Hello everyone!

First of all i want to thank everyone for their prayers and support! You guys are the best. And secondly, for those of you who heard about the rooster that gets you up at 4, i have not heard it once.
That was Lauren. This is Helen Marie. She's awesome. Yes, we can feel your prayers. Rooster no big deal, but we do hear dogs. The Guest House lets them loose at 10 to protect us - I think there are 2.
Lauren again. (continuation of Helen Marie's thought)...although by the sounds of it there may be more. I busted out the ear plugs last night. The dogs are annoying yes, but i hate to think what would happen to us if they weren't here.

Everyone is healthy although i noticed a lot of grunts and groans this morning when we pulled ourselves out of bed. As far as i know, everyones bodily functions are occuring normally.... :-)

A little about the area... Petion-ville (I have heard) is the upper end of many cities surrounding Port-au-Prince. It is made up of mostly the elite (can they be called that?). The cleanliness of the streets is much better than i had initially expected. There are women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads and chickens running around. People look clean and there are no children eating mud and no excrement laying in the streets. I have noticed that if you smile at people through the van window, most will smile back. There is a rapper called Wyclif Jean who is Haitian. It is his money that is cleaning the streets and hiring Haitian people. He put on several free concerts here and i guess they were the largest gatherings were no violence broke out. (The news reports violence in their society but i can't imagine that it is more prevalent here than in the U.S. We have not seen any sort of violence.) So even if you don't like rap, you should buy his CD's as it is positively impacting this corner of the world.

The children at the Children's House are awesome. If i could, i would bring all of them home with me. They are so unlike American children (sorry if i'm stereotyping) in that they never complain, they don't worry at all about who is first or if someone else's portion is larger. One of the things that really touched me was when we gave Gesset his birthday box yesterday. A handfull of lifesavers (candy) was put in every birthday box. A little while after Gesset opened his box, i noticed that many of the boys had a lifesaver. Come to find out, Gesset took his birthday present and shared it with the entire "orphanage" (we're not supposed to call it that). Now how many kids would do that in America?

I spent the day playing with the children. Two of them, Christina and Kerby, did not crack a smile at all yesterday and i have heard that it was the same way all of last year when the team was here. Today (or rather yesterday), they smiled! It made my day. It wasn't just a little smile either. It was an ear-to-ear, joy-reverberating-through-me smile that lasted most of the day.
In the morning i was playing with number cards with a boy named Vetchy. He would say them in English and I would say them in creole. Apparently i was saying 8 wrong (it is huit and not wuit) but when he tried to spell it for me, i didn't understand that "ash" meant "h." All of the sudden he looked at me with a smile on his face and said "Espanol? Espanol?" So i started doing these number cards in Spanish. Vetchy and the other boys around us found this very very funny. After the number cards, we took a wooden car and passed it back and forth, counting in English. We got to 100 which is exciting unless you don't know that 100 is a pretty big number...
In the afternoon, we started moving rock into the small "garden" in the front. The kids wanted to help! There were 6 or 7 of the youngest ones out there pushing rock around with their shoes and trying to lift the five gallon pails that they used to transport it. Then they started jumping off the steps...don't ask me why but they all found it very fun. It was maybe a two foot jump, so it's not like they couldn't do it on their own but we ended up setting up an assembly line of sorts. I would hold their hands while they jumped down and Cappy stood at the end and gave them all high fives. After a while Dillon joined us and started giving high fives too! This went on for quite a while...only ceasing when people started singing inside.
One thing about the singing, is that we may sing a song once or twice in a big group but all day the boys will sing it/hum it back to you. It's great!
The two older boys, Phenel and Peterson, have been helping Scott, Kirk, Bob, and the Masons a lot. They were very eager to help and i think it's great that they are as then they will feel some ownership of this place that they call home.

I'm scared that the power will go out so i'm going to stop now...
We love you all!
Lauren