DAY 6 (January 7, 2012)

This morning/afternoon we took some time to site see the city.  We first drove to the Capital building where the President (a/k/a “Seet Mickey”) used to reside before the destruction from the earthquake took place.  It was crazy to see what a beautiful building it was and how much damage occurred from the earthquake.  We asked Pastor Luc about how long the earthquake lasted and he stated that it lasted for maybe only 10 seconds.  Really, ten seconds and so much damage was done to this entire city?  It was just so hard to fathom the magnitude.  Just down the street from the capital building we also saw a monument that was built in 2004 (I believe) that signified their 200 years of Independence.  We then hopped back into the vehicles and drove down the road away and past what used to be a beautiful huge catholic church that used to have all kinds of stained glass windows.  Parts of the physical structure still remain today, but as you can imagine all of the stained glass was destroyed as a result of the earthquake.  We then headed to a local market where several vendors had handcrafted items lined up to buy.  We took some time to do some shopping for souvenirs and then headed back to the hotel.  We ate some lunch, got cleaned up and headed to the grounds early tonight to avoid the crazy traffic we ran into last night.  We got there pretty quickly, got everything set up and organized and were able to get a nice sound check in before the Haitian Band arrived and started the festival out.  The Haitian band began to play and sing and kid you not, their first song lasted 22 minutes…yes 22 minutes.  I don’t know that I have ever heard a song that long before-wow.  They were great singers but boy did it feel like it went on forever.  Our set went well tonight, Rachelle Hope’s set went well, and after Rachelle Hope’s set both bands joined together and we shared the song “Come Now Is the Time To Worship”.   Tonight Josh also shared his personal testimony and Allan spoke on “Faith”.   As an analogy for faith, Allan had Jon Greer (the BMX biker that came along with our team) jump over 15 feet in the air over him as he stood on the ramp.  He wanted to explain how we need to have faith even though sometimes we may be afraid.  The crowd was pretty excited.  Tonight I’d say the crowd about doubled to tripled in size, and during the Altar call MANY raised their hands to receive Christ.  It just gave me chills as I stood on stage and saw the thousands of hands raised and waving in the air to accept Christ as their personal Lord and Savior.  Jon then finished off the night by doing several bike tricks-one of which included the finale, a back flip.  Crowd control was pretty difficult tonight, even more so than last night.  We needed more security officers to keep the crowd back and out of the path as Jon needed to enough room to build up his speed for jumping the ramp and the rope we had tied up was not long enough to keep the sides of the crowd from pushing in.  Jon managed to make work of the room he had and just missed running into a group of people as he landed the tricks at the other side of the ramp.  Tonight a Haitian biker-Gino also joined Jon in doing bike tricks.  It was neat to see different races come together by means of what their hobby was-biking.  Just to see a connection and relationship form between these two was cool.  We were pretty tired after a busy night, but we headed back to the hotel, had devotions and debriefed as a group before heading to bed.