The rumors yesterday were that today was to be a "hot" day, meaning potential riots and roadblocks with the announcement of the election results that were to be today.
So far - everything is calm and traffic is still flowing smoothly.  However, the last that I heard, the announcement of the election results still have not been made either.

Please pray for this process!  Also, please keep praying for Haiti's new leader! And pray for all of the people here!  We are ALL exhausted from all the added stress and turmoil of our country! Seriously, I do not know of one person that is not feeling added stress from LIFE right now.  Cholera, political unrest, this following an already tumultuous earthquake!  Whew....

Please also pray for our mission family.  We were scheduled to go on our Annual Mission Retreat a couple of weeks ago, but then with the political unrest, we were not able to leave as planned.  Many of us were really looking forward to a time away from the "fish-bowl" that we live in and enjoying some R&R!  So, it's a bit difficult to just keep going and working and giving....without that time away that we had been hoping for.
My kids are even mentioning how much they need a "vacation"!  I have never heard that from their mouths before!  :)

Even though we will not be able to get away as a group due to our work schedules, please pray that everyone will be able to at least get away on their own.  We had 4 of our missionaries head to the D.R. over the weekend - from their blogs, it looks like it was a wonderful time! Praise the Lord!

This morning was a hard morning for all of us as we had to say "Good-bye" to Grandma Joyce.  Good-byes are terrible things!

But, I just received a blessing from the gentleman that helps in our yard . I had asked him over the weekend if he thought he could fix or find someone to fix a couple of pairs of our shoes.  Jake's soles were coming unglued from his tennis shoes and the black leather was peeling off of Alanna's school shoes.  My friend happily brought the shoes back to me this morning; and he refused to accept any payment for them.  He said, "You do so much for me, this is one small way that I can do something for you."  He was so happy to be able to do this for us ---that it just really blessed me!  Thank you Lord for the blessing of friends!

We praise the Lord for good health!  We are all feeling better and grandma didn't catch the virus that we had so we were all healthy enough to go on a hike up the mountain after school on Friday afternoon.  We hiked up to see the Garden/Terrace project that Dave Graffenberger has developed with the local community.

What a lot of work has been done!  The terraces help to prevent erosion and obviously the tons of plants growing will be a blessing to many!  We thank the Lord for this work!

We enjoyed the hike with Grandma as well as Jonathon Folkeringa, former Haiti MK who is with us through the month of December! :)

As if life hasn't been exciting enough lately, our family has been sharing a mysterious illness with each other.  We have had a few days of fever followed by a rash that lasts several days, it sounds like Roseola.  Brianna is getting over it now.  Jake is the only one left. Hopefully he is immune to it!

Hopefully Grandma Joyce is immune to it too!  She arrived Friday - to a sick son and sick grandkids!   So, we were not able to hike up the mountain Saturday as planned - but we did have a fun game of Hide-n-Seek in the yard.  She also enjoyed going to a baptism on Saturday.  Brett drove our long-box 2 ton truck full of people from their church to another church that has a baptistery. Joyce really loved hearing our Haitian brothers and sisters singing on the trip to and from the baptism service in the back of the truck despite the extremely dusty roads!

                                                                Singing in the back of the truck on the way to the Baptism.

Pastor Josef's church meets upstairs

(Please join them in prayer for a new location)

For those of you interested and asking about the Cowman School roofing project (#407861), we have not had much advancement since I wrote last.  We are still just over halfway funded.
When hurricane Tomas passed by, I had another ceiling tile fall, along with LOTS of water into my classroom. Thankfully I already knew that I had a leak there; so I had moved everything away from that spot!  The guys have tried to patch...but its pretty awful up there!  Its kind of like the roads - more bad than good!  :)

Thanks for your interest, prayers and support!