Pray for the People of Haiti

Please pray for the people of Haiti. There is a special place in RBBC’s heart for Haiti—Heart of the Bride, led by Tony Gibson, ministers among children there and some of our church family have been short-term missionaries there. Dan and Tracy Shelton are pursuing adoption of two Haitian daughters and dealing with a very trying process.

And Haiti has been devastated by one storm after another! Hundreds have died, roadways and bridges are washed out, homes are destroyed, food supplies are short, and the country has been almost deforested.

So pray and seek other ways to show Christ’s love, too.

And here is something more to move our hearts for Haiti:

Slavery in Haiti
September 8, 2008 By: John Piper
Category: Commentary, International Outreach

It is a good thing that people from all ideologies are talking about the horrors of human trafficking. Don’t let the “trendiness” of it dampen your indignation. If a liberal champions a good cause woe to conservatives who put their head in the sand.

Doug Nichols has been on the cutting edge of caring for street children since before some of you were born. He is one of my heroes. As Founder of Action International, Doug draws my attention to child slavery in Haiti. The children are called restavéks(stay-withs).

He writes: “Let me share a few paragraphs from the recent book A Crime So Monstrous, by Benjamin Skinner:

…Slaves are everywhere. Assuming that this is your first trip to Haiti, you won't be able to identify them. But to a lower-middle-class Haitian, their status is 'written in blood.' Some are as young as three or four years old. But they'll always be the small ones, even if they're older. The average fifteen-year-old child slave is 1.5 inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter than the average free fifteen-year-old. They may have burns from cooking for their overseer's family over an open fire; or scars from beatings, sometimes in public, with the martinet, electrical cables, or wood switches. They wear faded, outsized castoffs, and walk barefoot, in sandals or, if they are lucky, oversized shoes...

You may see their tiny necks and delicate skulls straining as they tote five-gallon buckets of water on their heads while navigating broken glass and shattered roads.

These are the restavéks, the 'stay-withs,' (child slaves) as they are euphemistically known in Creole. Forced, unpaid, they work from before dawn until deep night. The violence in their lives is unyielding. These are the children who won't look into your eyes.

Nationwide the number of restavéks ballooned from 109,000 in 1992 to 300,000, or one in ten Haitian children, in 1998, to 400,000 in 2002."