being an instrument of Christ’s love. 

Bruce Nelson Conference Director, Outdoor and Retreat Ministries