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It is Sunday morning as I write this last post. Don Ames parted company with the three of us in Atlanta and met his wife there. We continued on to Harrisburg. Upon arrival we discovered that each one of us had a checked bag still on the ground in Atlanta. So, after filing the baggage claims we drove to Bainbridge and Art continued on his way home to meet up with his family. Michael was feeling a bit under the weather, so decided to wait until morning to drive back to the Williamsport area. We should all eventually get our missed luggage delivered to our respective homes. Thank you for following along on the blog as we worked at Radio Lumiere. You can check out the Radio Lumiere website at the following address: http://www.radiolumiere.org/. Also, if you Google Radio Lumiere in the Internet, you will see a few photographs of some of us working there. I would not expect that you can understand Creole, but it is possible to even listen to the station on line. This is a good ministry and one worth checking in on from time to time. Thanks again for your support of us as we traveled and worked on the sites there in Haiti. This concludes our blog. Gary for the team.

Friday

It is now a hot and muggy Friday evening in Port-au-Prince. I just checked in on line with Delta and our flight tomorrow leaves P-a-P at 2:25 PM. Our Haitian driver will be here at 10:30 AM to take us to the airport. We have packed some of our bags and we are traveling a lot lighter since a lot of the weight we had coming in here was equipment that we have since installed onto the walls at Cote Plage (Radio Lumiere) or at Boutillier. The traffice today was again horrendous and we made an attempt at visiting the King's Hospital to do a site survey, but traffic congestion did not allow it. We may have enough information to do the estimate already, so we will continue to discuss it. We made it back to the radio station about 40 minutes later than we were expected. Once we arrived there the entire radio station staff treated us to a special Haitian lunch, complete with cake. The Director thanked us for our efforts for the ministry and we also thanked them for their hospitality and friendship. I think I speak for all of us in saying that this is a fine organization that has people who love the Lord and have a heart to share the Gospel with the Haitian people. We will always have fond memories of these folks here and are hopeful that any time we are able to return to Haiti for any project we might be able to check in and visit these folks again. Anyway, we are assured that we will see these people when we meet our Father in Heaven. Any further projects with Radio Lumiere will have to be at one of their transmitter sites around the country, as long as we did our work successfully at Cote Plage and Boutillier. This may be the final blog post from Haiti. Thank you for following us along as we have worked on Phase II of the project. Paul Shingledecker leaves for his home tomorrow also, and it has been a real blessing to spend these past two weeks with him. Remember the Haitian people. Many of them do not have much in the way of material things and t seems hard to have to survive in this sea of people with any dignity or sense of self esteem. But these people are as friendly as they come and we will miss them. See you Stateside tomorrow or Sunday, Lord willing. Gary for the Team

Winding down

Thursday we went to the tower again to mop up on our work there. After a call to a US representative for the FGWilson generator company to verify the wiring for the generator remote start, we were satisfied the system would work as planned. Why a manufacturer will not spell this information out in their service manuals is something I cannot fathom. The information we were looking at in the manual we had was not even close. In fact there were blog posts on the manufacturer's website from people asking for the exact same information we needed and no one from the company had the integrity to respond with an answer. Go figure! Anyway, we installed a few light fixtures on the inverter circuit, and tied in the wiring and ran our tests. The system worked flawlessly and we were satisfied. Then we cleaned up and loaded our tools for the journey down the mountain. We installed a recording power monitor to get one day of readings and will need to run up there Friday to pull the meter off. On our way down the mountain we stopped in Petionville to look at the Stereo92 building. Another US group has donated solar panels for this site and will be coming to Haiti in a few weeks to install them. We needed to size the Charge Controller and give suggestions for installation that this other team can utilize. Traffic from Petionville to Carrefour was absolutely horrendous! We hoped to reach the radio station by 5PM but it was just around 6 when we arrived. We went past one of the canals where yesterday there were men fishing for a woman's body who had fallen into the canal. There were men this time on the other side of the street still fishing for the body or for another one, we did not know which. Death is pretty normal here. In fact we went past the street leading to our villa and there was a funeral hearse and procession coming down from there to the main traffic jam to make it even worse. Makes one just think about the eternal consequences of the way we live our lives while we are here. Thank you for your prayers for us. It is now Friday morning and internet seems to be working. Today we will return to the tower, then stop by a hospital to look at some possible future I-TEC work, then we will be at the station by 2PM for them to send us off. They are very precious people and we feel it a privilege to be a small part of this ministry here to this great sea of people who need the Lord.

Another day on the mountain

Today was day 3 at Boutillier and we have yet to see the grid power on. We connected and programmed the inverter and took the transmitters down long enough to tie them in to inverter power and then we were able to shut the generator off to do the tie-in's there. The generator is now powering the inverter and is charging the bank of batteries. Praise the Lord for a good day and some accomplishment. Getting the inverter to start the generator is another issue we are working through, as the generator manufacturer has not made it easy. A phone call to the representative in Florida in the morning should get us the information we are looking for. Anyway we cleaned up pretty well at the site and have just our tools to bring down tomorrow. We are going to install some light fixtures in the morning and if we can get the inverter to start the generator we will be finished up there. I have pictures to share but no Internet, so will have to maybe put up a few in the morning. Thanks for your prayers and thoughts for us as we have traveled these many miles each day. We get to see all sides of the people of Haiti. There is great need here. But we also see God working. He is working in us, too.

Good day on the mountaintop

Today was a pretty good day at the Boutillier tower site. Unfortunately this is the second solid day without grid power up there, so the generator has been running all the time we have been up there. This makes for a lot of heat and noise issues. Today I wore ear plugs which helped a bit. Last night I was having trouble hearing after the entire day within 3-6' of the running generator. (No, it is not sound attenuated). We did shut the station and generator down for about 10 minutes to make some electrical modifications, but these are still temporary and we will have to do it again once I can actually work on the generator. Hopefully EDH will turn the power back on so the generator can be idle and this work will get done in short order. If not, then we will shut the station down for a an extended period tomorrow and make the changes anyway. We were able to get the battery banks tied into the Inverter and we are hoping for power tomorrow to charge the battery bank. One way or another, Wednesday is the day for bringing the batteries on line and doing some cleaning up. If pictures appear on this post it is because the Internet is better. If not, I will post some when I can get to the radio station tomorrow or Thursday. Know for sure that the Lord has been blessing us in our times fo fellowship as a team as well as with the Haitian workers here who do love the Lord. The traveling has also been long each day, but in spite of seeing most Haitian trucks and cars looking like they have been in numerous accidents we have not witnessed a single crash. Maybe some close calls, but even road rage does not seem to be an issue here. We are still here for 4 days though, so would appreciate your continued prayers.

2nd Job 2nd Week

Today we went up to the Boutillier tower site to begin work. It involved a trip to Eko Depot for more parts. That took about 4 hours or so. We spent a solid hour in traffic on the way there. The traffic to Petionville was also very heavy, but we were all entrenched in work up there by about noon. We installed the batteries that have been delivered so far, but not all have arrived and we are hopeful to see the rest tomorrow. We installed some panels on the wall, and since EDH (Electricite deHaiti the Haitian Utility) was off line all the time we were there we were able to tie in some of the leads while they were not turned on rather than the expected need to tie them in "hot". This was a blessing. We had to leave up there by about 3:30 PM to come down as it started to rain and several of us were going to be riding in the open back of the pickup truck in the rain. We are going to leave earlier tomorrow morning and are hopeful that the time spent there will be very fruitful. The only picture I took today was of a new Muslim mosque under construction, seemingly a very new thing in Haiti.

A New Week

Today we went to the House Church again for our church service. It was a blessing. After the service we ate lunch at a nearby restaurant that the team in January had stopped at. The food was very good but still reasonably priced. After lunch we drove through some of the city that is still showing signs of great destruction from the earthquake. Much of the city is getting very well cleaned up and the electrical service appears to be strong throughout the entire city. The streets leave a lot to be desired, but they are also being worked on all the time. There is great hope for this city.