Dear Friends and Family:

 Greetings from the Heathrow Airport where I (Zach) am on my way to Amsterdam for my annual trip to meet with my Ph.D. advisor.  October has been an unbelievably busy and incredibly successful month for our ministry despite some very challenging moments.  During this month we have dedicated two new churches, done a three-year strategic plan, held a three-day-long TLT training conference for 60 church leaders, received a visiting delegation from Back to God Ministries International to discuss the future of the Perspectives Reformees ministry in Haiti, received a visiting team from Lakeside CRC (Alto, MI) for a week, and completed our first quarter reports.  For the next 10 days while Zach is in Amsterdam, he hopes to “burn the midnight oil” to complete a chapter of his dissertation. Honestly, we are completely exhausted.  Please pray for grace and patience to make it through this very challenging time.

Please give thanks for:

-A successful Timothy Leadership Training Conference in October where 60 leaders dug deeply into Scripture to learn key ministry skills.  Please see our blog for pictures and stories about this event.
-A blessed visit from a team representing Lakeside CRC.  We visited Thomassique and witnessed the dedication of the Gwo Kajou church building, saw many newly dug latrines, talked with beneficiaries of the programs.
-The development of a new three-year Strategic Plan for Sous Espwa.  This month we redid our vision, mission, and strategic objectives which is no small achievement for a team as diverse as ours.
-Good health and safety for our family and all our visitors.

Please pray for:

-We have felt “under attack” in October by many strange coincidences (including a generator breakdown and a poisoning of our dogs) that have attempted to steal our peace of mind this month.  Pray that God will give us peace and trust in his provision.
-The three-year evaluation of the Christian Reformed Church in Haiti which will occur in November.  A big part of our job is working with this Haitian denomination.  Pray that God will bless the evaluation.
-Our ministry team as we struggle to come up with our 2014-15 budget.  As always, resources are limited and the needs are great.
-Safety and blessing for our family while Zach is gone to the Netherlands and Sharon will be single-parenting.

 FOR MORE PICTURES, STORIES, AND INFORMATION ABOUT OUR MINISTRY AND FAMILY, PLEASE SEE OUR BLOG AT segaarking.blogspot.com

Thanks for your prayers and support,

Zachary, Sharon, Hannah, Isaiah, Vivian and Esther Segaar-King

Missionaries to Haiti
Christian Reformed World Missions

 

Calvary Assembly of God gave bunk-beds to our family!

Hannah enjoys mummy-wrapping at her birthday party in October.

The twins celebrate their 8th birthday,

Timothy Leadership Training Advances

This October we brought together about 60 leaders from all over Haiti for our biannual Timothy Leadership Training (TLT) Conference.  We had our largest graduating class of 11 (two in level two and nine in level one).  It is not easy to graduate from TLT as graduating from level one requires completing at least one year of training in the local church and completing many practical work-plans that the participants develop to apply what they learn to their ministry context.  We were really excited by the story of Doris Falante, a youth leader in Jacmel.  After completing the material on Christian Stewardship, Doris decided to organize the youth in his church to hold their own “gastronomic and artisanal fair” in Jacmel at time when many tourists visit.  The youth, who are almost all unemployed, discovered gifts they didn’t know they had in cooking and art and many wares and much food was sold.  Also, Doris decided to teach the church leadership about the importance of Christian giving, planning to increase the overall offerings of the church by 15%.  After Doris’ efforts, the offerings increased by 30% and there was money left-over to organize church activities.  Furthermore, Doris developed a plan to encourage young people to visit the sick and home-bound.  Doris got his whole youth group involved in the visitation which was an unbelievable encouragement to the suffering of the congregation who never expected that the young and healthy would take time to visit and pray for them!

Looking for a Few Good Teams!

We are looking for a few good teams!  An important part of our ministry is recruiting and receiving volunteers for Service and Learning Teams and Church Partnerships teams.  These two kinds of teams are vital to our ministry for several reasons.  First, they inform our supporters of how to better pray and lend a hand to our ministry in Haiti.  Secondly, they provide visitors an opportunity to learn about themselves and their own faith through the lens of developing relationships with people from another culture who share their faith in Christ.  Thirdly, teams are an important mechanism for funding our special construction and development projects in Haiti.  Service and Learning teams are focused on learning about Haitian culture and ministry.  They also have a service project which has a construction component as we are trying to complete the conference center for our partner, the Ministry for Christian Development.  Teams that are interested in Church Partnerships often visit from 5-7 days and spend focused time learning about our ministry and a community in Haiti.  We hope that after several visits, such teams will undertake a church-to-church or a church-to-community relationship that will include communication, visits, and eventually, shared projects.  We are so thankful for a team from Lakeside CRC of Alto, MI that visited us in the month of October.  They have developed a relationship with the CRC of Haiti churches from Thomassique over the last three years.  It has been an awesome growing experience for both Lakeside and Thomassique.  Currently, Lakeside is doing a project in Thomassique that includes church construction, latrine construction, a justice program, a leadership training program and microcredit.  Please prayerfully consider how your church would like to participate in sending a team to Haiti!

One of the Lakeside team members on the motorcycle that they helped purchase for the CRC of Haiti

A picture of the team that visited Haiti in October, 2013

The interior of  the Savann Plat church that Lakeside will assist the CRC of Haiti to construct.

Things You’ve Never Seen on a Motorcycle

After living in Haiti for eight years, we’ve seen a lot.  But here’s one thing we’ve never seen before-- motorcycle carrying a coffin.  Actually, coffin-making is a pretty big business in Haiti.  In fact, the organization that made all of World-Renew’s 3,500 houses for earthquake survivors in Haiti used to make coffins and cabinets before the 2010 earthquake.  Also, it is very common to find carpenters making coffins by hand throughout Haiti.  It is normal for Haitians to take massive loans and exhaust their savings to pay for a funeral for a loved-one.  We have often thought how ironic it is that the dead burden the living with such crushing debt.  However, there is a social expectation that the family of the deceased will provide a significant amount of food for family and friends.  Of course, funerals are big-business in North America, with families often resorting to insurance policies to cover the burdensome costs of a funeral.  However, regardless whether we are buried in a tuxedo in a beautiful casket or in an a wooden box (or urn), the one thing that matters most about dying is what will happen on the day that Christ returns and the dead are raised.  On that day, only our eternal security in Christ will matter!

Volunteering for the Glory of God

A group of PRIHA volunteers, Zachary, and two representatives from the BTGMI office, Nzuzi Lukombo and Curt Selles.

No matter where you are in the world, trying to run an organization through volunteers is pretty much like the famous cartoon of a caveman pushing a cart with square wheels.  It can be difficult to get things going!  But, there are a lot of advantages to volunteers.  For one, you can be sure that, in the absence of a monetary incentive, volunteers have a vision for the work that they are doing.  Second, with volunteers, meager resources can be greatly stretched.  Our media ministry, Perspectives Reformees Internationales d' Haiti (PRIHA), a ministry of Back to God Ministries International (BTGMI), runs almost entirely on volunteers.  There are volunteer promoters who recruit students for PRIHA's bible-study-by-correspondence.  There are volunteer graders that correct each answer of the more than 1500 participants' bible studies.  There are the volunteers that listen to Pastor Paul Mpindi's messages on each of the 30+ radio stations that broadcast Perspectives Reformees throughout Haiti (the volunteer listeners fill out a report and send it back to the PRIHA office to inform us whether the stations are broadcasting the messages as contracted).  There are volunteers who bind and staple thousands of photocopies of the bible study to be distributed.  In the end, volunteers such as the ones pictured above, carry the load of ministry and dramatically decrease the funds needed to reach Haitians through media with the live-saving Gospel message.  Thank you, volunteers!

September 26, a Day of Disaster for Haitian-Dominicans

On September 26, the Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic (DR) issued what is nothing less than an absolute legal disaster for persons of Haitian descent living within its jurisdiction.  The Court handed down a ruling stripping citizenship from descendants of Haitians who entered into Haiti illegally from 1929 onwards.  Haitians and Dominicans share a common history of colonialism, with the French settling Haiti and the Spanish settling the DR (originally the entire island of Hispaniola, including Haiti and the DR was under Spanish domination, until the western third of the island was ceded to France as part of a treaty).  During the twentieth century, the DR came to dominate Hispaniola economically and politically as Haiti descended into political and social turmoil.  It was during the early twentieth century that hundreds of thousands of Haitians entered the DR (either voluntarily or forcibly) to work in the vast Dominican sugar-cane plantations where they became effectively indentured servants.  In fact, on many occasions, Dominican cane-cutting bosses abducted or tricked Haitians into crossing the border, only to later forcibly remove them at the end of the cane-cutting season.  Other Haitians were trapped in the plantations, where they and their children became stateless refugees living under deplorable conditions.  Today, the children of undocumented Haitian immigrants in the DR are not issued birth certificates, barring them from legally marrying, attending school, working, or obtaining voter registration and driver's licenses.  The DR's 2010 constitution denied citizenship to descendants of Haitians born to undocumented parents.  However, the Supreme Court retroactively applied this principle to persons born in the DR since 1929.  Underneath the ruling is the continuing fear among the Dominican political establishment that the Latin American country will be engulfed by its Kreyol-speaking neighbor.  And quite honestly, there is a considerable amount of old-fashioned racism against the predominantly African Haitians among Dominicans today.  What does such a ruling mean to the hundreds of thousands of persons of Haitian descent living in the DR, many of whom are second and third generation citizens?  First it means that such persons can have their legal documentation confiscated and can be deported at any moment.  Secondly, due to the impossibility of deporting so many of its citizens, the Dominican government will only be able to selectively enforce this ruling, giving opportunity for extortion, bribery and all kinds of corruption.  Please pray that the Dominican government would change course and protect the descendants of Haitians who cannot be held accountable for the decisions of their parents to immigrate illegally or otherwise (the Supreme Court's decision cannot be repealed).  Pray also that God will break down the barrier of hate between Dominicans and their Haitian neighbors. 

Segaar-King September Ministry Report

Dear Friends and Family

Greetings!  Yesterday was a great day of celebration on the Haiti field.  After nearly a quarter of a century of trying to purchase property and build a church, Jacquet Christian Reformed Church, one of the founding congregations of the Christian Reformed Church of Haiti (CRCH), celebrated the dedication of its new church building.  We had many special visitors present including representatives from Trinity CRC of Goderich, Ontario and SON-BEAM International, two key donors.  Also, the founding pastor of the Jacquet Church, Obelto Cheribin, came from Orlando with his entire family, to participate in the event.  Finally, two former CRWM missionaries who played a key role in the early life of Jacquet Church, Dan Vanden Hoek and Ray and Gladys Brinks, made the trip from Michigan to Haiti.  Early on Sunday morning, several hundred members, well-wishers and a delegation of the board of the CRCH, departed the old Jacquet building in the company of a marching band, and marched through heavy traffic to reach the new building which is half a mile away.  Upon arrival and the cutting of the ribbon at the door, we persevered through a six-hour church service (eight-and-half hours including the processional), which was a record for us.  In addition to the donors, Zach was presented with a plaque for his work in coordinating the effort which resulted in the new church.  Finally, the building was dedicated and the hungry attenders feasted on chicken, rice and beans, and many other Haitian delicacies.  Please see a few pictures attached below.

 

Please pray for:

-Wisdom and unity for our combined country ministry team as we develop a new three-year strategic plan in October.
-Timothy Leadership Training on 16-18 October.  We are presenting a new material on community development.
-A visit from a delegation of Back to God Ministries International representatives (including the director) to see the work of Perspectives Reformees (the French-language radio ministry).
-Safety as Zach travels to the Netherlands for his doctoral work at the end of October and patience for Sharon as she will be very busy with work, children and home.

FOR MORE PICTURES, STORIES, AND INFORMATION ABOUT OUR MINISTRY AND FAMILY, PLEASE SEE OUR BLOG AT segaarking.blogspot.com

Thanks for your prayers and support,

Zachary, Sharon, Hannah, Isaiah, Vivian and Esther Segaar-King
Missionaries to Haiti
Christian Reformed World Missions