By Guesly Dessieux
In the last four months, I have travelled to Haiti three times. Even for me, that’s a lot of trips in a short amount of a time. Each of those trips was necessary, productive and exciting. During the first trip, we viewed several pieces of property, decided on one to purchase for Project Living Hope, and acquired all the pieces of Haitian identification to purchase land. On the second trip, Jerry King and and I went to oversee the surveying of the property and determine the actual boundaries of what we wanted to purchase. Then during my third trip in December, my cousin Pierre Jr. and I signed papers to buy the property.
We go into all of our trips with many hopes of what we will be able to accomplish but thanks to our experience in that country, we know actually getting things done can be complicated and a lot more time-consuming than even we expect. Yet during these three trips, we were actually amazed by all that we were able to accomplish. We believe God is really behind what we are doing and He hears our prayers for direction and help.
Pierre flew in on Wednesday and I joined him on Thursday. On Friday we went to the notary’s offices in St. Marc. We were joined there by 22 out of the 24 owners of the property. That’s right, 24 people shared claim to that piece of land. For that reason, the signing process took several hours as each person proved their identification and land ownership and each item had to be recorded by hand. The people in the room were excited both to be closing the deal and to see that this project they had heard about was actually moving forward. Through the whole process, Pierre and I stood in awe at the way God was opening doors for PLH.
Later that day I spent a couple hours meeting the manager of a nearby hotel that my wife, Sara, and Sarah Comstock, vice president of PLH, had connected with a couple months before. We discussed how we could create a partnership between PLH and his struggling hotel. We are both excited at the prospects.
Saturday I headed back to Oregon feeling like much had been accomplished and God had truly paved the way. I fly back to Haiti again in January and this time I will be joined by my wife and kids and seven other team members preparing for a week of soccer training and English teaching. Please pray for God’s continued guidance.