Au Cadet Church Project

Au Cadet is a remote mountain village approx 7 miles from Fort Jacque. The roads are so poor that the 7 mile portion of the trip takes over 2 hours to traverse. Although hard to imagine, the people there are poorer than most with little hope for improvement of their circumstances. Years ago, CFM honored Pastor Occius request to build a temporary stick church to help meet the spiritual needs of these people.  We supported a minister their and over time we provided elementary school classes for the children. Many of you have seen the picture of the chalkboard leaning against a tree with children in front of it, eager to learn. Our own Genel (raised in the boys orphanage) was our teacher their.  In late 2004 the board decided to start a memorial fund in memory of Travis Kennell to build a larger safer permanent church/school at this location.  In the mean time the residents have been utilizing the overcrowded make-shift stick church.  This building project has been plagued with hurdles ranging from extreme difficulty with accessibility by vehicle to political unrest.  Several other projects moved into priority status because they were more easily accomplished being in Port Au Prince.  Mama Sommers Girls Orphanage project began to take form, the Papa Sommers Boys Orphanage makeover was tackled approx a year ago, and our Pastor Occius home improvements were nearly completed this year.

Since the Au Cadet land was purchased in 2005, we began the construction with leveling two places for the Construction Depot and Cistern, and the New Church/School.  Claude oversaw the construction of the cistern project, and that is where we left off awaiting additional funding and transportation capacity.  This past year we were able to purchase an excellent used 4WD truck that was shipped to Haiti to be used for our construction projects starting with Au Cadet. With the other projects primarily completed, the ability to access Au Cadet with the new truck, and word that a hurricane had toppled the former stick church earlier in 2009… we stepped up the effort to get the new church project moving again. Over Thanksgiving a work team dubbed “Kennell Krew” arrived in Haiti to establish the first building on the Au Cadet site. The team of six traveled the grueling roads to this remote location, stopping three times along the way to repack their load of materials. On arrival we hired several women to procure water, a local man to procure sand and some children to collect small stones in buckets… all needed to mix cement to make and secure the support columns. The first half of the Depot was constructed in approx 10 hrs. including an overnight stay and sharing a meal of rice and beans cooked by the Haitians. A simple plan designed originally to build economic houses in Pine Forest had its début.  The next stage is to build the other half of the depot, roof the adjacent cistern, and gutter both roofs to divert water into the cistern. Water is initially needed for construction purposes, but will be a significant blessing to this village post-construction, as their closest water supply is miles away and has to be retrieved on foot with 5 gal buckets daily.

Claude is formulating current estimates to build the church/school structure in stages, using variable designs for efficiency and longevity.  Once completed; we envision a playground full of children with smiles on their faces, mothers drawing water from the cistern, neatly dressed families attending Sunday services, and a teacher and Pastor living on site in the “depot” to provide their services and care for the facility.

This entry was posted on April 30, 2010 at 9:10 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Mission Work by krystle No Comments Yet