Weather

I have forgotten to include the temperature information the last couple Mondays, so I thought I would include it now since I don't have much to say beside the boring car stuff.

78.8 Max temp
64.4 Min temp
92 Max humidity
56 Min humidity

Boring car stuff...

I spent most of the day welding the new cage and am about 30-40% finished with it. Kyrk and Gerbin helped to start it and design it on Saturday and today I was working on my own. I spent enough time in the sun today that I think that I may have gotten a little sunburned for the first time. I managed to burn or cut a whole in my Mechanix gloves too (the ones that I wasn't using for oil).

I fixed a guys car in the morning. It wouldn't start. I checked for spark and fuel and had both. I started digging further in the fuel and the Suzuki Sidekick had one fuel injector injecting fuel in the the airstream, but the fuel was barely dripping out - not even spraying. So I took it out and felt pretty sure that it was the problem. I thank God for giving me the ability to think about it and follow through the right path the first time to determine the problem, because he went and got a new (used) injector (I had to solder the connections on it) and it worked great. The idle was really high, so I fixed that too. The water pump seemed to be leaking a little against the block so I told him to keep an eye on the level and that it may get worse. He was so happy that he hugged me twice!

EDH!!

Last night around 8PM, Haiti's electric company got power to us. This is the first time we have had it since the hurricane activitiy at the beginning of the month. I sure hope we don't have to pay since we didn't get any electricity (yes - we will have to tell them that we didn't have electricity because they will try to charge us).

Snow Leopard Moth

I don't know that the name of this moth is really the snow leopard moth, but I thought it sounded good - better than Schlorf moth anyway. God is good as I may have stepped on this guy if I didn't drop (and lose) a little metal piece (that I really didn't need anyway). These are high resolution pictures:

Muscle, Spider, Radiator

This weekend, we got some muscle to protect us. It'll take a while before all the muscles are ready, but it will help to keep things safer. Her name is Oreo and she is 100% lab:



It's Tina's dog of course...


Kyrk & Debra got a boy and Chris & Kelli (upstairs) got a girl. We'll have three around here to keep things on the up-and-up. I had a difficult time deciding whether or not we should get one, but it seems to have already helped to keep spirits up here (except the cat who will get used to having a dog around). She'll be good to have around the house because there are times when people we don't know come up to the house to ask for things.

Spider

This spider was on the wall this morning. It was about 4 inches toe-to-toe. Nothing like having at least four eyes to clean the crud out of every morning...



Boring car stuff...

I had to change the oil in the dump and the stakebed trucks today (stakebed is on the right in the garage area). They took 6.5 gallons of oil and they have a huge oil filter. I topped off the stakebed's radiator and found a hole at the top. The huge intercooler (on the left of the picture) was rubbing on the top of the huge radiator (on the right of the picture) and wore a hole in it. They were very heavy pulling them out of there. We're going to send it out to get it welded up. I also have to align the front wheels on that truck because the tires are getting really feathered on the outside showing that they are heavily toed-in. I'll rig something up so I can measure as close as I can to make it toed-in just a little bit. I did this on the Canter after replacing the ball joint and it seemed to work out good. I'll also be replacing a coolant filter (didn't know that these existed) and the fuel filter on the stakebed.


Mr. Storm - do you think that intercooler will fit in your Integra?

Mud

This article addresses the continuing need in Haiti.

The Samaritan's Purse gentleman, David from New Mexico, was in the town mentioned in this article last week and his stories included working with people to haul mud out from their house, working to distribute water for tired and frustrated Haitians, sleeping in rough conditions with mosquitoes all over, and various other issues (including his laptop dying so he couldn't communicate back home or save photos of the food and supply distribution).

Matthew, who is also working with Samaritan's Purse, met with UN folks and secured a number of items for distribution through the Baptist Haiti Mission.

Boring car stuff...

My two mail goals for next week are to help finish up the rack for the new truck so it can be more useful in making deliveries and to get the Canter ready for going out far distances. The transfer case/transmission has leaking seals both front and back, the rear differential is leaking, and it need three new tires (all three are worn to the cords and leaking air - it came back from a short trip Friday with flat front tire). Please pray for me as I work to get all the vehicles ready and dependable for the distribution of food for people in need. The current plan is to go to the hard to reach areas, beyond where the roads have been repaired.

Today...a day of rest.

CRS, Groceries, Rack

This morning, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) dropped off a bunch of food for distribution through the Baptist Haiti Mission. This will be added to the other food from other sources and distributed. Samaritan's Purse also secured NFIs (Non-Food Items) for distribution. They include a cleaning pack, hygine pack, and cooking pack (each in a highly valued 5-gallon pail). One of the guys from Samaritan's Purse also went up north to help out and install a large water filter for the community. He had the last two nights of sleep in some pretty rough conditions - getting little sleep (we had five extra guys over for dinner tonight and he was one of them telling stories of his day because he just got back before we ate).


Groceries

We like grocery day for many reasons, one of the reasons is for the cardboard boxes. We get about five minutes of fire in the fireplace from the boxes. We make a pretty big deal of it by gathering some snacks and drink and sitting on the couch to watch it burn. It's great fun! We'll probably save it for Tuesday night.


Boring car stuff...

After shopping we started working on rack for the new blue Isuzu. We got about 20% of it built and have more to do come next week. Here is Gerbin chopping the angle iron and the second picture is Kyrk welding. I was the hold, measure, mark, and sawzall guy. The next picture of it will hopefully be of it completed next week.

Cows, Pigs, Moths

Yesterday after lunch, the kids came with me towards the shop area to drop off the "pig bowl." It's used for storing food scraps and then we bring it to the pigs and cows. The big cow is going to become meat soon. The little cow will take a little bit yet to grow. The big cow is really nice.



This pig was crazy! He was climbing the wall and making all sorts of noises! Are you aching... for some bacon... yup, yup, yup...


This moth was on the outside of our door this morning (High Resolution):



Today we are going to be going grocery shopping at 9:30 AM. When I get back I'll be working on the cage for the new blue baluga truck (Isuzu N-series) and then if there is time, I'll be continuing to build the cage for the Toyota Landcruiser.

New Truck

This morning I worked on a motorcycle that was returned from a pastor of ours and I tried unsuccessfully to fix a blender for one of the Haitian guys. I took the kids around on the four-wheeler a little bit at noon since we used it to carry two 5-gallon jugs of filtered water. Lou just loves being on that thing!



Boring Car Stuff...

We got a new truck today. The Canter is frequently out and about and the new one will be used quite a bit locally. The thought as I know it is to send the Canter out for longer distances. When this new one arrived, the first thing that I noticed was how low the gas tank was. They designed brackets for it that were conveniently easy to turn upside down to get about 6 more inches clearance out of it so I did just that. It's hard to see, but the first picture is before the change and the second is after (I don't think that we picked the color...). Carter and Gerbin (from the Netherlands) are in the first picture and that's Christopher in the red shirt:

Stolen Items

I found out this morning that my parents sent three stuffed animals in the box that we received from them but there were only two when it got to us. We are concerned that anything else that is sent to us in the future is also going to get here incomplete. We are learning that "this is Haiti." There are good times and bad times as far as customs is concerned and apparently things had been pretty good. I hope that it just happened that one of our first two boxes had something stolen out of it. We'll have to start praying that our boxes get to us with everything in them - we're learning of new things to pray for just about every day. The list is long of things to pray for. God is big and is bigger than customs in Haiti. The things that we are shipping here are not necessities, but would make life here more comfortable. Grandma and Grandpa wanted to give a little blessing to their grandchildren and one will have to be left out (Lou, because he doesn't seem to like stuffed animals anyway).

Here is a picture of Tina enjoying the chair seat cushions THAT DIDN'T GET STOLEN (and a bit of the house)!!


Today has been a day of missing the things of the States for Tina and me. I made the mistake of looking at some of our old pictures last night and Tina continued today. It was tough to see family and friends, the old places, the old animals, etc... Then to have the customs mess on top of that...it's a downer day and we'll hopefully wake up tomorrow differently, Lord willing.

Things to be thankful for:

Mechanix Gloves (saved my knuckles and saved a lot of washing my hands)
This flower outside our front door this morning (high resolution):


Boring car stuff...

I got the clutch replaced and the transmission put back in the Hyundai Accent. I worked on it all morning and got done at 12:30. Yesterday we sent someone to get a clutch alignment tool, but they couldn't find one. So I eyeballed it with the help of Anes (I am not sure of the spelling - it sounds like Ah-nez). He and I wrestled the transmission back up against the engine. It was nice to have his help! Things are much more difficult here than it would be in the US. We don't have the right equipment (our transmission jack is broke), parts break more often because of the roads, the parts are damaged when taking them off which makes it more difficult...yes I am whining.

The car works fine after the work, but we ended up leaving the flywheel alone because to have that type of work done here is risky - they would most likely ruin the part. After driving it a little, it would have been best to have the flywheel resurfaced, but this should last about 20k miles or so.

I drained the big air compressor and it seemed like it was more like a water tank than an air tank. There was a lot of water that came out. The air is so humid here. The water sometimes comes through the air hose and through the air tool - which isn't good for them.

BOXES!!! Hike, Hummingbird, Tarantula

We got our first box(es) today!!! These were shipped the first week in August. We got our cushions for our kitchen chairs and some nice stuffed animals for the kids (thank you so much Mom and Dad Schlorf!! We'll get pictures of us sleeping comfortably at our kitchen table soon!!). We also got a surprise box from our friends Dave and Shirley with a book, candy treats, and a blessing in an envelope! Thank you guys! We are hoping that our other boxes are soon to follow!


Here is a picture of all of us who went on a hike Sunday afternoon down the ravine.


Here is a picture of a tarantula that we saw on our hike Sunday (it was dead):


I spotted a hummingbird that got stuck in a metal mesh satellite dish. I got a ladder to get him down and then brought him in the house to check him out with the kids (I don't know why Blogger rotates the pictures once in a while).

Bird, Tree, Generator

I looked outside and saw a large bird land on a tree. Just as it landed, it took off again and came right back up with a mouse/rat. I grabbed the binoculars and watched him swallow it whole, head first. Then it sat there so long that I thought I should take a picture. I ended up using the binoculars to take a few pictures. Here are the best:



A large tree that was taken down by the hurricane was cut by the workers here. The tree was not on the Mission grounds. The guys cut it up and brought some of it here for eventual distribution to our schools and churches. We have two large chainsaws and this tree fell on one of the two large ones (leaving us with one good one and one parts chainsaw now). Here is Lou next to the pieces - I estimated about 50-60 rings:


This week, generator number 2 turned over 10,000 hours (we should have had a party). If it were a car going an average of 30 MPH, it would have 300,000 miles on it. Generator number 1 has about 9,500 hours.


We should have had a party because the next day it complained by leaking near the oil filter:


We have some gasket material, so I will have to make a new gasket, coat it with high-temp RTV, and see if that works.

The Current State of Haiti

Things are not looking up for Haiti. This explains more.

Kyrk went with the Samaritan's Purse guys up north and got some amazing photos and footage! I should be able to get some of it tomorrow and I will try to post some tomorrow or Sunday. I am hoping to not work much tomorrow. We (there was two of us who did most of it) moved about 200 family sacks today from one building to another and then I took the transmission out of the doctor's car - my right bicept is toast. I am hoping it will recover in a few days.

Bridge

This is a great message about the rebuild of the 35W bridge in Minneapolis. Since we are from MN (and John Piper is our preacher) it makes sense that I make mention of it. Since I don't have a whole lot of time to surf the web, my sources of information are limited, so you will find that I'll often link to DesiringGod's blog.

Busy, Busy

Today, we packed 300 family sacks and brought them to Port-au-Prince for delivery via boat to (I think) four different places (I didn't go with to make the delivery). I was the end of the line and packed the truck again. All of this food was purchased from Samaritan's Purse's money and they brought stickers for the sacks. Here is a shot after just a few sacks in the truck:


and here is a shot with the full 300 sacks:



We have a few more sacks of food to put together (just under 200) and then that will be it. The rest will be sent as whole sacks of food to distributed through the pastors of our churches.

Kids...

Carter and Kayla are doing well in school. Lou continues to babble a lot, but still not much effort in the verbal communication department. The potty training amounts to Tina figuring out when #2 is coming and setting him on the potty so it's one less #2 diaper to change. We'll get there (easy for me to say since I am not changing it - although I'd gladly change diapers for a month instead of one clutch...). Tina is doing pretty good. I would like to see her have a little more free time, but that isn't going to happen until we get done with the food.

Tonight we had Greg over for dinner. Greg is a friend of Cullie's (Cullie is a former mechanic of the Baptist Haiti Mission). We had good conversation and fellowship. Tina made a great dinner (once again) and had warm cookies waiting for us for dessert.

Boring car stuff...

There are a couple of bats that live near the mechanic's shop. This is the best I could do for a picture:


Dr. Bernard mentioned to me Tuesday that his daughter's car is not working well. He thinks it's the clutch. He wanted to know if I could take the parts out so he could bring them in that day or the next. I am not so sure that he understands that changing the clutch is a large job. Anyway, I started on it today and hope to get to the clutch tomorrow. It's a Hyundai and I don't like the way it's made so far for removing the clutch, but no one asked me. The oil filter looks like it has been on there since the beginning and there is no air filter. The car has 160 or 170 THOUSAND miles on in. I feel like it's not work fixing, but it's not mine to say that. I am just doing the work. I broke my 3/8 extension on it too (not a Craftsman). :-( My Mechanix gloves saved my knuckles on that one!

The Canter has two car-sized batteries. Yesterday one of them blew up. It blew a softball size hole in the middle of the top of the battery. The battery is outside the truck and under the bed so it didn't do any damage to the vehicle. They had to buy another while on the road. They also said that it was wobbling real bad. I looked over at it quickly and saw a large rock in between the driver's side rear dual tires. It took a lot of prying with a pry bar to remove it. Had that come out while moving it would have done a lot of damage to something or someone.

Less Work Today - More Pictures

We loaded up 100 sacks today in the Canter and packed more sacks until we ran out of plates, cups, and spoon. I wanted to clarify that I personally and solely did NOT pack the two trucks yesterday. I merely wanted to state that I touched every bag and wanted to give a grand total for the day - I was and am not trying to be prideful (nobody sent me any message to say this, I just read it and it sounded bad to me). I was the person packing each truck as the line of guys passed them to me. It was good today to have a bit less work to do. My muscles are starting to protest.

I soldered a guy's charger and fixed it and Gerbin and I worked on the four-wheeler a bit. That thing is getting pretty solid now!

Gerbin came over about an hour ago and wanted my pictures from us cutting trees. He had pictures on his memory stick and so I asked him if I could have his. Some of these pictures are Kyrk's and some other are from other people. They are from the flooding and hurricane damage. The third picture is one of our churches. (I did not take these pictures and if you did and do not want me to post these, send me an email to let me know):






Boring bug stuff...

Since we are nature people by nature (funny, haha!), we took another picture of a bug outside of our door. It turned out to be a moth. Carter poked it and it started flapping its wings. These pictures are high resolution:

More Food Organizing

This morning I worked on Antoinne's radio. I had it since Friday, but was too busy to work on it because of the food. His radio stopped working and he wanted me to take a look at it. It had a bunch of bugs inside of it and I don't know how they got in because they were larger than any hole I saw. There were at least six. Here is one hiding under the speaker:


After I fixed the radio, we loaded up two trucks with the 40 pound sacks. I personally packed both trucks (and drove the big stakebed) around the loading docks). We put 170 sacks in the Canter and 190 in the stakebed for a total of 14,400 pounds. That's the food that I lifted this morning (not all at the same time, of course). The Lord has been good to me - I have not been sore in the morning after sleeping at night. This is a wonderful grace!

In the second part of the morning, we hauled wood using the four-wheeler from one area to another area down a hill. That four-wheeler made easy work of moving the wood. There was still a lot of lifting being done to get it into the trailer and in out of the trailer. I helped another person fix their camera flash by soldering a few wires - there are always little things like this waiting for me every time I go back to the shop.

Then around 1 PM we started putting sacks together. We did this all afternoon and we are all tired (finished almost 300 sacks)! I was lifting lots of heavy sacks full of food in smaller sacks (heavier than the 40 pounders) and dumping out the black bags of food. I put labels on the pictures so you can see. There was also noodles, oil, and salt. Tomorrow we will be loading the sacks we put together today onto the trucks again to be sent out. Some of the sacks are going by boat and some by plane. We tried to fit the family packs into 5-gallon buckets but we couldn't get it to fit. It was two inches too tall and we couldn't get the covers on. They'll have to go separately.

A Nice Sunday

Our Sunday was very nice and relaxing. We went to church at 6:45 and then right after, we went to Kyrk's Bible study at 8:15. We came home and went for a walk around the campus and then ate lunch. During our walk, I finally got a picture of the finished gas tank holder (we ran out of black paint but had chrome paint).


We found a new cricket - it was about two inches in body length (high resolution photo):


There was a beautiful "moonset" this morning at 4:30 AM:



I would like to record the weekly high and low temp and humidity on Monday's:

Max temp for the week - 79.3 - September 10
Min temp for the week - 64.7 - September 13
Max humidity for the week - 87 - September 14
Min humidity for the week - 60 - September 11

Even Less Hair

Just an update to keep family aware of what is happening here...because it is so important of course.