Well, the travel dramas are over. Duane and I made it home Sunday night. We are so thankful for all the prayers and support we received the last three weeks. Throughout all the problems, complications, delays, and uncertainties, God’s timing is always shown to be perfect. We had many projects planned – most of which we were able to accomplish and others we hope to finish soon by getting our 3rd week group down (this time successfully). We were also asked to do several projects we hadn’t originally planned on and finished some home repair projects left over from the earthquake that we were waiting on material for. Thank you to all who volunteered to go to the hospital this past month (some who made it and others who tried) and to all of you who support us in multiple ways here at home.

This past year has been a year of growth and maturing at Centre de Sante Lumiere, and the past weeks of team projects are the result of many months of meetings and planning to determine how best to prepare for the future and improve the services that we provide.

We have seen growth this past year in almost every department. I typically don’t like to talk about numbers as it’s easy to get sidetracked with them and lose sight of the ministry, but we also need to be able to respond to the needs before us.

CSL’s 2023 statistics

Surgical Procedures – 1,784

Outpatient consultations – 80,763

Hospitalizations – 9,901

Lab Tests – 88,697

Deliveries – 613

Poor Fund Recipients – 4,422

Salvations – 960

All of the above areas have increased at least 25% this year. Labs have more than doubled, 650 more surgeries were done, and 150 more babies were born. Preparing to handle these increases, we have welcomed an OBGYN doctor as well as new staff in the surgical department.  Our building projects have included adding a recovery room, adding a break room for the ER nurses, preparing a guest house so that we can move out of the administration building to give them more room, creating two more private patient rooms, and moving our main gate to provide better security.

We are thankful for the progress that has been made; however, there continue to be many problems in Haiti that our staff are faced with, making like difficult. Haiti is controlled by a group of gangs who are trying to gain control of the country. The road to Port Au Prince is now totally blocked and very little supplies reach the Ley Cayes area. If you could even find gasoline last week it cost over $10 USD a gallon. When you consider the salary for almost half of our staff is less than $150 USD a month, you can see the issues this causes.  Everything is expensive right now. We have given staff raises but we can’t keep up with inflation and we don’t believe increasing our prices is possible either. This would result in more patients being unable to pay their hospital bills, which puts a greater demand on the Poor Fund. From our perspective, we don’t envision any improvements in the near future. We have had amazing support for our Poor Fund in the past, and demand for it keeps growing. We are working hard to find ways to cover these costs.

As we enter into this new year, we ask for prayers as we continue this ministry of service to the Haitian people and look to God for His guidance.

Thank you again for all your support.

Dan and Duane