May 2022 Ministry Update
Dear Mission Friends and Supporters,
We have some exciting updates this month! Evens, Karina, and their girls travelled to Haiti in March. This was Karina's first trip back to Haiti since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was great to see the entire SAI team and all the progress that has been made over the last two years.
Before we share updates from their recent trip, the Board of SAI would like to invite you to help support our ministry. Time and time again God has blessed this ministry with the resources it needed to grow and serve our community in Haiti. He gets all the glory for those blessings.
With two of our bigger projects nearing completion, we have additional staffing needs for our medical clinic and schools. It takes just over $5,000/month in support to keep our schools open and medical clinic staffed.
We are eager to rebuild our list of generous monthly donors. All monthly contributions regardless of size help us meet the economic needs of our teachers and staff who give their all for God and this ministry. Would you consider standing alongside these Godly teachers, employees, and medical staff by creating a monthly gift to SAI? There's very little overhead at SAI so your gifts have a direct, immediate, and positive impact on people in need in Haiti.
Click HERE to visit our giving page if you'd like to start supporting SAI on a monthly basis!
Medical Clinic Staffing Underway
The recent grand opening of the SAI Medical Clinic has been enthusiastically received by the La Victoire community. In the first three weeks we were able to provide medical care for 50 new patients. These 50 patients would have either been without medical care or would have had to travel two hours away to get basic medical needs met.
As many of you know, the medical clinic was a huge "missing piece" of our ministry for many years. Who would've known that God would use the COVID-19 pandemic to bring us new partners to finish construction of the clinic. We are so grateful to everyone that generously and patiently supported this project!
What Now? We are in the process of fully staffing the facility, consisting of:
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(1) Full-time Doctor
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(1) Dentist
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(1) Lab Technician
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(1) Pharmacist
These four individuals have all been identified and are getting ready to staff the clinic.
The monthly cost to pay salaries for these four individuals is $1,000 U.S. Dollars. We know the work each of these medical workers provide to the community is valued far in excess of what they get paid. Our hope is that as we build more monthly donors, that we can not only hire more medical staff but pay them more, closer to what they deserve.
School Construction Progressing Quickly!
The other big project we've been praying over in recent years is our schools. We have over 300 children enrolled in our Elementary and High Schools. Every ministry project is very important to us, but caring for the children in our community and helping them begin their walk with Jesus holds a special place in our hearts. Karina has been a teacher for many years now and knows how important it is to provide loving support and education for kids.
For many of these past years, SAI has struggled to find enough space for all our students. We've had to rent different locations each year, which creates confusion with parents as our schools would be in one spot one year and then moved to a new location the next.
But God brought new partners to us to finance the construction of a new building that will be the new home for our schools and also serve as a community center for other ministry programs. Since we already had land from a generous donor a few years ago, we've been able to hit the ground running!
As you see in the pictures below, construction is coming along nicely! When completed, the school will have two stories with 8 classrooms on each floor. We are praying for construction to go smoothly so we can officially open the schools this coming Fall.
Completion of this building will also help us connect our students to God. We're planning on dedicating a part of each Wednesday afternoon for devotional time, prayer, and worship.
Like the Medical Clinic, there's a monthly cost to support our teachers and staff. We need at least $4,000/month to pay teacher and administrator salaries. To be frank, we need more than so that we can be an attractive destination for the highest quality teachers. If you'd like to support our schools, you can indicate that on your monthly giving form.
Supporting Orphans and Food Security
Another generous partner is helping us construct a new girls orphanage on SAI ministry grounds. Young girls are particularly vulnerable in Haiti, and we've seen firsthand what happens if there isn't a Godly support system for these children. We've begun laying the foundation and will look to complete construction some time after our school is done being built.
We're also supporting the community with economic development opportunities and food security. Everyone across the globe is becoming painfully aware that food security isn't a given. The price of fertilizers and energy have increased significantly, which increases the cost of providing food for people in impoverished regions, such as Haiti.
The pictures you see below are from a recent delivery of beans to our ministry. We're working diligently to make sure that all families in need in our area have enough food. This is becoming a huge issue this year so we ask for your earnest prayers for these families and for God to open up ways for us to support them.
Prayer Requests
Please continue to pray for our family and the people of Haiti. It seems that we've been moving from one crisis to another the last two years. Starting with the COVID-19 pandemic, then political uprising, followed by a massive earthquake late last summer. Now, Haiti is facing escalating cost of living and food insecurity.
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Pray earnestly for the people of Haiti, that God provide all the sustenance every family needs.
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Pray for Evens, Karina, and their girls. It takes an enormous amount of energy to run SAI, be a good Mom and Dad to their precious girls, and keep their marriage strongly grounded in the foundation of Jesus.
