Note from Knox Singleton
April 2009
One of my father’s favorite hymns was “Come Thou Fount,” which I can still sing from memory. It never fails to bring back fond memories of my father working away, building something and often my helping him as his unskilled “gofer”. That memory was made fresh again as I returned from my recent trip to Pignon, Haiti, and saw the tremendous progress being made in living the Gospel through service to our brothers and sisters there.
There is a line in the hymn which goes “here I raise my Ebenezer; here by thy great help I’ve come” and it seems so appropriate to pause and give praise to our Lord for all of the progress that we are seeing in Haiti. An “Ebenezer” (for those of you who like me may not know the word) is a stone that was set up by Samuel to mark the progress that the Lord had given to the people of Israel to explicitly acknowledge that He was the source of that progress. I think all of us, who were in Pignon recently, whether working in the hospital, on well repair, with the town water project, the Bouqueronne School, the outpatient clinic building, school gardens or one of the other CCH projects, would say we need to pause and mark the blessing that the Lord has given to our efforts. We need to sing songs of loudest praise for what He is doing.
Allow me to touch on some of the things which our team did while in Pignon:
We participated in a “pig giveaway”. Our program to return the Haitian pig into active cultivation by peasants in the Pignon area has gotten off to a good start. Pigs are the “savings account” for poor families and are one of the ways that they survive the dry season when food is hard to grow and children often go hungry. Pregnant pigs are given to a group of approximately 10 peasant families and when the first litter of piglets arrives, each family gets a pig to raise and start a small business raising and selling pigs in the local market.
We are working to complete a school in a rural area called Bouqueronne and have named the school for the community in which it sits. The school serves about 200 children, most of whom did not attend any school before our school opened last fall. The nearest school used to be several miles away. CCH also drilled a well to give the school and local community clean water. Drinking from polluted river water can cause up to 20% of children to be out of school at any one time with waterborne diseases. Children in the Bouqueronne School receive a nutritious meal each day, the only food many of the children receive all day.
Part of the CCH team worked to install electrical wiring and conduit in the new outpatient clinic which is being built by CCH. The clinic is an addition to the CBP Hospital in Pignon and will serve a dual purpose. It will house medical clinics, including a growing HIV/AIDS clinic, a pharmacy, medical records and other outpatient services. It will also serve as a dormitory for visiting medical teams, who come to work at the hospital and treat patients in the clinics. Many of the young men in the town work along side CCH volunteers to complete the clinic building and we are hopeful that if resources become available that we can bring the new building into service before the end of the year. There is still considerable work to be done and we are trusting God to provide the funds to complete the work.
The first three CCH school gardens are “growing” nicely at the CBP schools; Sonshine School, Meredith School and Rocky Mountain. The purpose of school gardens is three fold: first, the food grown in the gardens goes to feed the children attending the school each day. Most children in the rural areas of Pignon eat once every two or three days not counting the food they receive in school (if they are one of the lucky 60% of children who get to attend school). Second, the excess food is sent home with the children to feed their families; and perhaps most important, the children and their families are taught how to use the modern farming techniques demonstrated in the schools to increase their own ability to grow food for their families. Simple techniques, like drip irrigation if implemented by a peasant family, can double or triple the amount of food grown during the dry season when many children and adults go for days with nothing to eat.
Members of the CCH team met with the Pignon Water Committee to discuss the progress on repairing and expanding the water system serving the town of Pignon. Through funding provided by CCH and participating Rotary Clubs in the US, repairs are being made to the existing pipes and new pumps are being installed to increase the amount of water being pumped into the system. Working with the local community, a plan is being implemented to provide water to as many as 200 homes as well as 13 public water outlets and to establish a water authority to maintain and manage the water system. Community organization is an important part of helping the local community learn to work together to maintain vital local services such as the water system or schools.
The team visited the site of a new church being built with the assistance of CCH and an orphanage where young babies who are malnourished are being nursed back to health. Many churches in Haiti provide both schools and feeding programs for their children and often are the only source of education or food that desperately poor children receive.
Two teams of physicians, nurses and other health workers worked in the hospital. It takes hours by terrible roads to get to the nearest hospital and the CBP hospital cares for the sick and injured in large numbers each day. CCH team members fix equipment, train hospital staff in critical skills, perform surgery, set fractures and in general seek to develop the Haitian staff’s ability to care for the poor who come to the hospital, often because they have no other alternative source of lifesaving healthcare.
I hope these examples show what a difference your efforts are making through the partnership between our local Haitian churches, Community Coalition for Haiti and Comite Bienfaisance de Pignon. Working together with the leading of the Lord, it is clear that He is blessing our efforts and multiplying our seeds into mighty harvests in Haiti. All of our work is done in the name of Jesus Christ and we seek to magnify His name in all our efforts. Certainly, nothing would be accomplished without His blessing and His guidance.
Thank you for your faithful support of CCH and our efforts to reach and serve the poor in the name of Jesus. As that old hymn says, we have raised an Ebenezer of what God has done and we give Him thanks for his Spirit having been present during our recent trips. “Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise!!”
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