Teenagers! Surprise!

God is my good, generous, and giving Father! I received an incredible gift from Him this week.

I discovered shortly after arriving in Haiti that within walking distance of our orphanage is a Christian school compound called Quisqueya. (The church that Jack and Marcia attend, Port au Prince Fellowship, meets at the chapel on this compound.) It is a large school, K-12, that serves missionary families and the Haitian bourgeois in the Port au Prince area. After school sports like soccer and volley ball are offered for students and staff so I put on my running shoes a couple of times per week and head over for some competition and endorphins. Through these expeditions I’ve met a handful of other young people (teachers at Quisqueya) who, like myself, heard the call to drop their lives in the states to get to know God better and love people in Haiti. The friendships I’m making here are sharpening, encouraging, and are good, plain fun!

But it gets even better than that! Each high school class at Quisqueya volunteers monthly at an orphanage in the area. Last month Three Angels received a phone call asking could we use some help with our children? Mais oui! But of course! So we were assigned a class and it was arranged for them to come the first Thursday of each month. This week was our first encounter with our assigned class. Thirty-two teens and one leader descended upon us and I found myself welcoming more than a dozen familiar faces- teens I’d played sports with or seen on campus. And they recognized me (You’re the girl with the pig-tails! I’ve seen you running on Delmas… or, Hey, you played soccer with us!) What energizing feelings of love and acceptance! I was drinking liquid happiness the whole day.

But it gets even better than THAT. These teens are the tenth grade class. DREW IS IN TENTH GRADE. What a joy, what an unexpected, undeserved little jewel of a gift from God. My heart was bursting with joy the whole day, thinking thoughts as, that guy is like a Haitian Drew and, that kid would be my sister’s best friend! Thank You, Jesus, for these surrogate brothers and sisters throughout this year of being an ocean away from my own! And they are the cream of the crop- every teacher friend of mine at Quisqueya drips with praise for this class.

The ratio of teens to orphans is something like 1.13 to 1 so they will be doing a lot of interacting with our kids. Marcia elected to have each teen paired with a child- some children have two teens. The pairs are permanent for the year so each orphan will get to bond with their teen. This month the teens played group games with the kids, ate lunch with them, went crazy with stickers and face paint and a giant parachute, and decorated cupcakes. Next month they plan on doing learning and activity stations. The kids loved the attention and affection. I loved the teens.