I'm home again in Port au Prince for a few weeks.
The corn is a month taller than when I left, and our biggest plantain plant has put on a beautiful bunch.
Everywhere, people are talking about the heat! It's been dry too! Every night it clouds over, but we have only had one tiny, short, glorious downpour to cool us off a bit since I got here.
Yesterday, we went to the hotel where we had our wedding reception and swam in the pool for a while. The water was extremely green... supposedly they're still working on getting it cleaned out for summer vacation... but it felt glorious and helped my swollen feet shrink down to their normal size.
Otherwise, we're just spending our time having a lot of good long talks and enjoying living daily life together again!
This morning I was translating letters for Compassion International and decided to actually check out their child sponsorship program a bit better. I'm going to leave the link here in case anyone is interested in checking it out.
I have been translating child/sponsor correspondence for them for almost a year, ever since one of our friends, another one of their translators, told me about them. So I've been to their office in Port au Prince to take the translating test and later did an online training. And I've learned a bit about the program just by reading and translating 100s of letters that the Haitian children have written to their sponsors in other countries.
I was actually surprised to see that you only pay $38 per month, plus optional annual birthday/Christmas gifts to sponsor a child. They have a mobile clinic that goes around for checkups, they pay the child's school fees, and also have a really cool "club" as the children call it, that meets every week and does different courses like using computers, some music and arts, etc. There's a lot of Biblical education in the club too. From the letters, it seems like they have a lot of good programs to keep the children accountable at school and help them develop mentally and socially.
The letters are really interesting to read. It's kind of cool to see the relationship that develops between the children and sponsors, even tho the program is so big that I never see the same names twice.
Happy Saturday everyone! Hope you're all staying cool and hydrated!
I once sponsored a child through Compassion. That's neat to hear about the other side of the sponsorship program.
Your post reminded me of the time, 20-25 years ago, when I translated letters written in French to Gospel Tract & Bible Society. This was in the days when people actually wrote on paper, put the paper in an envelope, a stamp on the envelope and then trusted the envelope in the postal system. The majority came from African nations and the quality of French was quite good. But I remember one letter that stumped me. I sat there staring at it and could only make out a few words, the rest seemed like gibberish. I set it aside and carried on with the other letters. When I was done with them I turned back to the mystery letter -…