Project La Gonave

Make a photo collage

We have been asked by the Haitian Methodist Church to finish building the church in Anse a Galets as a post earthquake project.

We visited with the pastor and his wife in early December for information related to publishing a project profile with the United Methodist Church. We took photos of the church where we had hosted construction teams in 2008.

The partially completed building has hosted three women's conferences since 2008 with the last, a large conference in July following the earthquake.

The women and congregation have been providing an outreach ministry to the poorest of Anse a Galets and local area with few resourses. We provided funding for the conferences and Shirley was honored to be a keynote speaker at the first scheduled conference. At that time birthing kits were distributed to many very poor, pregnant young women from the airport area of AAG.

Following our visit and photo shoot in Dec. we contacted a contractor, recommended by AAPLAG, to prepare an estimate to complete the building.

The Smilebox Collage, "La Gonave Project" has photos of the church, that will zoom with a curser click, plus other issues we noted in our December visit.

World Vision and Concern have been trying to address post earthquake issues by building some transitional houses and checking wells. The KEC Water Project is an on-going concern, particularly since most cisterns and wells were damaged by the initial earthquake and a 6.3 tremor that followed on the island the next day.

It is difficult to discern the exact damage to churches, schools and cisterns as most were damaged by previous hurricanes in 2008, numerous tropical storms and lack of upkeep.

We believe it is critical to the 16 Haitian Methodist Churches on La Gonave that recovery projects help them repair and complete churches in outreach ministry as we also look at providing transitional homes for the more that 1100 local homeless and 10,000 earthquake refugees on the island of La Gonave.

We ask for prayers this building project be approved and the UMC can join with other NGO's and Christian Denominations to help the broken people on La Gonave.