05/31/2022
Friends, the Tomah Haiti Mission Team has made the difficult decision to conclude our fundraising work. We would like to take this opportunity to briefly review our team’s history and offer a huge “THANK YOU” to everyone who supported the team and our work over the past fifteen (15) years.
A group of folks from Tomah first ventured to Haiti in 2006 to join the church group from Pell Lake, Wisconsin, led by Gladys Mungo.
In 2007, the first group from “Tomah” (and surrounding communities) formed a team and traveled to Bon a Dos to hold a medical and dental clinic. After that, teams served in Haiti every year until the final trip in 2015.
During those nine seasons of service, teams provided medical and dental care, helped organize and facilitate huge multiple-couple weddings, delivered care packages to villages and orphanages, helped at the Sunday School service in the very poor area of Renault, and played and worked alongside many Haitians.
The first two years, teams worked with a missionary named Luther, who was once best described as a “missionary Crocodile Dundee.” Luther was a missionary with Harvest International, based in Florida.
Following Luther’s retirement, the team worked with the Rod and Debbie Wray family, Canadians who gave up their careers to become fulltime missionaries with their five children. The Wrays also worked with Harvest International. The teams watched the kids grow up and move on; by 2015, it was Rod, Debbie and Katie, their teenaged daughter.
The Wrays dreamed of a sports camp for children, and they worked hard to build it. Camp Mahanaim sat on the coast of the Caribbean Sea, flanked on two sides by rivers. Over the years, floods and hurricanes caused damage that the Wrays doggedly repaired and rebuilt. Political unrest was a constant worry, especially when considering transporting teams from Port au Prince to Camp Mahanaim.
The Wrays always bounced or clawed their way back, but the 7.2 earthquake that shook the Les Cayes area on August 14, 2021 was just too strong and too close to recover from: the camp infrastructure was destroyed and soon overtaken by looters. The Wrays have since returned to Canada and will reassess their future plans.
Even though the Haiti Mission Team hadn’t been to Haiti since 2015, we continued to hold fundraisers and financially support the work of the Wrays and Gladys Mungo, who operates an orphanage and program called Haiti’s Children in Les Cayes.
The major fundraisers included an annual rummage sale, parking charter buses at Cranfest, and the yearly Father-Daughter Dance. The group also had soup suppers, brat sales, Culver’s Tip Nights, raffles, golf outings, a concert in Madison, basket making classes, bake sales, and many others.
The last event for the team was the rummage sale held the end of April. Following the sale, the team’s funds were split and donated three ways: one third to Harvest International to support another missionary there (Austin Truelove), Haiti’s Children with Gladys Mungo, and the Tomah Area MobilePack for Feed My Starving Children, which is returning to Tomah this July. The team members had distributed manna packs to the hundreds of children who attended the Renault Sunday School program.
THANK YOU to everyone who supported the team over the years. Whether you prayed for the safety of our team members as we traveled, or whether you donated funds, items for the rummage sale, brought your daughter to the dance, bought a raffle ticket – we are grateful.
THANK YOU to the many volunteers who helped us over the years – some of you never touched Haitian soil, yet you worked tirelessly at fundraisers, such as the weeklong prep for the rummage sale and the sale itself, or weathering the often wet and rainy (and sometimes very hot!) Cranfest weekends. We appreciate you more than you’ll know.
A special thanks to Gloria Dei Lutheran Church who was the team’s home base, holding our funds and hosting our meetings, storage space, soup suppers and rummage sales.
The experiences the team members shared in Haiti were life changing. We are extremely grateful to everyone who played a part in our work over the years.
Thank you.
