Port au Prince

Port au Prince
"He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure." Psalm 40:2

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Crazy Meetings and Wide Open Doors

So after the earthquake couple months ago we received an email from a former Park Street Church International Student who works for the government of Haiti inviting us to come and help in the recovery of Haiti.

He set us up with a meeting yesterday that was way over our pay grade. Aby Brun is a member of the reconstruction commission that will recommend the plans for how to rebuild Haiti and how to spend the $5.3 billion that has been pledged by the international community. We expected a brief meeting with this busy man but ended up having a two hour conversation, with him briefing us on all that has been discussed and planned as well as the steps that are taking place in taking care of the internally displaced refugees. He is a visionary designer and city planner and this conversation gave us real hope for the future of Haiti.

We felt a little overwhelmed after he spent an hour sharing the grand master plan of rebuilding Haiti and then finally turned to us and asked us "How would you like to participate?" Well our architect Jason, answered with much more bravado than any of us were feeling at that point. The funny part was when in our conversation he had to take a call from the Ambassador from Israel, and when he told the Ambassador he would talk about his offer with the president of Haiti who he was meeting the next morning.

While the scale of what we want to do long term is much smaller it was helpful to really see the big picture and it was incredibly helpful to have this man, offer friendship in this process for us. He has been inundated with requests from people wanting a piece of him for business reasons and I think he spent time with us because right from the get go, we were simply a church wanting to help.

He has offered to set up a meeting with the Haitian envoy to the UN. We have no idea what that will mean.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks so much for your updates and for the video yesterday. Our thoughts and prayers are with you in the face of such overwhelming needs.

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  2. Great to hear your stories first hand and know how to pray for you all! Sounds like this guy could sense you were "ambassadors" also... God's grace and strength to you!

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