Honey Bee Flies to Haiti, Part 3

Honey is back again!  Let's hear more about his trip to Haiti.

 

On our first full day in Haiti we took a tour of the mission compound where we stayed as well as a tour of the village that the compound was in. It was about 9:00 AM when we started our tour and women from the village were in the process of making the food for that day's meal. Children's Lifeline International, the mission we went to, provides one meal for approximately 9,000 kids a day. In addition to feeding the children from the village that the mission is in, the mission sends out buckets of food (seen below) to many other local villages. 

 

Each village feeds about 500 kids, give or take, so assume that the mission sends food to about 15-20 local villages. All of the food is prepared in the kitchen of the mission in the large cooking bowls seen here, and then placed in the buckets.



 

The kitchen that the women were cooking in was an open kitchen. It did not have a complete wall on the front of the kitchen and the back of the kitchen had an opening at the top of the wall. In the picture below, if you look carefully you can see a lost chicken under the cooking vats on the left side of the picture.



 

Each meal consisted of a portion of rice and a piece of bread that was about 3-4 inches cubed. This picture shows the bread before it is cooked in the oven. What does the oven look like you ask?

 

The mission actually owns two solar ovens that are used to bake the bread. It was so hot in Haiti that I felt like they could just set the bread out on a sidewalk to bake it, but the oven was used instead. During the storm that went through Haiti in September, one of the solar ovens was damaged. As far as I know, enough money has been raised to fix that oven though.

 

This is what a meal looked like when it was served. The servings were fairly large portions and I saw some kids putting rice into containers to take home with them to eat later. We found out that they were not supposed to do that but no one would really stop them from doing so.

While the kids were eating at the canteen, one of the other fathers that was along on the trip came up to me and said, "I guess we can't tell our kids anymore that there are starving children in Haiti that would love to have your food." The reason he said that is because a great deal of the kids would actually throw away some of their food which was surprising since it was likely the only meal that a majority of the kids would eat that day. Someone else pointed out though that since the kids eat so little food, they don't know any different. They aren't used to overeating like most Americans do.

 

Stay tuned for more on Honey's trip to Haiti.