Haiti Child Sponsorship has been operating for nearly 50 years in this building!

We have started to renovate and expand the Haiti HarvestCall Child Sponsorship office! The office will be about five times larger when completed. There will be more offices, a large center hall and waiting room, a large storage room, a full kitchen, a conference/training room, a library/computer center and indoor restrooms for the kids. We are looking forward to finally having the space to better serve the needs of the kids in the Child Sponsorship program. It is a blessing to watch the building start to take shape! Praise God!

Administrator Marie Lucie Jeune stands in front of the original office!

The new concept for the front! The right third of the building and the second floor will be added.

Perched high on the same hill for the last 45 years, this week finally brought the conclusion to the use of this building! Several small changes and updates had been made over the years, but the office is by and large unchanged from the original. It was finally time to move as it was getting too dusty and too loud to work, and the existing building will soon be integrated into the larger plan. We will be moving to another space less than a half mile down the road until the building is completed.

A view of the back of the building shows the high hill we are perched on!

The construction is moving fast even though the Haitian way is totally without machinery. They dig through rock with pick-axes and broken-off shovels to make holes for the foundation and they cut out a huge stump with only axes and machetes. The workers are hand-mixing concrete in the sun all day and carrying rocks for the foundation and blocks for the walls for weeks on end. It is not a very safe working environment as many activities are happening at once, they are tripping around holes and they generally work without good shoes, gloves or eye protection. The day they were swinging machetes at the stump several had no shoes on…I could hardly watch.

Workers hand-dug 18 of these holes for the foundation work!

Cutting out a stump by hand!

Happy success at the end of the day!

Hand-tied rebar pillars ready for the foundation!

The busy yard full of workers and materials!

The hand-mixing of concrete is continuous!

Setting up the first pillar! Bos Sancave (on the right) is the construction manager we work with!

Foundation walls going up!

Foundation in place, concrete being hand-poured!

Block walls starting to rise!

It is raining in the distance but it’s work as usual here!

Foundation work continues for the new back wing going up next!

This drawing for the back shows the large new meeting room wing that is being planned!

All said and done, the project will take nearly 10,000 blocks, 3,175 sacks of concrete and 295 truck loads of rock, sand and gravel, most of that mixed by hand and then carted to the site to be dumped. It is an incredible amount of rock and concrete!

We will provide updates as the construction moves along. Thanks to several friends and churches, some of the needed items have already been contributed! If anyone is interested in donating for the remodel, send your check to:

HarvestCall Child Sponsorship
PO Box 3797
West Lafayette, IN 47996