After a decade of taking annual trips to help with projects in various parts of Haiti, a group of friends from the Chicago area began to feel the urge to focus on one part of the country. Pastor Fran Leeman from LifeSpring Church and a few others sat down with Steve and Joline Moore, long time missionaries to Haiti, and proposed we find that place and get to work. After considering several possibilities, we ended up wandering around the Grand Anse River Valley for a week in 2006, visiting villages, meeting people, and asking questions about life there. At the end of that week, the whole group felt we had found the place, and we should get to work. The valley and mountains where we work are a remote area beyond the city of Jeremie at the end of Haiti’s southern peninsula. Following several visits to the valley, the local churches gave us a piece of land overlooking the river on which to build a house. We built a great house for our staff to live in and our one-week teams to stay in; we named it Kay Bo Rivye, which is Kreyol for “House by the River”. Our first couple of years in the valley were spent getting situated, building relationships, and starting to understand the needs. Since then, we have built six schools, rebuilt scores of homes after Haiti’s massive earthquake, helped reestablish farmers who were wiped out by a series of hurricanes, created the Village of Hope Orphanage, and provided hundreds of children with the opportunity to attend school and receive nutritious, protein-rich food.
