All Dough Flies in Haiti

Although the team left yesterday, I've stayed on to concentrate on bread and the wonderful bread oven that we began to use this week at Grace Village.  It is hard to find words adequate to describe this experience. Serving here has been like nothing I have ever done. At the end of the day it seems to me that all our work and perhaps our whole life comes down to relationship.

First our relationship to God. The cross has two directions and the first I think is vertical. Perhaps we can think of it as up toward heaven or perhaps we think of it as that which is so fully grounded. God can. Time and time this week, things worked out that could not have if only facts were considered. Things worked out that should not have. We arrived at the oven to bake for the first time and it had not been lit. A team member used a hair dryer as a bellows and in 90 minutes the oven was 400F. Another day we made 80 pizzas with the children at Grace Village, enough communion bread for 300, and bread  to share with the other team and the long term missionaries; then left to go move elders into better, more stable housing. Yes, one day. We worked delivering water at two sites one day and at the second site the line was so long it seemed no one of us thought there could be enough water for everyone. There was enough. Time and time again it seemed surely we would run out or just get too tired. Time and time again God showed up in the form of a song or a smile or a hug.

It is all about relationship and our meeting the desperate poverty of "things" in Haiti with enough openness to see the vast "richness" of spirit and joy. It's all about relationship and digging in with people you didn't know who become friends and who become a family in an extraordinarily
short time. It's about relationship to the land of Haiti by seeing it's beauty through the veil of poverty. The land is beautiful and I wonder if Haiti is more broken than my own country or just broken differently?

I am a baker. My hands have developed a relationship with the process of coaxing food from grain, water, salt and yeast. My familiarity with bread was changed through the Haitian climate and the ingredients and I am still learning.  There is a process in baking called a pre-ferment; a way to start a dough early and get it's flavor to be deep and rich. One such ferment is called a poolish and you can speed it up and create a "flying poolish"  (no kidding i'm not making this up)...but I found that with Haiti's heat and humidity, all of dough I've made have been "flying" :).  And so we start again developing a  relationship with what we thought we knew so well. We do not come to Haiti with answers.  We come to serve and to learn.

Strangely we come to Haiti for our own healing too or perhaps that just happens when we allow ourselves to be open and transparent. We find that when we strip away the ball games and malls and all our petty insecurities there is a Love that really does transcend all we can imagine.

God bless,
Ross