One of the most practical ways we serve the church in Haiti is through short-term ministry trips. Teams from our US partner churches come to serve and encourage the church in Haiti in a variety of ways, and it’s always a refreshing time for those involved. Today, we asked Kevin, one of the volunteers from our January team, to share some reflections from the trip.

Our time in Haiti was really encouraging. I wish I knew at the beginning how hard it would be to say goodbye to the kids! It was amazing to see the children start and end every day with prayer and praise. Hearing them go from Creole to English in the same song reminded me that we all serve the same, mighty God—the Holy Spirit that lives in me also lives in them. It made me long for heaven where we’ll all be worshipping together forever, with no language barriers, trauma, sickness, or even a memory of those things to create a distraction.

The goal of our trip was to help the local staff meet the kids’ immediate physical needs, while creating opportunities for the staff and children to spend time together. It’s more important to strengthen the kids’ personal relationships than to build a bunk bed or desk, and we really tried to foster connections between the kids and their immediate caregivers. We also tried to connect with the kids among ourselves whenever we could. With the building projects, for instance, we welcomed the children into the process and tried to show them that they are loved, valued, and capable. It would have been much quicker for us to simply do all the work for them, but the message we wanted to send is one of people over productivity, and souls over stuff.

The only real challenge we faced during the trip was inescapable, and that was material availability. We had to improvise and change the plans a little, which ended up taking more time than we hoped. All things considered, we did very well with the materials we had (and they were far better than expected in a third-world country).

This was my first international short-term mission trip, and it was an eye-opening experience to see the need of others in such a clear way. Spending time with these sweet children has shown me that chasing temporal comforts while neglecting the marginalized is really sad and wrong. There are plenty of people in and around our own communities that are in desperate need of help, but we so often turn a blind eye to it out of concern for our own comfort or convenience. I want to be much less focused on pleasing myself and my family and much more focused on serving the people around me that are hurting and in need.

Regardless of geographic and socioeconomic differences, God desires that all people will come to place their faith in His Son alone. The only way they will be able to do that is if someone tells them and then walks alongside them as they grow. Reaching the lost and telling them about Jesus is only half the battle. Once they’ve been introduced to the gospel, then we get to be the vehicles through which the Holy Spirit can work—that’s what the Connect 2 staff is doing in Haiti, and we were blessed to come alongside them in that ministry on this trip.

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