Finding a Rental House in Haiti

As you probably know if you keep up with the All Things New blog, we are moving our children off of the Hope Rising campus and we have been trying to find a rental house since we made the decision to move.  When transitional times come, no matter what type of transition it is, there are always challenges that come along with it.  This is true if you are changing jobs, if you are moving from one home to the next, starting a diet, and sometimes even when you move from one type of sock to another (I will never change from the Adidas Climacool, but that is beside the point).  Transition brings change which brings challenges which brings stress which brings a host of new problems and so on and so forth.  So as I am writing this blog, I completely understand that each of us, at one time or another, have gone through huge, transitional life changes.  If we are being honest, the following statement is probably true:

“If you are not in a transitional time in your life right now, you are probably just transitioning into a transitional time.”

The reason I bring this up is because I do not want you to ever think that we believe the struggles that we face are more difficult or more stressful than what everyone else faces.  Hopefully they are entertaining and they give you a taste of what life is like here, but we do not believe that our lives are harder than yours.  We just know that you love our kids like we do and we want to give you a taste of what it is like to live down here with them and take care of them.  Right now, we just happen to be in our second MAJOR transition in the past 10 months.  If you missed the initial transition in April, I hope this does not come off as arrogant, but the story is really great and you can read all 7 parts of the story by clicking here.

Now, back to the transition that we are going through…Moving the kids again!

If you are living in America right now, which you probably are if you are reading this, then you may be thinking something along the lines of, “Why don’t you just go find a house with a bunch of rooms and rent it.”  And, in a way, you are thinking correctly.  The problem, however, comes in trying to find the right place and on top of that trying to find the right place under a time crunch of moving out of our current situation by March 1.  As you may have read, we found 2 houses back in January where our boys could stay in one house and our girls (along with Jess, Sophie, and I) in the other.  They are nice houses and they are big enough for what we need.  At this point we have a few other options that we are looking at as well but I wanted to give you an example of what we have to think through in the rental process.  These are the problems with the homes that we are now in the process of thinking through:

• They are not right next to each other.  They are about a 3-5 minute walk apart and this could present some logistical challenges.
• One of the houses does not have a water source (a well specifically).  The owner, prior to us moving in would have to make sure a well is dug.
• Neither house has consistent electricity.  They are both being setup to use EDH (the Haitian power company) but they only are supplied electricity about 30-40 hours per week.
• One of the houses does not yet have a wall or security fence around it.  This is something else that the owner will have to take care of before move-in.
• We are not completely sure how well the plumbing was installed in either home, and this is something that we will have to figure out prior to moving in and signing contracts.

The point is, there are additional challenges that we face when trying to find rental homes here that are difficult to think about if you only know America.  In America we always have running water, we can easily find consistent electricity, and we can sign contracts that we understand and can be enforced in the future.  These “unknowns” are all part of the transition that we have coming and part of how GOD is leading our ministry.  We believe that GOD will lead us exactly where and how He wants and we are excited to see how it ends up.  Look for more blogs coming up about our move!