Egg Fruit. First harvest in the North.

Why would a fruit be named 'egg fruit'. Not its shape. Not its taste. The color and texture of a hard boiled egg yoke most likely lead to the naming of this fruit.


The fruit is very nutritious, high in vitamin A, has twice the carbohydrate of mango and four times the protein. It tastes very sweet  with a sweet potato and squash flavor, and a  pasty/starchy texture.

Egg fruit makes great milkshakes or can even be made into pumpkin pie.  It is good on bread like jam.

Locally banana, peanut butter or avocado are often eaten on bread but jam, or other sandwiches like ham and cheese are rare.

Egg fruit grows well in poor soil and did well on LaGonave, but grew slowly at the start at Fauche. Probably due to white grubs eating the roots or the many mahogany trees on campus that poison the soil for other plants, stunting them.

 This four year old egg fruit tree produced about 40 fruits for its first harvest. A few 5 year old trees still haven't produced or have not produced much.

They should be producing well soon and the seeds will be planted in the nursery for distribution in North Haiti, where Cory has not seen any other egg fruits yet.

Thankful for good antibiotics to combat both Cory's and Anna's leg infections this week.

Cory's small wound near the ankle infected his lymphatics late on Saturday.

Monday morning the slight thigh pain Anna started with the night before had increased to the point she could not walk without pain and a fever had started.

Today both patients continue to improve.

We plan to travel to LaGonave for a summit of organizations working on LaGonave and then work for three days next week with the DecAid Project before returning home [Those of you on Facebook can check out the DecAid Project page]. 

Good Bye November..

November we set back our clocks, hosted a team from Friendship Wesleyan, fit in a bit of school and celebrated American Thanksgiving both as a family and today with other missionaries from around Cap Haitian.

On campus today an evangelism program through Compassion International to review with the students how to know the Lord.

Growing up Thanksgiving meant having a huge breakfast with Dad's family and then a early supper/dinner with Mom's family.

Family-catching up on the newest news or revisiting familiar or new stories from the family archives.

If given a choice of eating special foods and having a 4 day weekend vs. a normal meal with family there would be no contest…family would win!

But other than some E-mail messages we could not celebrate with family so we focused on a day off of school to make some special treats while thinking of the abundance of blessings the Lord provides our family.

For the first time ever we cooked a whole bird. Anna named him, Mr. Turkey so that we could say we had turkey. Step one: make sure you buy an ugly bird to help you not get to attached.

Two: Have Cory do the butchering while advising thanks to google. While I grew up on the farm I'm used to bigger 4 legged critters not birds.

Three: Have everyone helped pluck and make it a learning experience!

On Thanksgiving everyone had a couple of dishes to focus on so we ended up with mashed potatoes, bread stuffing, corn casserole, gravy, chicken and three types of pies.

Four small apples lasted in the refrigerator since our return in early September only to end up in a great tasting pie. Pumpkin and mock apple as well.

Still enjoying one of the best parts about Thanksgiving….the left overs.

 Chicken rice soup tonight.

Today we brought sweet potato muffins and cookies to the Christian radio station and celebrated being thankful to the Lord for our blessings with others working in the area.

Enjoyed both visiting with friends we've met in the past as well as meeting some new ones.

Yesterday morning we were called down to Pastor Emmanuel's house to pray for his daughter-in-law.

Today's report is that she's in the hospital in Cap doing better and that Pastor Emmanuel who traveled to Port-au-Prince this week for his health also feels a bit better.

 Please pray for this family.

Tomorrow will be the first of December meaning only 32 days left in 2013, hard to believe.

Thoughts about 'orphanages'

Occasionally in the past I've talked to visitors or teams about orphanages. It can be hard when in a quick conversation or especially on-line to be completely understood, not to mention that with time people's opinions can change and mature. Please feel free to E-mail me if you have additional questions or need clarification of what I mean.

So allow me to share a bit about our feelings on orphanages and adoptions. I know currently this is a hot topic with lots of opinions on blogs, web sites, books and likely American radio and TV. You can search and learn from a lot more gifted writers than me and I encourage you to do so.

First let me clarify definitions of terms here in Haiti, an orphanage could also be correctly called a children's home and most of the children living there do not qualify as adoptable by US standards.  A creche is an organization which also houses children and also works to get those qualified for adoptions adopted. I will use these terms.

I admit to speaking out strongly at times concerning orphanages / children homes here. A couple of reasons in no special order:

1. I felt that well meaning folks came to Haiti, took in some children to feed, school and care for not completely thinking though the process. It takes years to learn Creole, learn Haitian culture and to know how to raise a Haitian child who can grow up and function well in Haitian culture and many folks skipped these steps.

2. Frustration from seeing lots of folks supporting children's homes but very little evidence of programs supporting Haitian families so that they could stay together. What parent struggling to feed their family and not able to pay for school, would not feel the pressure to hand over their children to a home where they could received food and education-not realizing the damage that can come from not being raised in  your family but a group home?

3. Feeling that for children who could not stay in their biological family that maybe the best option could be being placed in a Haitian Christian home for a while knowing that with Haiti's unfortunate reality of child slaves that great effort would need to be made to avoid this while supporting the family to accept the child as one of their own. This often happens in Haiti with relatives but still far to often the children end up being treated as slaves.

4. Hearing whispers and now horrific stories of the abuse that occur in some of the orphanages either at the hands of those in charge, staff or other children.

5. Only now have we started to hear about programs focusing on preparing teens ready to 'age out' for the real world of Haiti that they will need to live and work in but still hear more stories about the horrible places or places struggling with this concept too. Maybe such programs existed before and we just never heard about them.

6. Now with books talking about how to help without hurting, discussions of adoptions vs. supporting the families, discussions of small business and parenting classes hope starts to enter the picture. We need to talk about the hard topics and discuss together possible solutions.

I try not to make vast generalizations and apologize if in the past that is how I was understood. There will always be children who need a different home situation and a new family through adoption. If the Lord tells you to open your life to a child needing a home then pray, do your homework and start the paperwork! Let us know and we will pray for you.

There are organizations doing their best to listen to advice of Haitians on how to help Haitians help others. There are folks doing things right with the Lord's help. There are people who messed up in the past, realized it, asked and received forgiveness and now working on making needed corrections. Thankfully the Lord can use each of us and continues to work on us and our attitudes every day. 

We need to help families stay together. 

We will always have the poor. But we need to learn how to help the poor, the sick ,the lonely, the sad. Help them keep their dignity. Help them on their feet. Help them be all they can be. Help them see the Lord's love. Help them find hope again. Listen to their stories and help them by being a friend. 

Vanilla vine, egg fruit and black sapote.

This week Cory finally found time to work on some of his plants with Gener and Yvon.

With wet warm weather and a busy schedule some of the plants got a bit out of hand.

This spring when Cory needed to climb a ladder to attempt to pollinate the blossoms on his very tall vanilla bean vine he remarked that he should take down the vine, cut it into pieces and replant so that the flowers and eventually beans would be easier to reach.

One flower successfully pollinated and set a bean which fell off the vine while we visited the USA.

This two year old vine climbed 35 feet into the tree before Cory removed it.

He divided the vine into 4 foot sections to be replanted around posts or trees.

A second vine climbs up the back shed but so far no bean pods produced.

Not easy to produce your own vanilla pods but having processed chocolate our first year in the north Cory needed a new challenge.

We like vanilla so easy to support him on this project !

Some facts about vanilla:

• Comes from the orchids of the genus Vanilla.
• Second most expensive spice after saffron because of the labor-intensive process.
• Indonesia and Madagascar leads the world in production of vanilla.
• Up to 95% of 'vanilla' products are artificially flavored.
• Hand pollination needed as natural pollinators are rare.
• Vanilla beans take 6 months to ripen on the vine. Needs to be picked when end starts to split.  

Egg Fruit.

Black Sapote

Soon to be harvested:

Pollination in early April 

Holidays start and teacher training.

Back to just us and 'normal' activities which translates into not feeling like there's much interesting to blog about these days.


Monday, a holiday in Haiti celebrating the last major battle for Haitian independence fought in the north at Vertières. Because of scheduled protests against President Martelly in Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitian warnings went out from Embassies warning foreigners about possible danger.  A park between us and the airport celebrates & marks the site of this battle. On campus representatives from the northern district spent the day in training for ministry to children.

After being asked to help financially provide this training we realized we had a great opportunity to talk to the children's leaders about an important health issue and being good examples. Cory took a few minutes to share with the group information and to encourage them to not waste their money on something bad for their health…….

Even our team and in our house we rarely indulge in this treat as the teams to visit here can witness to……what am I talking about?

Pop, soda, cola as well as sugary artificial drinks. This topic will be included in the new version of the health book. Interestingly enough on Sunday we caught the end of the Sunday school lesson that talked about smoking being a slow poison…so this topic tied in well.

The training leader visiting from Port-au-Prince sits on the national board so we hope that the message will spread to the rest of Haiti. Some day I hope that visitors can be offered natural fruit juices or water more often than Coke.

Eli, Anna and I continue to organize, plan and study. With all the travel and teams interrupting our school year we just started week 7. Already the rhythm of our days is settling to a better, more efficient pattern.

Our French teacher, Alert returned the last edits of the Konsey health book and I just completed the changes. Now Cory gets a final check and then I can double check the table of contents and finish.

My in-box happily contains less than 30 messages. Cory helped to get the blankets and warm clothes out of storage yesterday and he started Christmas shopping this week. Afternoon rains cooling us down. Grateful for many blessings in my life.

[I also updated the page at the top of the blog 'about us'. A new family picture but please note we stood on a slight hill. Eli only needs a couple inches to reach Cory's height.]