Hey everybody!

So, we survived the CB : First Cut premiere, and we’re oh-so-slowly reassembling the Bedouins loft. We took all the folding chairs back to Avondale Methodist today, and packed up the projector and screen (but not before watching The Dark Knight, nach). About eighty people showed up on Saturday, thanks much to everybody, and even though we had an overflow room, everyone stayed in 508, so it was cheek to jowl all night. Mad fun.

In keeping with the theme, Jessi made about a thousand tiny vanilla cupcakes, and Mighty Leaf Tea donated a bunch of vanilla tea, which was really nice. So everybody had a snack and sat together in the flickering dark, while I paced around the back of the room. I’d never had a premiere before, and it was the longest project I’ve undertaken by about twenty minutes, so I had absolutely no idea how it would be received.

We had an overwhelmingly positive response, which was really gratifying, and most importantly, Anne and Stephanie really liked the movie. I talked to pretty much everybody, so I have a good idea of what works, and what I need to fix, and I’m going to take care of that… Right after the new year. I need a break.

Thanks again to everybody who came out, bought art, and gave feedback and encouragement. Thanks also to Mighty Leaf Tea, Urban Standard, and our other sponsors for the night, who I forget right now but I’m sure Stephen will remind me of later. We’ll have the remaining prints for sale on the site soon, and sometime in the new year, we’ll have a premiere proper, for the movie in its final form.

Merry Christmas from the Bedouins! God bless us, everyone!

God is good! We went down to the last-ever Encouter last night, which was pretty amazing. I haven’t been hoarse from worship in a long time. It was great to see everybody, and it was really great not to be sitting in front of Final Cut for an afternoon.

We also went down to kidnap some tech from the Encounter office. We have a projector at the house, but it’s kind of old, so we asked Matt if we could borrow Encounter’s super, super nice Christie projectors for our premiere. He said, “sure!” I love Matt. So if you’re coming up on Saturday, know that you’ll experience the mess I’ve made in full HD. The only snag was that we had to wait for the Encounter teardown crew to finish… well, tearing down, before we could grab the projectors and screens. We ended up leaving Auburn at about 12:30, got back to the Phoenix at close to 3, and here I am, back up and typing this at 8:15. Oh well. Philippians 4:13 is going to be my verse for the day.

Just want to offer up a prayer for Encounter as they get ready for this next phase… Lord, bless their efforts, clear the way for them, and give them favor with the authorities at every step along the way, as they make the move to Hong Kong. Your glory, Lord, all over Matt and his crew.

Amen! See you soon…

I was talking with Stephen tonight about love, and specifically what it means to love, like really love, God. I’m paraphrasing here, because the conversation was pretty long, but if our relationships here are models, however flawed, for our relationship with our Father, what does that say about our ability to love Him? Put another way: if we can’t (and, we can’t) choose who we love here, on this terrestrial ball, how do we begin to love God? Sometimes it seems like all I have is a desire to desire Him. I meta-desire Him. I meta-love my Father, who gave me life, and all the authority and riches of Heaven.

Oof. I need a breath…

Speaking of, I guess there’s a game on, this weekend? Someone told me about a game… You know, out there. On the gridiron.

I don’t actually know anything about football.

Anyway, two weeks until the premier! That’s pretty scary. I have to be honest: I have a lot of work to do in the intervening days. But by God’s grace, it’ll be there. We’re really excited about it. As you probably know, we’ve got the page up: bedouinsinternational.org/caribbeangold. Tell your friends.

In other news, I don’t have a voice for narration. It’s just so bad. I do twenty takes for one line of dialog. Maybe I should sing the voiceover parts? That would be unique…

Edit: Actually, scratch that. We’re supposed to be a worldwide, collaborative media organization, right? So, does anybody out there on the webs want to donate their time and talent, narrating our Haiti documentary? We’ll supply the copy, and you supply the strong, clear voice. There’s no money, but we’ll give you a professionally sharpied Bedouins International t-shirt, one of our fabulous buttons, and credit in the… well, credits.

We had a board meeting this weekend, peeps in town from all over. It was fun, but more importantly it really set the tone for the next year, and I’m excited to see what’s coming down the pike. Biscuet led it from China(!) which was interesting, and occasionally funny, as the movin’ picture streamin’ box had to catch up with itself, leaving the top half of his face on the left side of the screen, and the bottom half, misplaced and horribly scrambled.

I need coffee.

Still digging through footage… Here’s Stephen and Jessi, enjoying a relaxing drive through the savanna. Standing up. In the bed of a chartered death trap. At 60 MPH.

For this project I’m having to learn Color and Motion, industrial-strength applications for color timing and motion graphics, respectively. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. God is helping me absorb this stuff at an accelerated rate, which is great because I already need about 30 hours a day.

And, back to it. Whee!

As we made our way through the market, negotiating for fifty pounds of rice here, a dozen peppers there, we secured the services of a man with a wheelbarrow. This is different than saying that he was a man who owned a wheelbarrow, as the man and the wheelbarrow were a matched set: where the latter went, the former followed, and never were they parted. I feel confident saying that the wheelbarrow comprised the better part of his livelihood, and his possessions.

It wasn’t until a half hour into our acquaintance that I made a closer examination of the bright designs covering his barrow. MERCI BONDIEN, or bountiful thanks, was emblazoned on the sides and front, and the handles and wooden frame were covered in scripture references, painted with a careful hand.

The one that stuck with me, long after we’d paid him for his help and struck out for Coco Beach, was 1 Rois 18:39, which decorated the right handle: When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, “The LORD, He is God; the LORD, He is God!”

Awesome…

The trailer for the movie is coming along nicely, and very soon we’ll have the Haiti page live… I can’t wait for you guys to see it. Josh brung it, for reals.

Thanks for reading! God bless your smiling faces…

Paul

I guess it’s been about two months since we left for Haiti, a little less since we got back…we’re back in the swing of it, we’ve pulled down all the photos and footage, and Bedouins HQ is humming. We’re getting ready for the premiere, which is (eek!) in less than a month!

So much to do… We’ve prints to hang, invitations to send out, and of course I have to have a first cut done… The footage looks great, but there’s just so darn much of it! Somehow I have to whittle about twenty hours (so far) of in-country footage down to 45 minutes. It’s going to be painful, since I love pretty much everything I brought back. I guess I’d better get to it…

Watch this space! We’ll talk soon,

Paul

In truth, we were ready for more than she expected. But for my part, I wasn’t quite ready for Haiti, and the full weight of all that she has to throw at travelers. Which is considerable.

Twenty people in a pickup bed. Heat like a sauna, from 8 in the morning until sundown. Major roads that look like washed-out gullies. Dust, dust, and more dust, covering and pervading all my gear. All of which seem trivial in comparison to the sinister machinations and dirty politicking of the simplest transactions, from buying gas or souvenirs, to hiring a ride across town. Our guide and translator, Alan, has saved our bacon more times than I can count. Put another way, without Alan our bacon would be in a dirty market stall on the other side of Cap Haitien right now, and somehow we would have given US dollars to the hustler who stole it from us. It’s just that sketchy.

But God, as I’ve said, is so good. We pray every morning, for wisdom, for guidance, for unity in our group and for Christ-like compassion. And as weird as it seems to the scientist in me, it actually appears to work! Imagine that. I guess that happens to everyone, the “new every morning” wonder at God’s faithfulness, His real-ness, when He orchestrates events completely beyond our control to grow our faith, and glorify Himself.

Case in point: Our trip across the river, to the village that had never been host to white people. Ann had known for years, almost a decade in fact, that the second village was over there somewhere, but had somehow never made the trek. It’s understandable, the school at Coco Beach consumes a huge amount of time and energy. But on Saturday we found ourselves wending through the cacti and Spanish bayonets, into a world simultaneously brand new and very, very old. When we walked into the village, the first woman we saw was carrying a baby. She called out to us, asking for help. When we got closer we saw that the baby, a boy of about a year, was shaking his head violently from side to side, staring straight up at the sky.

Speaking to us through Alan, she said that the baby was sick, which was as much detail as she could offer. We perceived however, pretty much immediately, that the boy was blind, or very close to it. His eyes were crossed, and focused on nothing, his jaw slack as he shook his head, attempting to capture a stray shaft of light. His face was covered with tiny bumps, scars perhaps from a bout of pox or worse, probably the cause of his blindness. Regardless, Ann decided on the spot that the boy “must and shall” have medical attention, and after we conducted our interviews we loaded both mother and child into the truck, and began the two-hour journey back to Cap Haitien.

So many “ifs…” If we hadn’t decided to cross the river… If we weren’t with Ann, whose love for these people borders on mania… If we hadn’t decided to take this project! That little boy would still be out there, in a village that has no name known outside its borders, shaking his head at the sky. Instead he’s waiting for his appointment with an ophthalmologist in Cap Haitien, a grateful mother hoping that someday he won’t remember a time when he couldn’t see.

I love, love, love this mission. God birthed a dream in us that we simply weren’t qualified for, so huge we couldn’t possibly plan for it. But as we continue to chase Him into the unknown, He continues to show Himself faithful. I’m content to chase Him until I drop, cameras rolling on a miracle, His glory unfolding at 24 frames per second.

See you soon!

In Christ,

Paul

As Stephen said, we walked into a village today that had never before seen “blancos,” or white people. More importantly, in the memories of the Haitians living there, we were the first people to step foot step in the village, that weren’t born in that tiny corner of the country. That means no doctors, no aid workers, nobody of any color, ever. We conducted an interview with one woman in her backyard, asking about her family, children, life in general, with her sitting five feet from the crumbling foundation of a centuries-old stone wall. It was part of a small cluster of weather-beaten walls and ramparts that stretched out behind the village, probably the remnants of one of the Citadel’s several watch towers. It’s likely that outside of the village, no-one is even aware of its existence; this moldering fortress wall being slowly reclaimed by the Haitian rainforest.

When we asked them about their faith, they said, “of course we are Christians,” a response that took me aback. This is a people group that aren’t thriving or expanding, but merely surviving. Half of the kids in the village had the orange-tinted hair that is a hallmark of malnutrition, and since they’re so close to the ocean, their only source of water is an inland river that is, to paraphrase our translator, “not so close.” So to hear that they’re Christians, and that they have a small church in the village, makes me perk up immediately! I want to ask a hundred questions, about faith, about Jesus, about how their faith, and what Jesus said about His children, intersects their (objectively crappy) reality. Don’t even get me started on the socio-political stuff. I could chase rabbits all day.

But the reality lived by these people every day doesn’t suffer such pedantry well, in fact the thought of pressing them on such issues makes me cringe! They need love -now- in the form of food, medical supplies, and education. The situation in Haiti is dire, but not beyond recovery. There aren’t any child soldiers in Haiti, but a slow death from starvation, waiting for aid as the government grinds to a halt, doesn’t seem any better.

(I didn’t intend for this to get all disjointed and heavy. Really. I will now attempt to recover this post.)

God is good. It seems obvious, or more likely cliche, but it bears repeating. God is so, so good to us! To be in this place, pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with His creation, His beloved, hopeful, passionate, crazy, made-in-his-image creation, is awesome. Sometimes, in a rare quiet moment, I compare notes with myself — the me of perhaps a decade ago. How could I ever have imagined this outcome? I’m in Haiti. I’m filming a documentary on a forgotten people group, and their first furtive attempts at self-rescue. I’m dirty, sunburned, and exhausted. In short, I look nothing like the man I thought I would become, and that’s a very, very good thing.

I cannot wait to get this footage down, and start piecing together the story. I think you guys are going to dig it.

We miss you!

In Christ,
Paul