2 Haiti 4 Him

The Heckman family serving the Lord in Haiti at Emmaus Biblical Seminary

Saturday, June 10, 2017

My Time in Fauche

Some of you know I just got back from a little internship with a family up in Fauche. My experience with the Thedes was amazing! They have a 16 year old daughter, Anna, who I'm already friends with so we had lots of fun together. 

The first day, Anna and I ventured down to the clinic on campus. 

While waiting for the doctor to come, we visited the dentist.  I thought, at first, these rooms in the picture below were bathrooms. But they were doctor/dentist offices.

 Now most of you know I recently translated for a dentist for a week while the medical team was here. So I have seen MANY a tooth pulled and I am very familiar with your average dental office. I watched as he numbed the sweet old woman's mouth, and after a couple minutes he went in to pull the tooth. Out the tooth came (with impressive speed I might add), and he went back in to check for pieces of tooth still hiding in her gums. Simple. I turn to see Anna sitting on the floor with her head between her knees. "Uhh, are you okay??" She quickly informs me that she had never seen a tooth pulled. "I figured I might as well get on the floor that way I don't hit my head on the way down." Oh the joys of the medical field.

 "What we need to know about chikungunya" I love these posters. Informing people of the symptoms of sicknesses and how to prevent them.

This is the clinic we spent the morning in. The next day we followed the doctor as he checked on a patient that had spent the night in the clinic on an IV. She was feeling much better and looked pretty good. 

Tuesday morning, Anna and I woke up super early to hike the mountain behind her house and hopefully catch the sunrise.

Everything was perfectly still and quiet. We hardly met anyone on the way. The people we did come across were old farmers on the way to their fields. 


It was gorgeous. I was worried we were gonna miss the sunrise when the sky started to change colors...

But we made it! 

The sun began to peek at us from its hiding spot behind the mountain across from ours.

Anna and I continued to climb up until we reached an old cell tower at the highest point on the hill.

The sun finally rose!


 Quickly everything was bright and awake.


Anna and I <3

One thing I enjoyed doing while I was there was touring their garden. 

LOVE this hibiscus.

Cory, Anna's dad, is an agronomist and has so many cool plants to look at and lots of interesting fruit to try. This one is called a torch flower.

So pretty.


These are the pods from a "lipstick tree" which as you may have guessed by their name, are used to make the pigment in some lipsticks. 

I dig the pink tips on these birds of paradise flowers.


This is edible hibiscus, which Anna made me a smoothie out of for me to try.

These remind me of Dr. Suess books...

Cory's nursery...


These are velvet apples, which are strange at first but they grow on you.

These are breadnuts, which are high in protein and a staple in the Thede household.

These are called Ticheri (little sweeties) and they were invented by the wife of a local baker. They are hard little pieces of dough that are fun to snack on or add to soup.

And if you've never seen one, this is a starfruit.

We found out that Anna was in a newspaper by one of her volleyball teammates while I was there. I didn't even know Haiti had a newspaper...

I liked this poster of all the tropical fruits you can find around. Anna told me which ones were good too!

The house of hope.

One other thing we did this past week was clean their guest house since they had visitors coming on Friday! We swept, mopped (4 times to be exact), rearranged some furniture and made beds.

We also picked some flowers to make a bouquet to brighten up the place!

I think it turned out nicely...

On their campus they have a big half-finished church. Anna and I measured the whole thing for her momma, all the sides and both diagonals.

We had some little helpers too :) 

This was no easy feat since there's a field of thorns and ant piles in the middle 

And we ended up covered in seeds.


Kristie let me borrow her book to read that week. It was all about the medical myths that they believe in Haiti, and it was very interesting.  

I don't know if you can see them, but there are two men sawing away at a large hunk of mahogany. 

We played lots of different games, and one of the ones I found quite entertaining was mini Uno. 
(and YES it is very hard to hold the cards and shuffle lol)

We had a great week together and I'm so thankful for the time I got to spend in Fauche with the Thede family! 

Thanks for reading :)