A Calm Day

After weeks of excitement the past few days have been relatively calm. Calm is good. In the background, we are preparing for our medical team's April 7th trip to Les Cayes. Amoce is also busy working in the background down there. He's making arrangements for the next food distribution which should happen by this weekend. We've had several discussions about the best way to manage the distribution since last time it took 3 UN vehicles and some Haitian police in order to assure safety (i.e., not being mobbed). One thing that did help was that the families who were to receive the food had already been identified and had tickets to claim the food. In conjunction with the food distribution, he's also working on distributing the tents. We're leaving a lot of the fine details up to Amoce since he is on the ground and knows the situation. We've talked about whether a different meeting place might be preferable, but there are pros and cons to all of our potential plans. Locally in western Massachusetts there have been several fund-raisers for Mustard Seed as well as other projects. This Friday there will be a dinner and talent show at Northampton High School to benefit Mustard Seed. The local CVS drugstores are collecting donations, Hope Community Church in Amherst hosted a 'souper bowl' dinner, the children at Haydenville Congregational Church are making dark-skinned dolls for the children in Haiti, the students at the AHS-I classroom at Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative are collecting rope and students at Hatfield Elementary have collected medical donations as a community service project. (Someone asked me what the rope was for. It's to use with the tarps we are collecting - to tie them down, guy them to a stake, tie them together, use to hang tarps from to make "walls", etc.) Here at Mustard Seed we are grateful for all of the community support! We are also mourning the passing of Art Kennedy who travelled to Haiti with the College Church teams in 2002 and 2003. We had the pleasure of being on the same team with Art several times. He left a lot of his heart in Haiti, especially with the children he supported down there. We will miss him.