There is a village in the mountains of Haiti called John 3:16. It was built after Hurricane Sandy hit Haiti in 2012 by volunteers and missionaries from GoServ Global and the people who now live there.
The story of John 3:16 starts more than a decade before the hurricane.
A young boy named Eddie Constant lived in a village on a hill above the Ravine du Sud. Just below the hill, along the banks of the Ravine, there was another group of about 40 homes where people lived. The general area is still known as Camp Perrin.
Eddie’s family was very, very poor –so poor that they could not afford to feed Eddie. Somehow, an old lady who was slowly going blind found a way to give Eddie a few scraps of food that kept him alive when no one else could feed him anything. She would give him food from the back door of her shack so other people would not see that she was feeding Eddie. Everybody in the village simply called the old lady, “Grandma.” She fed and loved Eddie with the love of Jesus when no one else could or would.
When Eddie was about nine years old, he was put in an orphanage near Torbeck, about 18 miles away. Eddie excelled in school at the orphanage and he had a sponsor from the United States who supported him and his education. When Eddie graduated from secondary school, that sponsor paid for him to attend King’s College in the United States.
Eddie did very well in college and he could have earned a good living in the US, but he wanted to go back to Haiti and help his people.
Then, in 2010, a horrible earthquake hit Haiti. It destroyed over a quarter of a million buildings and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It was the worst disaster in the 21st century in the entire world.
Volunteers with airplanes were desperately needed to fly medical supplies into Haiti after the earthquake. One of those volunteers was a farmer from Iowa named Ken DeYoung, who flew supplies into Les Cayes, Haiti fifty times. On the very last trip, he asked if someone could show him around the city because he hadn’t been out of the airport. (Les Cayes is only four miles from Torbeck.) Eddie, who was working for the United Nations at the time, was there waiting there for him. To this day, Eddie has no idea why he ended up there. It was as if God placed him there.
What Ken saw absolutely broke his heart.
When he got home, God opened a door for him to meet with a missionary named Terry Baxter and together they formed a ministry that eventually became GoServ Global. The ministry was founded to help orphans like Eddie. God smiled on it and it grew and many, many missionaries went to Haiti to help the people there.
One of those missionaries was a guy who owned a company that made grain bins. He had an idea that those grain bins could be modified and used as homes that wouldn’t fall down and kill people during an earthquake.
After some experiments and trial-and-error, they found a way to make those homes work! They called them Safe-T-Homes and they built forty of them in a place called The Village of Hope.
Then, in 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit Haiti and destroyed 200,000 homes and killed 51 people in Haiti. The storm was over a thousand miles wide and dumped enormous amounts of rain in its path. That rain completely filled the Ravine du Sud and the village of 40 homes was completely swept away. There was nothing left of the village where Eddie grew up.
Ken and Eddie went to visit the site and decided that Safe-T-Homes could be built on top of the hill, away from the ravine, to replace the homes that had been swept away. The only problem was that there was no road to where the village would be built.
Each Safe-T-Home weighs 4,000 pounds and is made up of many, many pieces. Normally, large trucks are used to deliver the homes and the cement they sit on, but that wasn’t possible here.
So, the people of the village and the missionaries and the volunteers started carrying the pieces for the Safe-T-Homes up the steep hill by hand one at a time. It was taking forever, but they were determined.
Eventually, they took machetes and pickaxes and shovels and made the walking path just wide enough for a dump truck to drive up and down the hill and deliver the parts for the Safe -T-Homes. The “road” is still there, but only a dump truck or something heavy duty built for off-road use can use it. Top speed is about five miles per hour on that road.
One of the things that is important in a place like this is to make sure the people have clean, safe water to drink. So, Eddie and the people from GoServ found a couple of guys who were willing to dig a well. They knew the well would have to be deep and that it would take a lot of work, so they agreed to pay these men $2500 if they could dig a well that would supply water for the village.
The men dug and dug day after day. One man would go down the hole (which was maybe three feet wide) and fill up a five gallon bucket with rocks and dirt. The other man pulled the bucket up with a rope, dumped it out, and sent the bucket back down. Eventually, the hole was over 200 feet deep and they still hadn’t hit water. The hole was so deep they had to pump air down to the man at the bottom so he could breathe.
Then one day, the hole collapsed with one of the men in it! By some miracle of God, they got him out and saved his life but after two days in the hospital, he went right back into that hole and kept digging!
Eventually, they did hit water, but it only lasted a little while and they had to make a new well. That second well, with its hand pump, is still working today and supplies the whole village with water. On it (in Haitian creole) are the words, "IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST."
When everything was done, they were able to build 19 Safe-T-Homes on top of that hill where an old lady with bad eyes kept a little boy named Eddie Constant alive with scraps of food she couldn’t afford to give him. It was the love of Jesus living in “Grandma” that changed Eddie from a kid with no hope to a man who would eventually be used by God to rebuild the village where he had been born that had been wiped out –and make it possible for “Grandma” to spend the rest of her life in a safe, secure home of her own.
And, when they asked Eddie what they should name this new village, he didn’t hesitate at all:
John 3:16
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
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