Joan's Haiti Udate

Port-au-Prince
Tim & I went to Port for the first time yesterday. We were taking one team out and dropping off an other couple at a guest house there. The guest house was up into Port, so we couldn't take the bypass around the main congested area, but instead had to go right through it. It made us think of the old days when we would sit for hours in Port on the one main road in bumper to bumper traffic. This time it was complicated by debris and rubble in the street and a backhoe working on cleaning it up so we had to detour way back up into these narrow one way streets with two way traffic on them, so we were constantly dealing with finding a place to back up into so we could pass or barely scraping by to pass.
I was actually surprised to see so many people in Port. It was teeming with people. I thought we had them all out at Cayes! There are various states of disrepair everywhere you look, but in a way, that is Haiti on a normal basis. Much of life, seemed from the outside, to be moving on with business as usual for the small guys. Street ventors selling their produce, mopeds zipping in and out of traffic, and people, people everywhere walking around with stuff on their heads made us in the car comment on how incredibly resilient these people are. In and among the rubble that used to be houses, businesses, schools, hospitals, ect. are still the bodies of probably tens of thousands of people that haven't yet been dug out. Just the clean up effort itself is a huge undertaking. Where do you put all the debris? Many of the buildings that are still standing are damaged beyond repair so they will have to be torn down also. It's overwhelming to see the destruction. Even the road going to Port has big fissures in it or places where it is displaced and raised or lowered a few inches. Bottom line...NOTHING IS STABLE IN AN EARTHQUAKE, BUT GOD. Please continue to pray that the people here will continue to remember that and continue to seek HIM. He alone is the Unshakable Rock of our salvation. Sure looking forward to that glorious day when we will see Him face to face.

Joan is needing to know when "normal life" is going to start again.