March Break (By Teagan)

In september I did a presentation about Haiti to my History class. At the end of that presentation my teacher asked me if I could look into sponsoring a child at the Mission of Hope school. He also asked me if I could try to start to organize a mission trip down to Haiti for March Break. So I jumped at the opportunity. I worked with 2 of my friends to set up the sponsorship, and we raised $150 in the first two weeks, we chose to sponsor a girl who was the same age as us, but a grade younger.

After that I worked with another 2 of my friends (one the same as who I worked with for the sponsorship) and we started to plan the mission trip. Our History teacher set it all up with the school board, and he got all the flights and stuff. Then he had to pick the team. Our history class got first dibs, there were 10 people who applied from that class (me included), there were 8 girls, and 2 guys. After that we had to open up the trip to the other people in our grade. There were only 3 spots left. I think my teacher got about 10 applications for those 3 spots, and out of those spots he picked 2 girls and 1 guy. So now the team was picked, 10 girls, and 3 boys ( ...yeah we kinda out number them). Me and my two friends who were helping me organize this, set up meetings for us to give everyone the information on Haiti, and on the Mission of Hope.

After those meetings our history teacher asked us to organize an orientation retreat. Now if anyone has been to a retreat, you know that is is pretty organized, and there are activities, and meals planned for the whole 2 days. Most retreats I've been on there were about 200 kids, and about 50 staff members, and usually it was at a camp. Now imagine that on a much smaller scale of 13 kids, at my house, and 3 people to organize. So we planned this retreat like there was no tomorrow! Everyone arrived at 2:00 on the Monday afternoon, and they were planned to leave at 8:00 the next night. So this was gonna be a looong two days, if everything didn't go as planned. We had planned to have some games, introduction to Haiti, some worship, some creole lessons, some devotions, some group discussions, some rules, and even waking everyone up with a blow horn (which actually worked out quite nicely).

So everyone came to my house on january 2nd. I wasn't exactly sure how the retreat was going to turn out, but we had planned as best we could. And in the end it was AMAZING! Everything turned out perfect, and even better than I had hoped it would! We all grew close enough to share deep testimonies, and enough to make fools of ourselves while trying to learn creole. And lets just say that overall we had a really good time!

I am getting so excited to go to Haiti in March, and so is everyone else on the team, which makes me really happy.