TFC Faculty Members Travel to Haiti

Toccoa Falls College faculty members Dr. Dale Garside and Dr. Richard (Rick) Thomas are spending their Spring Break (March 15-21) in Haiti. Beverly Garside, Rachel Garside, and Shannon Garside Bottiger will also travel with them to assist them in their work. Workers at The International Christian Development Mission (ICDM) and its director, Yvan Pierre, helped to organize the trip.

Dale has been to Haiti three times since 2006. He worked with ICDM to help establish their two Schools of Evangelism (SE) in Cap Haitian and Port-au-Prince. The country’s recent earthquake flattened the school in Port-au-Prince, and one of the students of that school was killed while attending evening classes at a nearby seminary. One of their evangelists who previously attended Dale’s leadership seminars in 2006 was also killed.

This ICDM mission trip has been organized to provide medical and food relief, as well as leadership training to re-establish the destroyed school. Dale will be training 34 church leaders in a course called Pastoral Training.

Rick (MD), Bev (RN), and Shannon (RN) will form the nucleus of the medical team, which will be treating up to 1500 Haitians of all ages, but especially 500 or so children in need of urgent medical care. They will also be involved in food relief in the nearby small city of Gonaives. Many Haitians, formerly of Port-au-Prince, have returned to their home areas because of the devastating blow to the capital’s infrastructure. This has created a dire situation in the more rural areas where there is not enough infrastructure to provide for all of the people’s needs. ICDM is trying to provide relief in this area about a four hour drive from the capital.

Rachel is 15 years old and is accompanying her parents to help in the local Bible school for children. Since she also speaks French, she will help with interpretation as well as taking pictures of those on the medical and food relief teams.

Pray as the Toccoa team of five leaves early Monday morning, March 15, from Atlanta. They are taking about 120 pounds of medical supplies, 120 pounds of books for the School of Evangelism, as well as school supplies for the ICDM school and clothing for the orphanage. Pray that the Toccoa group connects with the rest of the team in the Miami Airport. Pray also for the evangelist’s and SE student’s families. Pray finally for those Haitians who have been traumatized, but want to return to a normal, productive routine in ministry for the Lord Jesus.

Tags: Christian College, TFC, Toccoa Falls College, Toccoa Falls College Faculty

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under Current News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.