Mission Trip Report Day Three (Bonus Report):

Once again, being without a watch, I retired to bed and quickly fell asleep only to awake at 3:00AM ready to take on the day. I tried to go back to sleep, but after tossing and turning for a few minutes, I relented and pulled out the computer to type the following:

After dinner last evening, we were privileged to hear words of encouragement from Jeanne DeTellis. She is one of the co-founders of New Missions, the organization that we are working with and for this week. What a delightfully charming woman she was. With her plain spoken, and sometimes brash candidness, she described the early years of sleeping in tents on the ground, walking for miles to get drinking water, and living daily by faith that God was in control and would provide.

She told us how she and her late husband George, began this effort in 1983. They were from Massachusetts, and after serving in a pastorate for twenty-five years, answered God’s call to begin an outreach program in Haiti. They started a church and school in five tents that was blessed by God and grew to where it is today – twenty-five schools and churches, a high school, a Bible College, a medical clinic, and a Missions Training Center. Many, if not all of the schools and churches are lead by alumni of those early classes, so it is truly a self-fulfilling missions effort ministering to over 11,000 children. Today, Jeanne’s youngest son Tim is the only non-native Haitian in the operational administration. His role is primarily to be a facilitator and organizer for the shipments of food and supplies from their sources to the warehouses, and then to the schools and mission outposts.

After seventeen years in Haiti, New Missions began a new initiative in the Dominican Republic in 2000. Focusing on the northern coast of the country, four long and bumpy hours over a mountain by car from the population center and capital of the country, Santo Domingo, the outpost in Sosua is near Puerto Plata. It has grown to five schools and three churches, and ministers to over 700 children, providing food, clothing, education, and the love of Christ.

At the end of her presentation I was awestruck by this fiery, wiry woman of God who was as passionate about her work as anyone I have ever seen. To watch her get misty-eyed recounting the horrors, and the miracles, she witnessed after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and to see a brief glimpse of the tempest fury that she keeps remarkably bridled when talking about the gross inefficiencies of government-sponsored relief efforts, is to witness a modern-day example of the passionate, committed, firebrand evangelists of long ago.
What a privilege and what an honor it is to be a small part of something that has been blessed by God so marvelously and so miraculously. I have been told, and can now testify that missions work is truly a double edged sword, changing both the ministered and the minister irrevocably forever… and it is only the end of day three!