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| The beautiful Bay of Petit Goave, southern Haiti |
Last month I traveled to southern Haiti to facilitate a three-day vision seminar in the large town of Petit Goave, three hours west of Port-au-Prince. Church of the Resurrection, a Methodist church in Kansas City, has committed to support the expansion of the Community Health Evangelism (CHE) tools into this part of the country. We are excited to be asked to accompany them!
Church of the Resurrection contacted the League of Pastors of Petit Goave to gauge their interest in learning about the CHE tools. The league is composed of several pastoral associations. In all, 58 pastors and lay leaders came to the seminar, representing 24 different churches and several denominations!
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| In our trainings we like to have
everyone sit in a circle -- this was impossible with such a large group. |
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| Improvisation: the back wall was too hard to write on, since you had to step up onto dirt to reach it. So someone rigged this easel-on-folding-chair-supported-by-cinder-block system. It worked! Here we were talking about the concept of Shalom: harmony with God, our neighbor, ourselves, and the environment. |
It was a beautiful location -- we met outside under the shade of some large trees. Here we are on a break with the Bay of Petit Goave in the background.
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| The man on the right is Lucson, one of our volunteer trainers. He and I co-facilitated the seminar. |
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| Here I am facilitating a lesson. |
One of the aspects of our ministry in Haiti that I really appreciate is the even mix of men and women among our volunteer trainers, committee members, and community health evangelists. However, we only had one woman participant on the first day of this vision seminar!
Several spiritual lessons were done each day: The Great Commission and the Great Commandment, What is Good Health?, How God Sees People and Community, and The Importance of the Kingdom of God for Jesus. The pastors particularly remarked that they loved our method of Bible study: participatory and thorough. They were very appreciative of the questioning, contextual way we approached key verses to get a fuller conception of what is meant and what it means for us personally: Who wrote the verses? Who were they writing to? What do the surrounding verses talk about? What happened before and after?
We are already planning a Training of Trainers for the first week of July. This week-long seminar will train volunteer trainers from different churches so that they can begin to implement CHE in their communities.
A special thanks to Kathy Naugle, from the Church of the Resurrection, who took all of the beautiful photos in this post. I love this last one with a little girl playing with a puppy.
