This is a blog that will be following all fourteen people on this mission team's journey as we are preparing and going to Mission of Hope, Haiti during March Break.
So let me just start off with a little bit of history (no pun intended) on how this trip came to be. It actually all started in History class one day back in September. I was the new kid at our school and my teacher, hearing that I had come from living in Haiti for 3 years, asked me to do a presentation about my life in Haiti for my class. At the end of that presentation Mr.K first asked me if I could look into sponsoring a child at the Mission of Hope school. Then he asked me if I could try to start to organize a mission trip down to Haiti for March Break.
After that I worked with Kathryn and Jill, and we started to plan the mission trip. Mr.K set it all up with the school board, and got all the flights and stuff. Then once we knew for sure that the trip was an actual possibility the team had to be picked. Our history class got first dibs because that was the class that was first introduced to the idea of going to Haiti on a mission trip. After the applications from our class were handed in (10 in total) the rest of the grade was allowed to apply for the possibility of being accepted. 3 more people were accepted out of many. So then we had our team of thirteen grade tens, and two chaperones.
Me, Kathryn, and Jill had to organize some meetings just so all of the students and their parents would know about Mission of Hope, and Haiti in general. Those meetings were small compared to what we were about to organize. Mr.K asked us to organize, plan, and pull off an orientation retreat. It was going to be over Christmas Break from 2:00 pm on the Monday, to 8:00 pm on the Tuesday. This took us a very long time to plan, and frankly we weren't exactly sure how it would go, but we got ready for it the best we could. It ended up going great! We played some games, did an introduction to Haiti, some worship, some creole lessons, some devotions, some group discussions, some testimony sharing, some rules, and we even woke everyone up with a blow horn.
So that is how we got to where we are, almost one month from our departure date. I am so excited and can't wait until we go.
-Teagan van der Mark
