Happy New Year & Update

We wish, and more importantly will be praying for a new year full of God's protection, presence and blessing in each of your lives.

I arrived in Haiti by myself yesterday and Richard is leaving from Philadelphia today for Brazil for the bi-annual international leaders' conference of Ambassadors in Sport. Our children, Joy and Ricky will arrive in Haiti on Wednesday morning, January 5th.

God did amazing things for us during this trip to see our oldest daughter, Grace, graduate from Biola University in California. The most important thing for her was for us to all be at the opening of her Senior Art Exhibition on December 13th.
We were supposed to fly on American Airlines December 10th so that we could help her set up the show. But, as most of you now know, from December 7-10 there were demonstrations going on in the streets of Port-au-Prince with barricades of burning tires to keep life from going on as usual. This was to protest the fraud in the Nov. 28th presidential elections.

So, American Airlines and other airlines canceled their flights starting Dec. 9th. But the fearless missionaries of Missionary Flights International, decided to try to reschedule their Dec. 9th flight for Friday, December 10th and we were fortunate enough to get on the list for that flight. Of course we still had the challenge of getting to the airport through or around the blockades and we weren't 100% that MFI would be allowed to fly. We had heard that the airport was closed.

After asking some wonderful Haitian friends for help, we came up with this team. They got us safely to the airport (you can read Richard's colorful account of this below). Here's a picture of most of the team and the motorcycle that went ahead of us. It just didn't feel right asking everyone to gather together and smile for a pretty photo of the event. We were smiling at the fact that we had made it to the airport, but we still didn't know what would happen.

Here's the DHL warehouse where we waited for several hours:

Here's us on the floor of one section of the airport. We waited in a few different places and finally got on the plane at 3:30 pm.


We were so grateful to get on the MFI flight! And grateful for the volunteers and missionaries who are willing to do stuff like this!