Haiti and the Zoo

The Quilt – Part 3

I love this picture. We bought the t-shirt at a Baptist encampment up in the hill country from Petionville. Petionville is the wealthier part of Port au Prince. The little compound has a restaurant, a souvenir store and a small zoo. Roberta would occasionally load all her kids into one of the large trucks, along with Charlene and me and would haul us all up the hill to what they called “the zoo”.  She would feed us all in the American style restaurant after we had checked on the animals.

Our trip to the zoo was just one of many delightful memories of our time in Haiti. We visited the country for about 24 years and we spent two of those years hosting the Estes Church’s guest house for medical teams and other transient missionaries. While there, we met lots of fascinating people, including Roberta’s friend Bobbie. Bobbie was a retired education professor who wanted to improve the Haitian educational system. She and Roberta worked out a plan and Bobbie would come down every three or four months bringing along some of her former students, now teachers in Tennessee’s school system. They formed relationships with teachers and principals in some of the more promising schools and began to teach them how to better reach their students with the material they wanted them to know.

Bobbie was hit hard by Roberta’s murder. You can read her reaction and much more about Haiti in Charlene’s new book "Roberta - Joy and Courage in a Clay jar Too Soon Broken"