Cold lunch

"The stove is out," Ryan told me yesterday, as I called the kids together and prepared to start school. "The gas lines somehow got disconnected. It's a miracle they didn't blow up the stove when they tried to light it this morning."

"Oh--that's going to make it difficult to cook lunch," I remarked. I wondered what they were going to do.

Lunch is cornmeal or rice with a sauce on top, usually of beans or fish broth or hot dog broth. It's not very palatable to eat raw. At home we would just make sandwiches or something, but there was nothing on the premises with which to make a cold lunch. No bread, no peanut butter, no corn flakes, no fruit, nothing that could be served without cooking.

But school was starting, and I threw myself into teaching with my usual energetic abandon, which gave me no room to worry about lunch.

About 11:00, school was interrupted by a rather large procession that walked through our schoolroom on the way to the kitchen. A bunch of guys were bringing in a huge cooler, several gallons of pure drinking water, armloads of bananas, piles of watermelons, mountains of Montrouis's famous rolls of bread, and even a big-screen TV.

There were two white guys among them who were strangers to me. I greeted them and thanked them. They were businessmen who come to Haiti on occasion, and they had learned about the creche on one of their visits. Now, they enjoy stopping in once in a while to bless the kids and the creche.

One of the things they brought was 250 pairs of underwear. You might say, "Oh, whoopie do...underwear!" but the fact is, we had an urgent need for underwear and had just been praying for it.

The water they brought was just in time, too. We were down to about half a bottle of drinking water.

They stayed for about half an hour and then left. We resumed school.

At the lunch break, guess what there was to eat?

Perfectly ripe bananas, heavenly sweet watermelons, and delicious bread and butter!

Thank you, God, for knowing our need and meeting it!