Transition is a weird thing. You are trained on it, you read about it, you hear about it from countless others and yet until you actually go through it, you can’t fully understand and process what all comes with TRANSITION! Moving to Haiti was a BIG event, a big life change for our family and transition has been the process of us adjusting to that.

The first several months, including the holidays, had some tough moments for our family as we missed everyone and everything we held dear back where we lived all of our lives up until this point.

It has been so REFRESHING this past month, in January, to feel like we have taken a new step in our transition. We still have our moments for sure, and I am sure we have many to come but oh the beauty we have found in this month.

We feel like we are finding our FEET here, our groove 😉 We are slowly building our circle more here, which helps us feel more connected. It will never take away from the family & friends we miss and love dearly back in the states but we praise God for the brothers & sisters we have here that we get to work with daily.

We were both able to serve with teams in January. Jim helped the first team of the year, who stayed local in our area to help build a home for a very deserving momma of 6 children. April went out a few weeks later with a church from Nebraska to Policard, which is high up in the mountains here in Haiti. We get to help be the “bridge” between both cultures & languages. We are praising God for two people that came to know the Lord in Policard! Countless lives have been encouraged, changed for eternity and given hope this month through the three teams we had that came here.

When not out with teams Jim helps with any welding projects, other projects they give him around the office and depot and is the one that helps fix the community internet issues when things go wrong.  He also is taking language lessons and helping teach April how to drive in Haiti. He also helps with the boys homework after school and other family happenings in the evenings. He also drives to the local airport almost weekly to help pick up our community mail from Agape Missionary pilots.

While not out with teams, April spends half days at the office working with the Hope for Kidz team, taking pictures of the day to day happenings with RMI to share on social media and occasionally going out on day trips where teams are, to capture with photography what they are doing. She is focusing on learning the language and learning how to drive here in Haiti as well. The second half involves helping the boys with homework, playing with Zeke and just being a momma!

The boys are so loved here by the RMI staff. The teams have been so kind with them too and there are usually a few from each of the teams that really love spending time playing with the boys and helping them. Our boys talk about it and really appreciate it, they can tell when adults are “kid people”. One lady was a momma of 4 or 5 boys and she let them talk her leg off one lunch, about sea creatures, Wild Kratts & Coyote Peterson. She became famous in their eyes when she shared she knew all those things too and that one of her sons was on an episode of Coyote Peterson!

On non-team weeks, during the week days we get up around 6:30 and get the boys to school by 8 and we head to the RMI office for morning devotions before we start our day. We pick up the boys at 1pm from school and have lunch outside with our house staff. One of the things we love is holding hands together and praying before we eat lunch. The rest of the day consists of homework, and other community events we may be a part of and family time. Team weeks, it looks a LOT different and is a lot busier but we love it!

We are so grateful that our solar system is all installed and has been providing electric for us beautifully. This came at the perfect time because of some things here where we live and the house we live in and so we thank God so much for providing us with solar system. What a blessing it has already been to our family.

We PRAISE God that we are in contract again with our home. We are praying it goes through this time on the buyers end and all works out so our home can be sold!!! Please pray with us for the complete sale of our home. Thank you so much!

We praise God for the language we have learned in the past almost 6 months. We have a long ways to go but it’s so neat to see where we have come. When April was out with the team a week ago, she teared up one time as they were singing and she realized she knew enough of the words to understand what the song was about.

We have so much to be thankful for. He has shown us so many things along this journey here in Haiti and our lives are forever changed because of it.

We love you all & will never be able to share with you enough, how much it means to us that you are praying for us!

Love,

The Starkeys

“Our hope is not in the New Year but in the One who makes all things new!”

What a year it has been!

In the beginning of 2019 we didn’t have a move date yet and we were still raising support. Fast forward 7 months later and we were loading our container to be sent over to Haiti so it could arrive before we did the following month. When we look back on this past year there is one resounding theme that keeps coming to mind…ONLY GOD! Only God could have gotten us to this point of moving our family to Haiti, only God could be the one who gave us such peace and unity in what we were doing, only God could do what He did in our hearts in the first four months we have been here. So much change has happened in our lives this past year, more than ever before in our lives and God has walked every single step with us.

We love knowing as we enter this new year in our new home in Haiti, entering our fifth month here on the field, that God is the One who makes all things NEW, not really a New Year. He is the One going before us, before all that RMI does, He is the one who knows every single thing that will come our way this year and we are so grateful that we have this HOPE IN HIM! In Him is peace…in Him is love…in Him is kindness…in Him is joy…in Him is all we need!!! We have felt that more than ever the past four months here in Haiti.

(SIDE NOTE: The top image is from RMI’s annual Christmas celebration held at the Zanglais Ministry Center. It was a beautiful day held with all RMI Haiti staff, celebrating all that God has done this past year. The second picture is of our family being silly with reindeer antlers we made around Christmas time and the last picture is of Jim building a bike ramp for the boys.)

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FAMILY NEWS…

December has been a fun month for our family as we have been busy with a lot of Christmas activities with fellow missionary friends, the kids school and our own family. The boys participated in their first Christmas concert here in Haiti in the beginning of December and they did such a great job. We were so thankful for the hard work they and their teacher put into this because it was such a blessing to our hearts. Zeke turns 3 years old actually today, December 31st! We are so thankful for the gift that he is to us from God. We have loved seeing him blossom and grow just in the four months since we have been here. We call his language Zekaneze because it’s a mixture of Creole, English and toddler talk 😉

Jim and April have continued in their language studies and have been so thankful for the teacher that they have. Even though we have a long ways to go in our language study, we have come such a long ways since the first day we moved here so we praise God for that.

(SIDE NOTE: The first picture below is Isaac and Micaiah with their teacher Miss Andrews and their classmates at their Christmas concert. The second image is of Jim and the older two boys helping local fishermen and the community draw in the fish nets from the ocean. The third picture is of a really special night we had at our neighbors house. They are german and had us and another family over and shared stories from their Christmas time as a child growing up, shared neat traditions with us that they do and goodies as well. It was a wonderful night that we will always remember. The last picture is from a special Christmas concert that the local church in our village did that we went to. They did a great job! We loved watching a few of our RMI friends in it.)

             

 

A HUGE thank you to each and every one of you who donated to RMI’s special food box fundraiser. We have been able to give out over 5,000 boxes of food, which equals to 1,080,000 servings of food! ALL GLORY TO GOD! Jim has been a big part of that with helping load the boxes each time they go out and then RMI staff take it out to the different villages, churches & schools in need. Micaiah even took part one time and went and helped load food buckets as much as he could. This has been such a huge need and blessing to the Haitian people with all the country has gone through this past year.

The past month Jim has been busy doing various welding and other projects around the center and helping load food boxes to go out and be distributed. He is excited for teams to start in January when he can start going out with them and get to do that aspect of ministry as well.

April has had a chance to go out to a few schools this past month with the amazing Hope for Kidz team and Jim went to one as well. It has been such an eye opening and beautiful experience to be a part of. It is so humbling to see these kids who don’t have much, get so excited over something like new bowls and spoons to eat their donated hot lunch everyday. We were excited to be a part of handing them out and seeing the joy on their faces made our hearts full. We love RMI’s Hope for Kidz program because school in Haiti is not public or free, it’s private and it costs money, which most of them do not have. So in order to go to school, most of the kids are sponsored. RMI has around 2,700 kids sponsored so far, many more still needing sponsored. We serve a hot meal lunch every day to several thousand students in all of our schools. April was also able to help with the taking of yearly school/sponsorship photos for us to send out to each of person who sponsors a child. The child gets their previous photo after the new one is taken and it is so fun watching their faces as they look at a picture of themselves.

If you would like more info on sponsoring a child yourself through RMI, please let us know and we will help you. It is only $32 a month to help a child go to school, get all their uniforms, supplies and even medical care when needed. You can send letters, pictures or gifts occasionally as well and they write back too! We got to meet the boy we sponsor this past month and it was so cool meeting him in person and talking to him and encouraging him in his studies.

PRAISES:

We are ending this year with VERY thankful hearts. We have around 77 families, churches & individuals that support us every single month so that we can be here in Haiti doing what God has called us down here to do. Without you, we wouldn’t be here so thank you for being a huge part of all the ministry work down here that RMI does because you are the hands that have sent us. You are just as much a part of this as we are! We are so grateful for you and we don’t have enough words to truly describe how much it means to us when we look at the list of supporters and see each of you giving faithfully, month after month. We know for many of you, it’s a sacrifice for your family and yet you do it anyways! Just think of the countless lives that will be changed because of what your family is doing! THANK YOU!  Thank you to EVERY SINGLE PERSON in our lives that has prayed for us on this journey, helped or encouraged us in some way. It has not gone unnoticed and we love you all dearly.

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PRAYER REQUESTS:

For the sale of our home in Ohio.

For us as we continue to transition and learn the language.

We thank God for all He has done this past year and we are excited for this new year. We are looking forward to welcoming all the teams that are coming down soon and getting to do ministry with them alongside all of RMI staff here in Haiti this coming year! Happy New Year everyone! We love and thank God for you! 

Love, The Starkey Family

December Update!

It’s beginning to look a lot like…SUMMER? 😉

Holidays in Haiti

This is our first time celebrating Thanksgiving & Christmas somewhere other than where we grew up. We have definitely missed family so much but we have been trying to make the best of things and start new traditions here in Haiti for the holidays. Thankfully a sweet family sent us a Fall/Thanksgiving care package that really helped us be able to do some neat crafts & games with the kids. It’s harder here to find things and you can’t just go out to the store and pick up stuff to do neat holiday themed things, like we could back in Ohio so we were so grateful for that box.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with about 80 other local people. It was around 91 degrees that day. Many of the people we didn’t know but we did get to know a few new people and even had one of the families over to watch the OSU vs. Michigan game this past weekend. It was neat celebrating a day of THANKS with so many people.

The day after Thanksgiving, is the day we always decorate our house for Christmas and we would go out to the local tree farm in Ohio and chop down a tree. With the heat, and it looking more like SUMMER than WINTER 😉 haha, we knew we needed some help in getting into the Christmas spirit. We turned on Christmas music, a fake fireplace on our TV 😉 and had a blast decorating together. Thanks to donated foods that came in, we even were able to have hot cocoa with whip cream and sprinkles. It was a BIG treat as we can’t purchase whip cream here! Instead of chopping down a tree, Jim took the older two boys down to a field in our village and flew kites with them and the neighborhood kids that came down. It ended up turning out to be a wonderful day together!

We tried to make it feel as much like Christmas as we could, so it would help the boys have a sense of normalcy here in Haiti because we as a family did so many things around Christmas time in the states. We started on the Advent book called “Unwrapping the Names of Jesus” with the boys, which will have us learning about different names that Jesus is called and what each name means!

We know around this time of year, people like to give and so we wanted to give a fun reminder that if you want to send anything to the boys or care packages to our family for the Christmas season, it takes a few weeks so sending now versus in a few weeks, will allow us to get it in time for Christmas. If you would like to see a list of items that are helpful or fun to have for us that we can’t get here in Haiti, our amazon wish list is HERE . Thank you so much!

Other family happenings…

We got a dog! She is a 6 week old female Rottweiler mix. We named her Reesie because her coloring reminds us of a Reese Peanut Butter Cup. She is very sweet and loves playing with the boys. She is quickly capturing our hearts and helping distract us a little, from missing family during the holidays.

We go to bible study every Wednesday night with the other area missionaries and we are so thankful that our friend Lee works hard at delivering a lesson that not only ministers to all ages but helps the littles stay attentive to the lesson. This night he did a play of when Jesus healed the lepers and only one came back to thank Him. The kids and adults were able to get involve in the play while learning about this lesson from the bible.

April has been able to play and sing with fellow missionaries here in our village. Below is a picture of their practice for a special night of Christmas music coming up this week that they were practicing for.

Saint Mathurine Waterfall & Day at Port Salut

This past month has brought a little bit of calm, enough to where we were able to go out twice, on the weekends, to do some sight seeing of this beautiful country. Our first stop was in the beginning of November to a big, beautiful waterfall near Camp Perrin. Our second time out, we drove through the beautiful mountains to Port Salut and went to a waterfall and then the beach! It was a beautiful day with some very yummy food as well. Jim & Isaac were very brave and jumped off a cliff into the ocean.

MINISTRY UPDATE!

This past month Jim passed his first drivers test here in Haiti. There is no actual Haiti test, but this is through our organization RMI, who wants to make sure all drivers are very capable and knowledgeable of how to drive in Haiti since driving here is VERY different from driving in the states. Jim already knew how to drive stick, so he just needed to practice driving in Haiti road & traffic conditions. April will learn here soon, how to drive stick so that she can start practicing to eventually be able to drive here as well.

HOPE FOR KIDZ

This past month, has brought enough calm in our area, that the Hope for Kidz team has been able to go out to several schools. Most days they have been gone, as they are trying to get caught up and get to all the schools that we partner with. This is great news and it has also given April more work to do, which is great. She works on editing the pictures and information that comes in for each child.

LANGUAGE LESSONS

We have both continued our studies this month. Our teacher comes twice a week and gives us hour long lessons each of those days, for each of us. We do them separately since Jim started learning in the states a few years ago and knows more Creole than April. We are both finding that it is much easier to read and write Creole than it is to hear it and understand quickly enough to know what to say back, since when we read & write it, we have more time to think and/or look things up. We look forward to the day when hearing and speaking is as easy as reading & writing is.

PRAISES & PRAYER REQUESTS

We praise God for the funding of our solar panel system for our house that will be installed soon. Parts are being ordered right now and everything is being figured out for the installation.

We praise God a great Thanksgiving.

We praise God that this month brought enough calm that more ministry things were able to be done and we were able to explore the country a bit.

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We ask prayer for our continued language studies. That Jim and April will be able to quickly learn Creole well so they can further develop relationships and do more.

We ask prayer for the sale of our home. The people who were renting from us and trying to buy it, can no longer due to things on their end so our home is now for sale again. Please pray for the quick sale of our home as this is not in our budget.

Pray for April & the boys as this time of year has brought more times of missing family so much and wanting to see them.

Pray for the RMI Haitian staff. For encouragement, provision and for things that God knows. If you would like to donate towards something special for the holidays, we would LOVE to ask you to donate to RMI and check the box for it to go specifically towards the Haitian staff. Go HERE to do so!

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We cannot thank God enough for you, our supporters. We go through our monthly support list every few months and we recently just did. It made our hearts so happy to see the faithfulness of month after month, giving that the families on our team have given to God, so that we can be here serving in Haiti. You will never know how much that means to us, that you are partnering with us in reaching and discipling people for Jesus here in Haiti. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Love, Jim & April