Haiti 49 -- A Streutker Story

Their names are Clare and Sandy Streutker.  They inspire us.  Let me tell you why.

Clare and Sandy Streutker standing at the door to our home in Haiti.

 Before I start, I should tell you that Clare and Sandy are good friends of ours.  Very good friends.  So I am biased and could be looking through rose-coloured glasses.  But I think not.  You be the judge.

For the past 49 days our lives have included this couple living here in Haiti.  They came to help out, using their specific God-given, work-honed skills to make a tangible difference in the lives of others.

Clare and Sandy have a construction company back home -- SKC Construction -- and through the years have gotten pretty decent at building large buildings -- churches, schools, commercial buildings --and all the things that go along with that.  They also have a faith that helps them see much bigger than the construction they do at home, to the building God is doing inside them and the calling to help lead teams of volunteers to build at a leadership training centre here in Haiti.  Here are some things I saw them do in these past seven wonderful weeks:

First, they came.  Coming to Haiti isn't free, and they also brought funds for the construction they were doing, and so just getting themselves here was an investment.  They had lots of good reasons to stay home -- their business, their family, their having just moved into a smaller home and not having sold their older larger home yet, their creature comforts -- you name it.  They had all the same reasons for not coming that all of us have, and more, and yet they came.  When someone comes to Haiti from another place, it is encouraging to Haitian people.  Many Haitians understand their country to be low on the list of places people want to go and so when people do come it is a boost to the locals.

Second, they built.  When Clare stepped onto the plane to come on January 4th, the site where they were going to work was literally a hole in the ground, or a series of trench-like holes.  Though some excavation (read: shovels) had been done, nothing had been built.  Starting with the back-breaking work of laying out and tying off rebar in the trenches with the Brampton team, then adding some block and concrete with the Maranatha team, then pouring a floor and adding more block with the Woodland and Woodland Alumni teams and finally getting the walls high enough to frame and pour the concrete ceiling beams with the Rochester and Maranatha Youth teams, today, February 23rd, the old hole in the ground looks a lot like what we hoped it would.  It is exciting to think about how this building will be used to train hundreds if not thousands of leaders in the years to come, leaders who will be trained to use their skills to aid communities in using their own assets for the betterment of those communities.

Team work to get the pails of cement from the mixer up the ladder to pour beams for the roof

Leading by Example

 Third, they led.  Clare and Sandy's leading started way before they got here.  They encouraged others to come, recruiting a number of people.  They hosted those teams for dinners, introducing them to Haitian food and orienting them to mission work, Haitian culture and history, and a few Creole phrases.  Their leading didn't stop once they got here.  They led at a pace that invited others along in so many healthy ways.  Regularly, they were doing the hardest and dirtiest work (our laundry lady can attest to that :)).  With each team, they not only helped them know WHAT to do on the jobsite but also HOW to do it:  humbly, relationally, and with learners' curiosity.  They brought just the right gift mix - construction, people skills, missions know-how - to effectively set a pace for the learning and serving that others did.

Fourth, they laughed.  For many of the days they were in Haiti, they lived in our home.  While with us, they played games and that was part of the laughter, but even bigger they added laughter to much of what they did.  For our son Stephen, Clare was like the little brother he never had (and yes, Stephen is only 8).  One day before church, they played in the dirt together outside our gate creating a path from my neighbours door to the road.  There was regular banter between Clare and all of our children.  Laughter was often heard on the job-site as Clare and Sandy and their new-found friends, whether the mission teams or the Haitian workers, joked and grinned and generally had a good time.  Though they all worked hard, many of the volunteers who came commented on how much they enjoyed the work that they did.

Stephen and his 'little' brother, Clare (Stephen is the one in the red shirt)

Fifth, they impacted.   It's funny, often people going on their first mission trip go with the express purpose of "making an impact."  As Clare and Sandy had been on and organized mission trips for others in the past, they knew the truth:  that mission teams actually get impacted more than they make an impact.  Fact is, other than a handful of Haitian workers, the names Clare and Sandy Streutker will be forgotten here.  It is doubtful that any history book of this nation could include as much as a whisper about their work.  So their impact isn't measured in terms of what they did for Haiti, but what they did for the people they interacted with.  As teams have come and go, people connected with Clare and with Sandy, creating bonds they now continue through prayers and conversations on Facebook.  Here's a glimpse of all those folks.

Immanuel, Brampton:  Carol Vanderstoep, John Vanderstoep, Iona Stewart-Buisman, Al Bloemendal, Renee VanderKooy, Erick Schuringa, Ruth Ann Schuringa, Anna Afful, Clare Streutker

Maranatha, Cambridge:  Joe Kool, Meghan Vanderstoep, Sandy Streutker, Greg Paultre, Simon Prince, James Bultje, Tammy Prince, Mitch Ball, Holly Prince, Clare Streutker, Brad Prince, Sasha Prince, Charles VanLingen, Stephen, Nathan, John, Carol, Erin, and Kristin Vanderstoep 

Woodland High School (Breslau): Meghan Vanderstoep, Matthew Feenstra, Oliver Chen, Niek Los, Jake Pasma, Steven Shantz, Sarah Kooy, Tristan Verstraeten, Ethan DenBak, Bethany VanPelt, Clare Streutker, John VanPelt, Marjorie Pasma, Gregory Paultre, Lisa Krygsman, John and Carol Vanderstoep

Woodland Alumni:  Sandy Streutker, Jordan VanderVeen, Clare Streutker, Bethany Streutker, Jon Streutker, Anthony Foster, Rob Scholtens, Pieter Wilting, Katie Deen, Nick Jovanovic, Jordan Mohle

Maranatha Youth:  George Geerts, Mackenzie Streutker, Sandy Streutker, Alex Streutker, Clare Streutker, (photobomb cameo by Meghan Vanderstoep), Brian Kloet, Carol and John Vanderstoep

Rochester Team (not all pictured):  Emily and Kevin Smith, Ron, Katie, and Sarah Cok, Kelly and Faith Fasoldt, Sue and Cindy Sapienza, and Tim and Sydney Frelier

 Today, is Day One without Clare and Sandy and the teams they led with us in Haiti.  Today is supposed to be a day of relief, of catching our collective breath after the fullness and activity of all that has transpired in the past seven weeks.  After that long of not having time off on the weekends, after that long of hosting people to not only eat countless meals in our home but in some cases to also live with us, it would be normal for me to have been looking forward to today and for today to have been somewhat celebratory.  But it's not.  Today is instead a melancholy day, a day not unlike the first day back for those who came here on mission teams, a day for collecting our thoughts, reflecting on the past, and knowing that we have been deeply impacted.

Thanks Clare and Sandy, for responding to God's call on your life to be here and for inspiring so many others to do the same.  May God bless you as richly as you have blessed many.

Poverty Crisis?

What is poverty?

This seems like the kind of question any school child could answer.  Poverty, one might think, is when a person or family can't afford the basic necessities of life.  Using similar definitions to this, countries determine for themselves at what annual income rate a person is or is not 'below the poverty line.'

I wonder though, if measuring poverty strictly in terms of economics is an accurate way of measuring something as complex as poverty.  We put the question out to the Woodland High School (Breslau, Ontario) team when they were here, and asked them, "What is poverty?"  Their responses were thoughtful:  a lack of a basic need, a lack of a home, limited natural resources, a lack of knowledge, spiritual or emotional lack, no access to health care or education, no vernacular Bible, and a lack of community.  Their responses definitely included the material but extended to non-material poverty:  knowledge, spiritual, relational.

We then talked about where we see poverty in Haiti.  They listed a number of things:

Where do we see poverty in Haiti?

Though we had just defined poverty as being more than the material or monetary side, the students couldn't help but notice that so much of the poverty they could see was material.  But when we got to talking about 'poverty at home' the expanded definition of poverty helped us see our own culture a little more clearly:

It was great seeing the conversation begin with the "out there" issues of poverty at home -- ie: shelters and homelessness -- but then quickly shift to the poverties which we who are 'wealthy' have.  While there weren't any personal stories of such poverties, I got a real sense that the teens were reflecting on their own culture and therefore on themselves.  I was reminded of the quote from the book, "When Helping Hurts" that "until we embrace our own mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good."  As I listened to the students talk, I felt like I was being taught.
Getting to a point of admitting our own brokenness, though, is a place of vulnerability, and doesn't feel like a place of strength.  Even though the apostle Paul instructs, in 2 Corinthians 12:10, that "when I am weak, then I am strong," we who are Christians are still reluctant to follow our Lord's example (Philippians 2:5-11) of emptying ourselves of our strength.  And so we face a 'crisis.'  One of the Woodland students, Tsung Chen, aka Oliver, was able to share some Mandarin Chinese (below).

CRISIS = risky danger + opportunity

While admitting our brokenness and poverty may seem like a vulnerability, it is also an opportunity.  As I have seen teams embrace this aspect of their own poverty, I have seen the ways they have noticed some of the assets the Haitian people and nation have.

For example, one participant noted that the Haitians are the happiest people he has ever met.  Another looked at the chaos that is the sea of street-side petty vendors and noticed a healthy spirit of entrepreneurship.  Another, looking at the imbalance in some Haitian families where there is only one income earner, sometimes a son or brother, who brings in all the income, and noticed a healthy sense of identity within the context of family.

All that to say that by embracing our own poverty, we can notice another's assets.  And only in noticing and working with the assets of the host country population and culture can we hope to help support anything life-giving and sustainable.  In church work back home, such as when Maranatha Church did their Visioning work a few years back, we looked at assets using a discipline called Appreciative Inquiry.  This tool is used here, too, in a place where traditional poverty is obvious, to discover what the building blocks for renewal might be.

So, what is poverty?  It is a lack.  But if we acknowledge our own poverty and commit to a humble stance because of it, appreciating the assets of the other, we may just find ourselves taking the kind of Christ-like posture advocated in 2 Corinthians 8:9 "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich."

Then, we will lack nothing.

Blocks and Mental Blocks

Every Friday afternoon, I head a little closer to downtown Port-au-Prince, find my way through some now-familiar streets and arrive at SKDE, a seminary where I am teaching a course on Eschatology to twelve pastors who come from as far as three hours away to develop their theological skill.

Eschatology, for those who might have thought it was some kind of medical term, is the study of "last things" or "end times."  Since none of us have been to the end times and been able to report back, all of what we know about end times comes from the Bible and some of that comes in literature that is not always straightforward, talking about bowls of wrath and lampstands and four horsemen and sheep and goats.   You might wonder, in a land where people are desperately poor, why a course in these things would matter.  You might wonder if I might be better spending my time teaching them pastoral care for people who mourn the death of loved ones or deacon training for how to help people care for those without the means to care for themselves.

However, eschatology is a thoroughly relevant course.  A healthy perspective on the end times can help a person in a land that may not always seem hopeful to yet hold a hopeful posture.  A reaffirmation that "God wins" and "Jesus will return" can simultaneously give us peace for ourselves personally and an urgency born of love for others.  And because the new heaven and the new earth are the perfected versions of life now, anticipating the hope of heaven can motivate us to make earth just a little more heavenly now.  In fact, 16th Century reformer, Martin Luther, when asked what he would do if he knew Christ was returning tomorrow said, "I will plant an apple tree." (Actually he said something like, "werde ich einen Apfelbaum pflanzen" because he was German).

So, it is with that "this matters" perspective that I head down to SKDE, filling my head with the inspirational belief that I am equipping these pastors and that I am making a tangible difference not just in their lives but in their whole congregation, and by extension their community, and by extension again every descendant every person in their congregation and community might ever have or come in contact with (you get the picture, I like to coach myself with extremely positive messages :).

Having said that, to be honest there are times when I truly wonder if "this matters."  Like last week Friday when I was teaching a unit on Apocryphal literature.  Different sections of the Bible are written with different genre of literature and this needs to be considered during Biblical interpretation.  For example, in the historical books, such as 1st Samuel, words are straightforward.  When David is described as a shepherd, it is because he literally is a shepherd.  But in poetic books, like Psalms, words are not used literally, such as Psalm 23 where God is said to be a shepherd, not a literal one, but in the poetic sense one who is like a shepherd, the ultimate care-giving protector.

In preparation for helping them interpret the book of Revelation where numbers are used symbolically (such as 1000 years, 144,000 sealed from the tribe of Israel), I was reaching back to the beginning of the Bible and wondering aloud with them whether the first chapters of Genesis might have some symbolic language such as the "days" of creation.  I wondered with them whether it makes sense to see the "days" as 24-hour, sunrise/sunset events when the sun itself wasn't created until the fourth day.  We then spent the next two hours discussing the many wonderful and wonder-inspiring elements of apocalyptic literature, particularly as it is found in the book of Revelation.

Though the class had run past the allotted two hours, there was plenty of discussion and questions.  As a teacher, I was thrilled with the engagement, really feeling like we were getting somewhere, like "this matters!"  Then, I got a unique question:  "Have you ever been to Germany?  And if so, what time does the sun go down in Germany?"  Not the question I was expecting.  None of my teaching preparation touched on this.  I told the class, some of whom had never heard of the concept or experienced it with their living closer to the equator, that though I didn't know much about sunset and sunrise times in Germany, I imagined it to be similar to Canada where the sunset in the summer is late, like after 9pm, but in the summer is early, sometimes before 5pm.

The questioner smiled.  Then he pointed out that perhaps the first three days of creation were more like the days of summer in Canada and Germany and therefore longer and that somehow, perhaps, this might explain the length of the first three days of creation........um......yeah.....he really was arguing this.  As he did, I made sure that my facial expression didn't betray what I was thinking, that is, 'this may be the most convoluted argument for a literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1 I have ever heard.'  My mouth though, remembered the phrase my friend Caroline Payne taught me when we were learning to teach the Alpha Course years back, and I said, "That's very interesting.  I have never heard that before."  I really didn't know how to reply beyond that.  I was stymied.  Mental block.

As I drove home from class, I did start to wonder, if this was the nature of the questions I could be asked, whether I was really making any headway at all, whether all my preparation and teaching and marking homework, in French, was really all worth it.  I wondered if I was building anything or just laying down the lessons and hoping it would amount to something.

Then I thought about what we've been putting our work teams through. How the Brampton team -- Renee, Ruth Ann, Anna, Iona, Al, and Erick were doing back-breaking work in trenches laying out re-bar and tying it off; how the Maranatha/Chatham team -- Sandy, Charles, Mitch, James, and Joe had lain foundation, lugged concrete and fill; and how the Woodland team -- Ethan, Tristan, Sarah, Lisa, Bethany, Niek, Steve, Oliver, Matt, Marjorie, Jake, and John -- had placed block upon block and hauled pail after pail of concrete.  I wondered, as they tied re-bar, hauled fill, and placed block upon block if they had wondered the same thing.

I remember years ago, hearing a story, probably fictional, about two bricklayers working on the Empire State Building.  One drudgingly slapping muck and heavy brick after heavy brick, the other, doing the exact same job, but whistling.  The whistler asked the muck-slapper, "Why the long face?" to which he received the simple reply, "'Cuz I'm stuck here slapping muck while all these suits make their way to their air-conditioned offices" (assume New York accent).  "Not me," responded the whistler, "I'm building a sky-scraper!"

Same lesson for the work teams:  not just tying rebar, hauling fill or laying block but building a building that will build leaders that will build a community.  Same lesson for me in the seminary, not just answering questions (or not being able to find any answer to them) or marking homework or preparing and presenting lessons, but building pastoral capacity for a number of churches.

Reminds me of some of the brilliance of Jesus.  Arguing for the inclusion of the little things that add up to the big things.  Children inherit the kingdom, mustard-seed-like faith is enough, two simple beams change the world one afternoon at Calvary.

That gives me hope.  Not just that my seminary teaching matters or that the mission team's work on the training centre matters but that every little thing we do matters.  Every little act of kindness, goodness, gentleness or service for another has the potential to add up to much more.  Each time a parent digs a bit deeper to help a child, each time a friend forgives an unintended wrong, each time a family opens their door to a stranger; all of these, added together, have the potential to do amazing things.  And the best part, "he who began a good work in me will be faithful to carry it to completion."

Mental block, gone.