My head is full of hot mud, and my eyes are all puffy and sore. I don’t have health insurance right now, so I’ve been popping vitamin C like skittles, and praying for health to return quickly. Let’s make it a group project. You pray, too.

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!

I’ve been at it all afternoon, with only a few breaks for coffee, digging through all this footage I brought home from Haiti… I came across a scene I’d forgotten about somehow, when we went into the main market at Cap Hatién to buy food for the school.

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

It’s been so long since I’ve written! Sorry about that.

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

It’s kind of funny, or it seems like it might be next week, when we’re sitting around in Birmingham looking back on the trip. When I first met Anne, she warned me that itineraries in Haiti are more general guidelines, than any sort of reliable timetable. I laughed, and assured her that we (Bedouins) were ready for anything.

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

So, yeah! Sitting here waiting on iMovie to convert a huge pile of AVIs, reflecting on the last few days…

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