Sweeping Dirt

Posted on 01/20/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001A Haitian broom is a charming piece of folk craft; a sturdy branch about four feet long and an inch in diameter tied off at one end with hundreds of narrow leaves that bunch out unruly as a cheerleader’s pom.  Over time, sandpaper coarse palms rub the stick to a warm luster; fingers massage the soft wood into a comfortable grip, the leaves splay horizontal, lose their tension and fan out like a chimney sweep’s bristles.  It is a lovely, curious object, if not entirely effective for its purpose.

Every morning when in Haiti, I drive from my guest house in Grand Goave to our construction sites; we are building a school and orphanage.  Dawn is emerging; though the roosters are long past awake.  Dogs and pigs meander along the road.  The few men with jobs are up and gone; folks with no agenda are just beginning to stir.  Shadows pass in and out of shacks; dressing, splashing their faces with whatever water is left in last night’s basin.

The women’s first chore is to sweep the front yard, the hard packed earth that spans from private shelter to the public way.  Some houses have only a narrow path defined by small trees; others claim a broad plane that provides the inhabitants a full view of the passing world.  This is where families dwell until nightfall; interior space is used only to escape storms and catch sleep.

Driving along the rutted road in the dim light, I watch women stand with their feet apart, sway their hips counter to the rhythm of their arms, and sweep away whatever the wind cast down overnight.  Back and forth they waver as if in a trance, shifting across their living rooms, half asleep, near zombies with two legs and a broom. Their sweeping was long ago chiseled into motor memory.

Every morning I am transfixed by their quiet, futile dance.  The women sweep dirt from dirt.  They raise dust, they push it away, and more dust rises in its place.  Are they fools, scratching at Haiti’s tenuous soil, or noble in their quest to create a place of hygiene and order in a land that defies either?  Are they trapped in a Sisyphus-like cycle of endless sweeping or might they someday achieve their desired objective of a clean world?

Contradictory human truths play out in these dawn movements.  We are creatures of habit, of pattern.  We do what we know, not always because it is best for us, but because it gives us comfort.  Sweeping dirt provides the illusion of making things neat.  If we sweep every day, long enough and hard enough, we can convince ourselves that sweeping makes a difference. These women never create a sanitary place for their family to live, yet their labor offers other benefits.  When they sweep their yard they claim it in a more tactile way than any deed can bestow, just as anyone who puts effort into a patch of land both owns it and is owned by it.  These mothers know their children need a clean and safe place to grow and thrive and they do all that they can to provide, despite the forces of poverty and disease that thwart their effort.

The futility of sweeping dirt might discourage me.  Instead, it motivates me to create enough hard surface here to ensure that people can eat and sleep and learn and play without mud packing their soles or spiders climbing up their legs.  We don’t need to replicate the blacktop parking lots that span America, but a little pavement has its benefits.

Haitian brooms have long handles; the woman stand upright.  Sweeping is a dignified act, an act of caring, an act that says ‘I matter and my family matters’.  But it is also an act of defiance against the trials of this land.  Sweeping dirt denies natural disaster and physical deprivation, it ignores political instability and economic futility, it mocks every calamity grinding down on them.  Sweeping dirt asserts that these women will do whatever they can, however little that may be, to create a sanctuary for their family on this earth.  For humans everywhere strive to improve our lot, no matter how meager.

_______________________

This article was published in the Cambridge Chronicle on January 12, 2013 under the name ‘We are Creatures of Habit”.  I prefer my original title.

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Buckeye Logic Comes to Magic Haiti

Posted on 01/14/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001This is the second of four articles I had published in conjunction with the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake.  This article was published in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on January 11, 2013.

Since the 2010 Haiti earthquake I have made sixteen trips to design and supervise construction of an orphanage and school in Grand Goave.  Haiti is a poor, backward, corrupt place, but it is also magical.  Mysticism runs strong here where ancient voudou merges the physical and the spirit world.  This mysticism offers solace for people with so little control over their daily trials. Time and again, when my American expectations are upended I remind myself that like magic, Haiti is not rational.

No one would describe Ohio as magical.  It is sensible and grounded, rooted in fertile soil and industrious citizens.  It is the epicenter of the United States’ most enduring and traditional values, a practical place where logic and reason prevail.  Two summers ago I bicycled through Ohio, Cincinnati to Conneaut, passing through Xenia, Columbus, Mount Vernon, Akron, and Cleveland.  I developed a strong appreciation for Ohio’s generous people, hearty food, exuberant cycling community, and its citizen’s faith that the products of our hands and minds, infrastructure and technology, are the tools that build successful lives.

I was pleased when a group of 23 Buckeyes from Akron came to Haiti to construct the growing compound where aid workers stay. They painted banisters and walls, laid out foundations for guest cottages, and built a roof on the new kitchen.  After a frustrating day of demonstrating earthquake resistant construction techniques to Haitian crews predisposed to attribute the tremor to the revenge of angry gods, I appreciated the planning and handiwork required to build a roof of both logic and craft in three days.

The new kitchen is a structure with one right angle and three odd angles nestled into a corner of the compound.  In pre-earthquake Haiti this out of squareness would hardly be noticed; most buildings got flat concrete roofs with cowlicks of reinforcing popping out for an eventual second floor.  Since those roofs crushed many people, post-earthquake structures often have sloped wood joists with metal roofs.  A wood frame will not last as long as concrete in a country susceptible to decay, but it is too light to crush when it falls.

The Buckeye’s new roof is a beauty.  One of the guys explains its logic to me.  “The metal roof needed to be about 3 in 12 slope.  We set the ridge four feet above the dividing wall in the kitchen, so it could be sheathed in full pieces of plywood.  We had to sister the joists, which were only 16 feet long.  We set the longest rafter perpendicular to the ridge and the top of the wall.  Then we laid out the other rafters, some parallel, some not, to determine a consistent slope.  Finally, we built up the angled walls as much as needed to meet the rafters.”  The result is a simple yet consistent roof sitting atop a skewed box.

I asked him about hurricane clips to protect the roof from ripping off in a hurricane.  “We couldn’t find any anchors to drill in the concrete block walls, but we found a spool of metal tape and some through bolts. We set the bolts through the top course of the masonry, anchored the metal tape to one end, wrapped it over the rafters, and pulled it tight to the other side of the bolt.”

This story demonstrates fundamental differences between Haitian and American cultures.  Take a dozen guys from Ohio, throw them in Haiti, give them an assortment of tools and materials, a jumbled problem, and in three days they develop and build a rather elegant solution.  Our ability to problem solve is great, we relish the challenge.

On our construction site, where we are building a larger yet more regular building, every step is an arduous process that must be repeated and repeated.  The crew trowels grout into ten walls, but unless we tell them to grout the eleventh, they might not.

This lapse is not due to laziness; Haitians work very hard.  It is simply that their minds work differently than ours.  We look for pattern, for logic, we apply order wherever we can.  Haitians are less analytical, less inclined to assign effect to cause.  They are more comfortable with magic.

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Transformation in Haiti

Posted on 01/12/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001In conjunction with the the third anniversary of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, several newspapers have published essays about my experiences in Haiti.  Over the next few weeks I will post them on my blog.  Here is the first one, which the Worcester Telegram and Gazette published on January 8, 2013.

I never met Britney Gengel, the Lynn Universty student from Rutland who died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  I never even heard of her until five months after she died, when serendipity led me to her parents.  As an architect who had worked in Haiti before the quake, I wanted to lend my hand in its recovery.  As grieving parents whose daughter’s final wish was to start an orphanage, the Gengel’s wanted to build one in her honor.   We collaborated on designing the BeLikeBrit orphanage.  We travelled to Haiti to select the site and plan the building.  Eventually, the project consumed me; I scratched a mid-life itch for change, left my job, and volunteered to supervise construction.  Hundreds of others, many from Central Massachusetts, contributed time and resources.  For many of them, like me, the spirit of this girl and her family’s determination to make her final wish come true transformed our lives.

Haiti is a land of endless contrasts.  It is dirty, backwards, corrupt, and intractably poor; yet it is also beautiful, tranquil; magical, and spiritually rich.   Conflicts between ancient traditions and modern opportunities are heightened by Haiti’s extreme poverty.  Most earthquake damage could have been prevented if construction had met standard codes, but since Haitians are equally inclined to attribute the earthquake to angry gods as shifting plates, construction crews were wary of the earthquake resistant features we incorporated in our building.  Families are tight knit, yet official marriage is considered optional and eighty percent of children in orphanages have living parents who placed them there for a better chance in life.  Haiti is a fiercely independent nation, but their turbulent history, insular culture and prohibitions against foreign investment crippled it; rendering Haiti utterly dependent on foreign aid.  Perhaps the biggest conflict of all is that this country, dysfunctional by any measure, is so vibrant and endearing; as if a predisposition for protest, a disdain for authority, and a stubborn streak were the ideal ingredients of charm.  Like many before me, I am aghast at Haiti’s poverty yet captivated by its people.

Anyone who visits Haiti returns to the United States a different person; after seventeen trips I hardly recognize myself.  I am drawn to Haiti precisely because it defies comprehension. Haiti falls short of American life by any statistical standard, yet by less conventional, though equally valid measures, it actually surpasses us.  By and large people in Haiti are happy; they are hopeful; they are not defeated by hardship.  Community is strong in a country where life is too hard to even pretend a person can ‘make it’ on their own.  And Haitians are mythically in love with their country.  One evening I witnessed a skinny kid strolling the beach at sunset; he struck his arm to the sky and yelled ‘Ayiti!’ I marveled at his patriotic euphoria despite the devastation all around him, and wondered how many Americans would muster the same exuberance amidst our own bounty.

BeLikeBrit orphanage also defies comprehension.  It is a solid, beautiful building, the most substantial building in town; though it would be unnecessary if such good construction existed before the earthquake. It is a monument to a young woman whose life was dashed in the first bud of adulthood; she inspires us by her lost potential as much as by her actual feats.  It is a testament to humans coming together to serve a higher purpose; to share our capabilities and resources with those less fortunate in an attempt to transform our loss into something positive.

Every one of us involved in BeLikeBrit was fueled by motivations beyond standard measures of economic gain and loss; we gave of ourselves without expectation yet we each received more in return than we donated.  Our good effort will never compensate for Britney’s death, but we can all be proud of the building that her spirit inspired.

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Favorite Picture of 2012

Posted on 01/07/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001I am on vacation this week, but want to share this wonderful picture of students on the stairs of the Mission of Hope school.  Happy New Year to all.

121212 MoHI with Students

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Happy New Year Invention

Posted on 01/01/2013 by paulefallon

vitruvian_man-001For those of us who need more disco balls in our life, which is pretty much all of us, here is a terrific and easy way to add sparkle to your everyday life.

 

For our New Year’s Eve party last night I bought a pair of small disco balls to hang from the accent lights over our dining room table.  We removed the table and raised the chandelier out of the way to create a dance floor.  We attached the mirror balls to a series of elastic bands looped through one another, suspended on an axle (a small Allen wrench) directly over the aperture of our accent lights.  The effect was dazzling.

DSCN1946

 

Happy New Year!

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Peter Ralph Lee – March 27, 1945 to December 25, 2012

Posted on 12/26/2012 by paulefallon

 Peter Lee TurtleneckPeter Ralph Lee died on Christmas morning, December 25, 2012 after suffering a heart attack and fall on December 14 that caused irreparable neurological damage.

The single word that describes Peter is community.  He lived in community, he made his livelihood creating community, he thrived among community, he enveloped everyone he touched in community, and he died among community. One of his ICU nurses at Brigham & Women’s Hospital proclaimed, “I want to be part of this village!” as she witnessed the flow of caring visitors who sought Peter’s binding presence until the end.

Peter was born on March 27, 1945 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and adopted as a baby by Howard and Valerie Lee.  He lived briefly in Midland, Michigan but spent most of his youth in Aiken South Carolina.  Peter graduated with a BA in Biology / Chemistry and a Master of Public Health from the University of South Carolina and began his career in public health working for the State of South Carolina.  Peter was founder and first director of the Healthy Communities Initiative at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) as well as the founding director of the Ecumenical AIDS Ministries of the South Carolina Christian Action Council, which formed AIDS Care Teams in almost 100 churches across the state. Peter received the Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership award, in 1995 for this work.

In 1998 Peter moved to the Boston area where he became Program Development Specialist with the RWJ Community Health Leadership Program, Collaborative for Community Health.  He became Director of Healthy Communities Massachusetts and Director of the Massachusetts Partnership for Healthy Communities before his retirement earlier this year.

Peter’s many civic contributions included serving on the Governing Council and Editorial Board of the national Coalition for Healthier Cities and Communities.  Peter was co-guest editor (with Len Duhl, the “father” of the Healthy Cities movement) of a special supplement of the Public Health Reports on Healthy Communities in 2000. He served on the steering committee for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council’s long-range planning committee for Metro Boston, the steering committee for the Massachusetts Cardiovascular Health Plan, and the Boards of WalkBoston and Urban Edge. He was also active in his Roxbury neighborhood as co-chair of the Fort Hill Civic Association.

Peter was a lifelong activist, inspired by hearing Martin Luther King in a march on Washington, D.C. in the 1960s, as well as a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church.  He studied at the Order of the Holy Cross but his vocation for action drew him to the public arena.  He was an active member of Christ Church Cambridge throughout his years in Boston.

Peter had a lifelong interest in Cuba, where his parents met and lived before he was born.  Though he never lived there, he was able to visit.  He bore witness to the economic challenges facing that country but also to the beauty of its people, their culture and their tightly knit community.

Peter’s life cannot be measured by titles and achievements alone, for he touched as many through his generous spirit and equanimity as through his official actions. He coined the phrase, “A healthy community is a garden to grow people in” and he tended that garden with more vigor than anyone.

Peter understood that the strength of community lay not only in what we share in common, but also in capitalizing on the unique strengths of each individual.  As his neighbor Sachielle Samedi wrote, “When we first met I was black, you were white; I was Haitian, you were American; I was 34 years old, you were 62; I was straight, you were gay; I was blunt, you were subtle; I had a northerner’s brashness, you had a southerner’s sensibility; I had an eight pound Yorkie, you had a sixty pound Boxer. Yet, despite these superficial differences, we were the best of friends.”

In retirement, Peter remained involved in community.  This past fall Peter began a volunteer position as archivist in the archeology lab of the City of Boston.  The work energized him with the same sense of purpose he savored throughout his life.

Peter is survived by his gentle sister Pat, his beloved dog Dancer, and the thousands of souls he touched during his time on this earth.  Memorial service plans, coordinated through Lawler Funeral Home, are not finalized. We thank Peter for a life so well lived, and for embracing us as part of his community.

 

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The Hope of Christmas

Posted on 12/25/2012 by paulefallon

haiti-001The hope of Christmas lay in a tiny baby in a manger.

I am no fan of Christmas.  The myth I learned as a child seems naïve in adulthood.  I do not subscribe to the religious or commercial aspects of the season and the introvert in me balks at so much socializing.  But Len Gengal asked me write a Christmas piece for Be Like Brit and my ambivalence for the holiday evaporates in the face of my respect for Len.  He loved Christmas and the joy it brought his daughter until that joy got yanked away when the Hotel Montana collapsed.  So once again Len pushes me beyond my comfort zone.  I am thinking about Christmas and realizing a fresh perspective on the holiday gained through maturity and my experience in Haiti.

The hope of Christmas lay in a vulnerable baby in a manger.

Amidst the ‘stuff’ we brought to Haiti over the past two years; an orphanage and a school, a road and clean water; two significant changes happened to me.  First, I got older, noticeably older.  The travel, the sun, the rudimentary living took its toll. I have more age spots and wrinkles and my mental lapses are accelerating in number and severity.  Second, death became a more visceral presence in my life.  When my grandparents and parents died, the unfortunate events were tempered by their adherence to natural order.  But death in Haiti ignores such logic; peers died, children died, death is both arbitrary and frequent; we inured ourselves against grief to avoid being consumed by it.  This familiarity with death seems to have followed me back to the States.  In the past week we pulled the plug on my friend Peter Lee after a brain injury left him in a coma without any prospects of neurological function, and the beautiful scientist Tanya Williams died at a mere forty-two.  Death is no longer something I can observe at arm’s length; I am in the thick of it.

The hope of Christmas lay in an innocent baby in a manger.

Death cemented my commitment to Haiti; 250,000 deaths in general and one in particular.  In life, Britney Gengel was a joy to her family and friends; in death she has rallied hundreds, thousands of people to step up for Haiti.  More specifically, to step up for children in Haiti, to provide sustenance and shelter, education and opportunity.  The story of Christ’s birth stopped being a quaint, primitive tale as I worked among children who lived in stys and slept on dirt; children who don’t even have the luxury of a manger.

The hope of Christmas lay in a pure baby in a manger.

Christmas is the ultimate celebration of hope over reason.  It acknowledges that we have created a tragic mess of the beautiful world we have been given, that we adults are so entwined in its machinations we can never salvage it, that only something tiny and vulnerable, innocent and pure can lead us on the path we are too narrow minded to find ourselves.  Be Like Brit is going to give six dozen children with manger-like backgrounds the chance to shine at their full potential.  Though I doubt any will be the Messiah, there is a good chance they will eventually teach or fish or build with wood or lead others.  Thanks to the Gengel’s tribute to Britney these children will all have the opportunity to transcend their origin.

The hope of Christmas lay in a perfect baby in a manger; a baby who saves us from our imperfect selves; a baby who transcends his surroundings to bring us the hope that one day all children will enter the world free from suffering.

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A Babe with a Brain

Posted on 12/23/2012 by paulefallon

vitruvian_man-001I was riding along the Charles in the early evening when my phone buzzed.  I saddled off my bike.  Brett’s voice, subdued and halting, conveyed the timbre of tragedy in his hollow hello.  Despite all the proliferating forms of communication, we still deliver bad news by telephone.

Tanya Williams died; 42 years old according to the calendar; forever 26 in my mind.  She was the friend of a friend, Brett’s housemate in graduate school before he came to live at my place, but that description implies a distance that did not exist.  If you met Tanya, if she engaged you and looked in your eyes, she was directly connected to you.

Tanya used to hang at our place with her boyfriend Dave and a lovable assortment of geeks.  Brett and I had the best digs and the coolest deck; on hot summer afternoons a posse of MIT doctoral candidates browned their bodies while discussing arcane science, ripping through NY Times Crossword puzzles, and drinking beer. Other women flowed through from time to time but Tanya was the only one with an unlimited deck pass.  A house of guys has to protect their reputation; only the most spectacular girls deserve unfettered access and nobody compared with Tanya.

Tanya was a babe with a brain, and her attributes aligned in that order.  Since she had a PhD from MIT, a post-doc from Berkeley and worked with Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn, her brain credentials are of the highest standard.  But as a babe, she was without peer.  Tanya was the Lauren Bacall of molecular biology, the Michelle Pfeiffer of DNA Transposition, her willowy body, her regal cheekbones, her easy smile and the toss of her auburn hair proclaimed her easy elegance. She moved like a cat.  She always threw me a little off my guard, yet I never doubted that she had me pegged.

Tanya married Dave, as perfect in his own right as she in hers. They moved to California, had a son, life was rich, and then cancer began to eat away at it until, after battling for over five years, the mutated cells bested the babe.

Brett moved away too.  We are still in touch from time to time as extended families are, our shared past is richer than what we hold in common at present.  He was thoughtful to call when Tanya died; he knew I would want to know.  I was not friends with Tanya well enough to book a flight and stand at her funeral; that’s not my style anyway.  But she meant enough to me that I walked my bike along the river awed by the recollection of her brilliant heart, mind and body.  After some time my eyes cleared, my breath drew regular again and I continued on my way, but my spirit was dampened.  Although Tanya’s light was extinguished three thousand miles away, her absence made the December night even darker than usual.

I think about Tanya a lot these days.  I could rail against the injustice of people dying before their time, of fate tripping up perfection, but I wasn’t there for the bad parts and they don’t cloud my memory.  For me, Tanya will always be a babe in a bikini on our deck with a terrific tan and a sharp word for any guy who misunderstands that brains can come in very alluring packages.  It is a testament to Tanya’s enduring presence that on a cold December night fifteen years later, even a guy like me can relish such a babe.

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Waterfire Haiti

Posted on 12/16/2012 by paulefallon

haiti-001For the past decade I made an annual pilgrimage to Providence, RI on a summer evening to experience Waterfire, an art installation that sounds simplistic, setting fire to wood stacked in iron braziers anchored to the middle of the Providence River, yet oozes sensory satisfaction as the four primal elements mingle in close proximity. My first visit happened on a whim, a detour on the way home from a day at the beach.  I was transfixed by how the fires reflected in the waters dappled surface, how they cackled against the new age music, how they filled the night not only with their light but with their pungent aroma.

Waterfire is a miracle of man’s domination. Less than two hundred years ago Providence, like many other industrial cities, burned to the ground regularly. But we developed masonry construction and fire departments and sprinkler systems and now fire is a threat we control.  The arc of human development is always to encounter an adversary, study it, confront it, tame it, and, once we have achieved mastery, play with it.  As children, every one of us was warned against playing with fire, and conquering that prohibition draws us to Waterfire.

Each summer I checked the Waterfire schedule, which grew to include most weekends, and journeyed to Providence to stroll along the riverside, low against the nearby buildings, tight to the water and flames and pungent air.  The event remains singularly uncommercial despite growing more popular every year.  Last summer the crowd was so thick my strolling was reduced to inching along shoulder to shoulder with the throng.

This summer I bailed.  The group I planned to go with ballooned to a small crowd, they made reservations at an expensive Italian restaurant before taking in the fires.  What had been a reverie of air and earth and fire and water had become an extravaganza; I do not enjoy such excess.

But 2012 refused to die away without a rejuvenating fire on water.  Tonight, in the starry blackness of the Haitian night, I strolled down to the beach after an exhaustive day in Port-au-Prince and before me lay a string of ten dugout canoes stretched along a single line, a hundred or two hundred feet apart.  The only marker of each canoe was the tiny flame flickering as it tread its position on the sea.  I asked a passing native what they were doing off shore in the calm night.  Fishing, he replied, pointing to the nets anchored on the beach and stretching out to each boat. The invisible fishermen bobbed peacefully in anticipation of the sea bounty sure to get entangled by the web of nets they cast.

Waterfire Haiti is just as spellbinding as Waterfire Providence; the odd juxtaposition of flames surrounded by the element that extinguishes them inspires reverie and awe.  But if Providence speaks to mankind’s domination, Haiti speaks to our accommodation with nature.  Waterfire Haiti is not art, it is survival.  Launching onto the sea in the dark in order to obtain essential food is risky.  I only hope the men in their boats feel serenity tethered to the shore by their nets and tethered to each other by their feeble light. Perhaps they even appreciate the splendor that their tiny beacons add to the starry night.

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Mission of Hope Sermon

Posted on 12/09/2012 by paulefallon

haiti-001Lex and Renee invited me to speak at their church on the last Sunday of my regular visits to Haiti.  We are planning to move classes into the new school in January.  Even though I tried to use simple words for translation, Gama got tongue tied a few times; there are so many English words without Creole equivalents.

Bonjou, zami mwen.

I have asked Pastor Lex and Renee to inscribe this Bible verse on the wall of your new school.  The Gospel according to Luke, Chapter 6, Verse 48:

He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.

I have spent the past year living among you, working with you to create a house well built.  It is a large house, with many rooms, and even though it is not complete, we have built enough that is strong and good and we can begin to use it.  Over time we will finish this part, then add more rooms.  The building will never be completely finished.  It will change and grow old with us; for it is so sturdy it will outlive the youngest person here today.

Every person in this church today is a person with strong beliefs.  We hold many beliefs in common.  We believe in man’s ability to improve his lot here on earth.  We believe that when we work together we can create something greater than when we labor alone.  We believe in constructing our buildings strong.

Some of our beliefs are different.  You believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.   That is a powerful belief.  It is a belief that brings you peace and brings you strength; it helps you face the difficulties in life and be strong in the face of adversity.

There are more than seven billion people in this world and there are thousands of ways people believe in god.  Some practice religion, some do not.  Some find peace in their faith, and make peace with people of other faiths.  Some people insist their religion is the only true faith; and they use it as an excuse to go to war. I believe in every faith that celebrates peace and I reject every faith that champions war.

There are as many ways to worship god as there are different countries and different cultures and different personalities. There are Buddhists and Christians and Hindus and Muslims and Jews. And within each of these religions they are many sects.  Among Christians alone there are Methodists and Baptists and Catholics and Fundamentalists and Evangelicals and Lutherans. And among evangelicals there are many, many churches, each with inspired leaders.

 

You are lucky here at Mission of Hope because you have Lex Edme, a truly inspired leader.  He is a man of great faith as well as a man of great action.  He is firm in what he believes, he is unwavering in his devotion to Jesus, and he guides this congregation with a clear vision.

But Lex is not just a man of faith; he is a man of wisdom.  In his wisdom he knows that this congregation, this community, this Mission of Hope cannot reach its full potential by itself.  In order to provide the church and the school and the opportunities the people of Grand Goave so deserve, Lex knows he must reach out to other evangelicals, he must reach out to other Christians, he must reach out to other religions, he must even reach out to those who practice no religion, because there is so much to be done here, and so much worth doing, and Lex knows the world is full of people with talent and energy who want to lend their hand here.

I have known Lex for many years now.  I love him very much.  I am thankful for the opportunity he gave me to come to Grand Goave and work among you.  You are some of the finest people I have ever met and you have allowed me to do some of the finest work I have ever done.  Not every pastor has the strength and courage to invite a non-believer into his fold but Lex is a man of strength and courage and Mission of Hope has a new school because of his vision.

I do not know when I will return to Grand Goave, but I will return.  We will complete your building together.  I hope it will be a place where your faith in Jesus Christ can grow stronger and stronger.  I also hope you will remember it was built by people with many different ideas about god.  I want your faith to turn solid as the foundation Luke tells us about in his gospel.  I also want you to remember that the reason our foundation is so strong is that we all built it together.

Thank you very much.  God bless you all.

 

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