Middle Management

Two months ago, JMU sent a spring break team to the DR for a 1 week outreach, like they do every year. This year was particularly exciting for me because I had 2 JMU students, CJ (the IV staff worker), and a bank president from Florida with me at my site. It was a great week for me and the students and they also made a lasting impact on my work here.

One afternoon during the week, I presented a problem I had that I needed them to solve: When I started the boys club it was with only about 10 boys and it was easy for me to find them each jobs every week and then be around to verify that they're doing them. However, over the past year as my main job (MicroBanks) started to take off, so did the boys site. 8 months into the club over 50 boys were involved it was impossible for me to find and verify so many jobs.

After some brainstorming they came up with a genius idea: Middle Management. I elect and train leaders (boys from the club) that are in charge of their own work crew. The leaders get paid for finding and overseeing the jobs of their crew. In turn the leaders get a Ryan Dollars salary plus a commission on every job successfully completed by their crew. They are given a total amount that their crew can earn each week and are responsible for choosing how much to pay for each job they selected and then who gets what job. They want to give their best workers the best paying jobs but they have to balance that with their younger workers who don't want to be taken advantage of.

Over the past 8 weeks I've been training the leaders about how it all works and about what it means to be a leader. We studied the life of Jesus to learn that leadership means service. Each week I help the boys manage problems in their group and assess them on their job quality. Every 10 weeks all the managers doing a good job will get to join me on a special trip to the movies, the beach or a baseball game.

It has been a complete success. I have 7 leaders, each with 5-member crews. I gave each of them a fancy padfolio to maintain all their records. It's wonderful, but also really funny, to see all these boys walking around El Callejon like little inspectors.

Pray that God would use all this to teach these boys about male leadership, which is something El Callejon desperately needs.


Josh and Will were the brains of the idea. While they were thinking of this great idea CJ was defacing my currency with pirate patches and cowboy hats.


Fill up 1 bag of trash from the street: $250 de Ryan


Francis and I before a bike ride. He has been my most faithful follower and God has really worked in his life through the site. He's in charge of his own crew, Los Fuertes, and he loves every minute of it.

Haiti Pictures

Some pictures from our trip...


At the border. People have set up all kinds of things to sell.


One of the largest tent communities we saw. All of these people lost their homes in the earthquake and are living in these tents indefinitely.


The remains of a building.


The tent community that we worked in.


Doing the "human knot" with the teenage girls.


Ryan dancing or fighting (not sure?) with one of the boys.




A view of the city and a collapsed home




The Presidential Palace. Not the best picture but you can see that it collapsed.


A 3 story building collapsed into a big mess.


Crowded streets


Ryan getting his face decorated with stickers


The teenage girls working on their purses made out of plastic bags and old jeans.



We took a lot more pictures, but hopefully this gives you and idea of what our trip was like and the current condition of Haiti. As Ryan said before....please keep praying for Haiti.

Haiti

Last week Caroline and I had the privelege to spend 4 days in Port-au-Prince, Haiti with 20 SI staff and their families. We worked with a tent "city" of 500 people living in the parking lot of a fallen down car dealership in the heart of Port-au-Prince. The trip was very "SI-style" in that we were divided into several sites to minister to different segments of the community (dentistry, construction, bread-making, and kids groups of different ages).

I worked with the teenage boys playing sports and other games. Our field was small and also doubled as the trash dump but we had a great time. The boys really loved the water balloon launcher I brought. I would launch water balloons about 100 feet in the air and they would try and catch them, resulting in a pint-sized shower each time. After each activity we had a short Bible lesson.

Caroline worked with teenage girls. The highlight for them was making hand bags out of old jeans and strips of plastic. They learned to make something beautiful from trash, a Bible lesson in it's self. The other Bible study they did I thought was brilliant. They taught the girls about how the Israelites fled from Egypt and had to start a whole new society with new rules, values and customs. Then Caroline (via their translator named Paper) shared how the girls are in a similar point in life. She asked them what values and rules they want to have in their new city. As a group they shared what was important to them and then wrote down their ideas. Here's what they wrote:

Leadership-We think our city needs leaders to be in charge and maintain rules
Respect-We think everyone should respect each other
Cleanliness-We want our city to be as clean as possible
Community-We want to work together in whatever we do
Prayer groups-We want to start and maintain prayer groups that meet together every day.

As I saw the destruction on every corner of Haiti, I couldn't stop thinking about what these girls value in their new city. It's been 3 months since the crisis and it's already an afterthought for most of the world, but somehow these Haitians have to start over. Where do they begin? The government is broken, the buildings are destroyed, their whole world has changed. What now?

That's all I thought the whole trip: What now? I felt like the initial shock was wearing off for everyone and that's the question they was asking. People's most basic needs are being met but they can't live in plastic tents forever. What now? The first task is a morbid one, finish destroying what the earthquake started. Before any rebuilding can be done, rubble must be removed. So goes the slow task of hacking at fallen buildings with a pick ax and then tossing the remains in a truck to be dumped in whatever open field isn't already filled with tents.

I noticed commerce was starting again. Since most the large businesses were destroyed small scale markets had formed along the street. Imagine taking everything out of a walmart and then selling it on both sides of a road the size of your driveway. It's not very efficient for consumers or cars. What now?

Now is the greatest opportunity for Christians to share the gospel in a tragically poor and historically dark place. My prayer is that as everyone from little girls to governments are forming new rules and values there would be Christians at their side to speak Truth into the process.

Pray for Haiti. Pray that God uses this tragedy to rebuild a country based on Him. Pictures to come soon.