The island is divided in 10 departments. We have set-up a distribution committee that almost covers all the churches in the island. There is approximately 160 churches in Haiti with about 20 000 believers. Here is the breakdown of the churches by department. 01- WEAT 46 churches 8295 believers 02- NORTH 12 churches 1490 believers 03- NORTH-EAST 03 churches 0345 believers 04- NORTH-WEST 18 churches 3240 believers 05- ARTIBONITE 29 churches 3675 believers 06- SOUTH 18 churches 1490 believers 07- SOUTH-EAST 08 churches 0820 believers 08- GRANDE-ANSE 16 churches 0895 believers 09- NIPPES 02 churches 0130 believers 10- CENTRE 08 churches 0810 believers

Print shop Historical overview

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I travelled to Haiti for the first time in the early 1990s to accompany my pastor who had already started missionary work in that country, a few years prior. I was overwhelmed by the extent of their poverty and, paradoxically, their level of faith and spiritual riches. In 1991, I became the pastor of our local assembly, the Assemblée Lumière du Soir (Evening Light Assembly) in Warden, Quebec, Canada. As I like to say, they stole my heart during my very first trip, making me long to go back. So every year, we would prepare a series of the most important French messages we had on tapes to bring them to the Haitian assemblies that didn’t have any. Once we got there, we would purchase Bibles, tape players and as many batteries as would be required for those assemblies to listen to the tapes for a full year. Every year, we would spend two weeks in Haiti. Sometimes, it would take five or six of us to bring these hundreds of tapes to about half a dozen new assemblies. We also brought them French biographies of the prophet. I was able to establish a Dominican connection by which we were able to get 3,333 biographies printed in Dominican soil at a much cheaper rate than in Canada. This way, we could distribute them throughout Haiti without having to carry them over in our luggage. Up until 2010, I traveled mostly with brother Raymond Hébert, pastor of the Madawaska church, in Maine, one of the United States of America. This brother worked for a pulp and paper company, and every year, they would donate a few tons of photocopying paper to Haiti. Brother Raymond would ship this cargo a few weeks ahead of our planned trip, and then go about distributing the paper to the needy Christian business owners, always saving some for school children. One day, we were in the northern part of the country, in St-Michel-de-l’Attalaye, to visit the assembly of Bro. Napoléon Bougella, who is also a school principal. As we were about to part, he begged us to supply him with French message books. I remember him telling me: “If you give us books, God will take care of the rest.” I was so moved by the fact that he had put spiritual things first. Thus was born the idea of printing the message in Haiti. We already had the paper, thanks to brother Hébert, but we were certainly still a long way from our goal. Nevertheless, the idea of printing the message in Haiti was born. And as they say: “Once love projects, grace will take over.” In the spring of 2006, we held a special meeting at Brother Georges Lamarre’s. We had gathered a group of about twenty pastors, elders, trustees, and others from the Port-of- Prince area. When we proposed the idea of printing the message in Haiti, the project was greatly welcomed. We therefore established a committee in charge of choosing the Message books to be printed, and another committee in charge of their distribution. A printing graduate, Brother Wilfrid St-Fort, gave me a printing shop tour, so that I could get familiarized with the printing equipment we would need to acquire. Brother Lamarre offered us, free of charge, a space in the Bourbon district of Port-of-Prince that we occupied till the 2010 earthquake. During that massive quake, the entire four-story building collapsed, but by the grace of God, the basement that contained all our equipment weathered the shock, and the equipment was only subjected to superficial damages. Having no other available space to set up our print shop, we had to store the salvaged equipment in a warehouse, until my May 2012 trip back to Haiti. Before leaving, I asked my local assembly to pray that God would provide for an air-conditioned space in order to fight off every printer’s worst enemy, humidity, and that it would also have closed windows to ward off enemy number two, dust. Toward the end of one afternoon, I walked back from visiting a very needy brother in order to give him the funds he needed to buy a tarpaulin to cover the improvised shelter he and his wife and three young children had been living in since the quake. As I was walking past an ice and filtered water plant, I heard someone hailing me. I recognized the voice to be that of Brother Fénol François’, but I didn’t know he was actually the owner of that plant. Sitting behind the wheel of his pickup truck, he was calling out: “Brother Petit, what are you doing here, and where are you going?” As he offered to drive me to the place I was staying at, I squeezed in at the back, with the group of workers he was driving back home. Dropping me off at my destination, he said; “I didn’t know anything about your arrival.” When I told him that I had mainly come to find a new location to set the printing shop back up, so that we could continue printing the Message again, he immediately said: “Brother Petit, your search is over, I have what you need for this endeavor, and it is free.” The next morning, I went to visit the space he had to offer, on the second floor and at the front part of his ice and water plant. It was a beautiful unused commercial space with a new air-conditioning unit, and closed windows. Clearly, it was an answer from God! A few days later, we transferred the printing equipment to our new premises. And this is where, to this day, the French Message books are being printed in Haiti again. And since Brother Fénol produces his own electricity, the constant power cuts that used to hinder the printing work are now a thing of the past.