We're Here!

We arrived in Haiti yesterday afternoon. Some people from the community picked us up in a bus owned by the church and brought us to Bayonnais along with 4 missionaries from the communities sister church in North Carolina.

The drive through the countryside offered a lot of time to take in Haiti. It was kind of surreal driving through slums, jungle, deforested dry farm land, fertile rice patties, roadside markets, and ocean coast all in the same drive.


The people of the community embraced us whole heartedly when we came in last night. We spent the evening taking with everyone and amusing and being amused by the children. I feel like they all know all of our names already and I'm struggling with the three I can remember. I got to play games with the kids last night, there was one like jacks that the kinds played with rocks that I'm terrible at, but I'll keep practicing :)

This morning we went to church with the community, it was great. I couldn't understand a word of the singing, but I was glad to worship the our Creator with them. One of the American
missionaries preached in English, which was translated in Creole by the pastor here. Kevin spoke on Matthew 25 and giving God all we have, a great way to start the week!

Today we are hiking out to the pipeline to do our first assessment of repairs being done already, I'm excited to finally see the site I've spent a semester designing for!

I got an update from my mom this morning to, Alex and Jake both did great at Wausau, winning the first and third events respectively!! Great job guys, I'm so proud of you!

Happy Birthday Nickolas John!!!

Before you get a status update, there is a matter of utmost importance, I must wish young Nickolas Schieber a happy 12th Birthday!!!! I will sadly be out of the country and unable to celebrate with you, but I hope its great!

We made it through the night sleeping on the benches of the foodcourt near the terminal. Most of us are still pretty tired, but at least we all got a little sleep. Our plane leaves in about an hour and then we should be in Port-au-Prince about 12:00 eastern time and should be to the village about 4ish.

Hopefully I'll get to connect with you some time tomorrow. As we drove down to O'Hare last night, God brought me to Philppians through a Francis Chan Podcast, reading Paul's words to his supporters, I am reminded how thanksful I am to have the love, support, and prayers of so many people. Thank you all so much, I could not do this without you!!

PS Alex and Jake, I don't know how your games went this morning, but keep playing hard and have fun today!! AO1

A New Adventure Already

Good Morning (?) from Fort Lauderdale,

We arrived at the Fort Lauderdale airport about an hour ago. Our flight to Port-au-Prince doesn't leave until tomorrow morning at 9, so the plan was to grab a hotel room for the night and come back in the morning, but you know plans change :) We found out as we arrived in Florida that the hotel we were planning to stay at actually doesn't have a shuttle to and from the airport like we thought and no hotels under $200 a night (like 5 hours for us) offer shuttles after midnight, so in tribute to Tom Hanks we will be spending the night in the terminal (we are toying with the idea of also adopting really bad accents as well). Looks like card games and light sleep for us tonight, but it should be fun!

Off to Haiti

Hey Everyone,

I've only got a couple minutes before I leave, but I just wanted to post the link to our teams travel blog. I will try to update here too, but we will post the travel blog everyday as well.

Please pray for our team, for safety and guidnace in our travels.

Thanks!

http://www.ewbuw.org/taxonomy/term/15

Playdown Update

Al's team made it through playdowns, so on to Nationals as Team Minnesoata 2 :)

Minnesota Playdowns

Good Morning from Playdowns!

This weekend I'm in Minnesota watching Alex's team playoff for a chance to represent MN at the Junior Curling National Championship. She had her first game last night, which they won, and has another game tonight at 7. I'll try to keep updating so you can follow, but updates will also be here

In other news, mom and I wanted to go to church this morning, so we did some research last night and found a church in the area we thought looked solid, got up early this morning and set out for the 9AM service. We get to the parking lot of this big church and there are like 5 other cars in the lot, bad sign we're thinking what could this possibly be like if only 5 people show up for service? Turns out, the early service was cancelled becuase of the holidays, so now were off to attempt the 10:30 service :)

Check back tonight for results on Al's late game!

Exam Week.....

With the arrival of exam week, I have banned myself from blogging so that I don't give myself an excuse to not study, but it's late and my brain is pretty much fried and I decided I'm allowed to write something short, just a little update.

I've been involved with a student org called Engineers Without Borders since spring semester of my freshmen year. EWB is an organization that brings engineering professionals and students together to offer free engineering services to underprivileged communities worldwide. At the UW we have teams working in El Salvador, Rwanda, Kenya, Haiti, and the US. I have mostly been involved with the Haiti team, but because of curling and rowing and summer stuff I have only done design work with the team, I've never gotten to be on the travel team, but Monday night I finally got official travel dates for our Engineers Without Borders winter trip which I will be able to go on this year!!!

Our team is leaving from Madison on January 6th, flying through Miami to Port-au-Prince, Haiti and then will drive to Bayonnais, the community which we work with. While we're there we will do a lot of surveying and other assessment work for a pipe bridge to be built over a river during the spring break trip. We have a lot of the bridge designed already, but need a little more information before we will be ready to implement the project. We will also be working with the people of the community and even running a health info session with some of our members who speak the language and giving out some basics like soap, tooth brushes and toothpaste. Then we'll return to Madison January 14th, just in time to chill a little before classes start the 19th.

I'm so excited to finally get to travel and thought I'd share that with you all :)