Friday, December 16, 2016

Christmas Greetings from the Plattners!


Love Divine, all love excelling, Joy of heav'n to earth come down!
  Fix in us Thy humble dwelling; All Thy faithful mercies crown. 
 Jesus, Thou art all compassion, Pure, unbounded love Thou art;
  Visit us with Thy salvation; enter every trembling heart.
-Charles Wesley-


Celebrating Christmas in Haiti is definitely different than 
IL, but one thing--the most important thing-- remains:
Jesus was born to redeem us!  Celebrate Him!

We wish you all a blessed Christmas!


The last couple months since the hurricane have been full.  Full of many stressful, difficult and hopeless times.  Thankfully God did not leave us there.  We have also been blessed with refreshing and relaxing times to spur us on in our work here.  As always, we will let the pictures do the talking!





This is how our church looked for at least a month after the hurricane.  With all the rain we received during and after the hurricane, you can imagine what a mess it was.  


The kids took advantage of all the extra water around here and found some new swimming holes!  Brenna is enjoying her ripstick at the Court.  



In mid November we enjoyed a visit from the Hartzler family who lived here during our first year.  Brenna and Grace were good friends, and they certainly picked up where they left off and had a great time together!


That same weekend, we were thankful to go to our annual missionary retreat at Coby Beach.  It's about a 2 hour drive from us.  We gather for a couple days of fellowship and learning (from wise speakers), and the encouragement and spiritual strength we receive is such a blessing!  This is a picture of all the HarvestCall missionaries from Bonne Fin and Cayes.



And then, our long awaited trip to the Dominican Republic!  We left on Thanksgiving day, drove 10 hours to Cape Haitian, and then about 5 more hours to our resort the next day.  DR is so different than Haiti!  It's almost hard to believe it's the same island.  The roads are better, there are more trees, they speak Spanish, and they have fast food restaurants!  Hooray for soft-serve ice cream at Burger King!


What kind of mother lets their child have ice cream and french fries for lunch??? :)


Are you seeing the trend?  Our trip was pretty much a food tour!  


The kids had a contest to see who could get the best picture of Kurt and me.  
Hadley won with this one!


We visited a beautiful Japanese garden!  (of course the kids and Kurt say the did it just for me:)


We drove through a town that had all these stations set up along the main road.  At first we thought it was deer season:)  Upon closer inspection, we realized this is how they sell goat in the DR!


We spent some time at the Three Eyes National Park in Santo Domingo.  There were 3 underground lakes with crystal clear water.  Beautiful place that we enjoyed visiting!

We returned home on December 4th and are now anticipating special Christmas visitors!  We are really looking forward to having some family here to celebrate with us!  In the meantime, we're trying to make it feel Christmassy here (even though it's 80 degrees) by putting up decorations, drinking hot chocolate, playing Christmas music, lighting candles, making cookies, singing, and reading A Christmas Carol aloud in the evenings.  Thanking God for simple pleasures!