How It All Started

“It was a trip of firsts, so many wonderful firsts. The smell of strong black coffee brewing in a sock, sweet with sugar swirling around in a tin cup. Women who swept the red dirt making it clean, the first time I saw fabric hanging in the place of an absent door blowing in the wind.  The first time I knew poverty wasn’t just about being poor, the first time I saw people walk all night through the mountains for medical care, care that might only be worm meds, antacids and something for the pounding in their head from hunger and dehydration. The first time I saw how so little can do so very much, the first time I saw people fight for a bowl of rice and beans.  It would be the first time I would leave my heart in a place I didn’t understand. 

When it was over, there would be one less child in this world who died in our care, life had some how gotten bigger and smaller at the same time, black and white pat answers turned gray and my circle of friends got smaller.  Not intentionally, not instantly, stuff changed, what was important changed.

No, I changed.”

And that is how it all started...

One short-term mission trip to Haiti and I was on a mission to do something about what I had seen.  I wasn’t one of those people who come home, sell everything and get on a plane the next week.  It took several years for me to figure out what would work. I hated the idea of a feeding program or orphanage; they only seemed like a bandage being applied to a hemorrhage. I was looking for long-term solutions.  

All of that fell into place when we met the missionary woman in the mini skirt and the hippie who should have been driving a VW van. My idea of shipping over one treadle sewing machine at a time to them quickly turned into over forty being donated to us. Next there was a meeting with the hippie and his wife, lots of prayer, a few tears and finally after seven years of trips we would make Haiti our home. Not with the idea of a business mind you, it was just going to be a sewing program teaching a hand full of ladies a trade to find a jobs with the intention of creating ways for them to keep their children fed, in school and with a place to live.

It all seemed logical that women needed to be empowered. They didn’t need pity they needed jobs, jobs and the courage to believe for a better life. Well, as the saying goes in Haiti, it is mountain after mountain. We had our first graduation and ladies with no place to work. Our sewing school would now grow in to what is Haitian Creations.

All these years later, I am still driven by the boy who died on the boat, the ladies who had the courage to change and this one thing the hippie said to me. He said, “What if you are the one the Lord has called to push through and you don’t do it?”