It was a Monday evening in September 2002, and I was making dinner at our Edisto Beach, South Carolina, home. Trisha and I had finished our first day of work since returning from a mission trip to Haiti.
Trisha sat on the stool at the kitchen island across from me and asked, “So, what about Haiti?” I said, “I want to go.” She said, “I do, too!”
It is now 2007, and we have run an orphanage for children born with HIV/AIDS for a year.
We stutter-stepped for nearly 2 ½ years searching for our calling. We sought three different ministries, thinking we would work for someone else, but it was not to be.
During that time, we had taken in a 10-year-old street kid, afflicted with advance-stage AIDS, TB, pneumonia, scabies, a scalp of sores, malnutrition and a neurological disorder affecting balance and coordination. Roodline (Wood-lin) has been with us now for two years, going from near death to becoming a strong adolescent. Roodline was the inspiration of Kay (pronounced “ki”) Konfo — Comfort House.
In June 2005, we started to resurrect a filthy three-bedroom house, and on Dec. 9 of that year, took in our first two children. At that time, we drove more than three hours on mountain roads to get to an AIDS clinic. Today, we are only six miles from Hospital Albert Schweitzer, which started its children’s AIDS program because of our orphanage. We now offer high-quality care, with an ever-improving nutritional diet and a regimented drug program for 12 children.
Read it all. My wife and our youngest daughter leave with a mission team to Haiti and the end of next week–KSH.
I pray God richly blesses this ministry to the truely least of these
Make sure that they have ALL their shots in good time. A member of a group that a friend of mine accompanied from Upper SC to Haiti last year, came down with typhoid shortly after her return to Columbia, apparently because she had failed to take the appropriate preventative measure early enough.
I pray that this couple and Kendall’s wife and daughter will be used mightily by God in their ministries. I just finished three years in the Caribbean and the needs are immense in many places. I already want to go back.
Often the region is seen as a vacation spot, but a good look outside the fence wall of the resort would show us the reality of the people trying to make a living on the islands.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic is growing faster in the Caribbean than in most places of Africa. The proportion of children growing up without a dad in the house approaches 80% on some islands and averages close to 70% across the region. The poverty level on some islands is astounding. I can think of islands where the over 80% of the housing and crops have been destroyed or significantly damaged by hurricanes in the past 2-3 years, places that make New Orleans look like a holiday resort. Disease on the poorer and smaller islands is rampant and health care can be spotty for serious diseases.
Worse is the corrosiveness of the American/European tourist industry. Catering to the anything goes, “what happens here, stays here” mentality is eroding both the spiritual and moral foundations of society as well the ability to trust North Americans/Europeans for help. We are increasingly viewed as morally corrupt takers, even as our money is accepted for whatever service is being offered.
On some islands, fair wages are non existent and kept that way by American corporations in either agriculture or hospitality industries. As a result, families are often broken up to make ends meet. It was not unusual for me to meet men who had “wives” on different islands depending on where the work was at the time. Neither was it unusual for me to pray with a family who was sending a kid or two off to another island or to family in Europe to have a chance to get ahead in life, knowing they might not see that child again for years and years.
And I have to say it, slavery still exists on these islands as a result of some of these working conditions and policies by employers. It is merely not called that because of the offensiveness of the label. I know several people who would fit the definition of slave, though maybe not with the cruelty of a Southern plantation owner circa 1850.
The Caribbean needs to hear the gospel in all of its life-changing, society-transforming, resurrection power.