The Hands & Feet Project, the children's village in Jacmel, Haiti that was started in 2004 by the band Audio Adrenaline, suffered major damage in the recent hurricanes.
Praise God that all of the children and staff are safe after Hurricane Gustav, which battered Haiti on the heels of Hurricane Fay, but as you can see in the video, the Hands & Feet campus is under a mountain of rock and rubble that washed down from the mountain.
Although the overwhelming process of restoration has begun, tropical storm Hanna hit this week and again devastated the village, relegating the children and staff, 48 people in all, to one second-story room.
"With our property completely buried in approximately four to five feet of mountain rock, we are doing the best we can to begin the clean-up process," says Drex Stuart, a lifetime missionary who has previously served in Haiti and heads up the Hands & Feet Project with his wife, Jo. (Jo and Drex Stuart are the parents of Audio A's frontman Mark Stuart, who is also actively involved in the project.) "Much of our supplies, food, clothes, diapers, formula, etc., have been destroyed and two of the houses where the kids lived were flooded with four feet of water and are currently unlivable. All 36 kids are living in the main house with the nannies."
"Our property is about 50 feet wide, but we are also going to help our neighbors finish their walls, because otherwise ours will be ineffective," says Joel Griffith, Hands & Feet Project managing director based in Franklin, TN. "In total we will build a 200-foot retaining wall covering a Christian school that has 850 kids, the homes and property of five neighboring families representing 50 people and our property housing 36 orphans and 12 staff."
"We had major damage to two of our children's houses and we lost most of our property walls, the foundation for our new cafeteria/kitchen. With the retaining wall and purchasing a backhoe to keep it up, we are looking at an estimated immediate need of $100,000- $150,000," continues Griffith. "Although at this time we cannot handle supplies because of shipping costs, we are asking for monetary donations through our website, www.handsandfeetproject.org."
To make a donation online to help Hands & Feet Project, go to www.handsandfeetproject.org. Contributions via mail can be sent to Gustav Relief, c/o Hands & Feet Project, PO Box 682105, Franklin, TN 37068.
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Thanks for alerting us to this. I remember meeting Mark Stuart a few years back at one of our interlinc meetings. We started off talking Audio Adrenaline and he was very polite and very pro and very matter of fact. But then he started talking about this property he had just purchased in Haiti to build what you are looking at above and it was totally different. It was like he lit up and got really fired up. This was clearly a very big passion for Him. My prayer is that their needs will be met. It was so awesome to see someone who was so successful in music being so passionate about really being God's hands and feet.
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