It’s looking like Kentucky Baptists will send more than 12,000 Buckets of Hope to Haiti as part of the SBC-wide effort to provide practical aid to the people devastated by the Jan. 12 earthquake. The goal here in Kentucky was to collect 10,000 buckets so our people have been especially generous.

The video on this page shows students at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville preparing thousands of the buckets for transport to Miami where they will go by ship to Haiti. (Click here if the device you’re using doesn’t embed the video into the post.)

Just getting the buckets to Haiti has been quite a testimony of cooperation. In most cases, the buckets went originally to one of our Baptist churches, then on to an association office serving as a cluster point and then finally to Louisville. In Louisville, the students here are putting the buckets on wooden pallets, shrinkwrapping the pallets and then loading those pallets onto trucks for the long ride south. Handling the buckets is hard physical work and much appreciation is due to Bob Perkins and the entire team at Southern that has been coordinating this labor. Kentucky Baptist disaster relief workers are also helping with this part of the project.

Once the buckets arrive in Haiti, they will still have to be transported to secure locations from which distribution can be managed. My understanding is that the actual distribution will primarily be accomplished through the Haitian Baptist churches which already have the experience in handling this kind of distribution in a controlled, fair and compassionate way.

The Buckets of Hope will be extremely valuable when they arrive in Haiti. Kentucky currently has had both medical and chaplain/assessment teams in Haiti this week (working in Port-au-Prince and Mirabalais) and the stories that are coming back continue to be heartbreaking. The needs of the country before the quake were already desperate but are even more difficult now.

I just watched video footage earlier today (that I’ll have up in the next couple of days) of one of our pastors describing the physical and emotional exhaustion of some of the Haitian pastors who are almost literally serving as shepherds as they go out seeking food and water to meet the physical needs of their flock. Almost all are dealing with deep personal grief after having lost loved ones and most are still living under makeshift tents. The approach of the rainy season has our doctors worried about the public health impact from unrecovered bodies still buried in rubble from the quake.

Yet, our God is at work! People are coming to Christ by the thousands and even voodoo priests are coming to the Lord during this difficult time. And our disaster relief teams continue to talk about the resiliency of the Haitian people and the admiration they have for them.

Please continue to pray for the people of Haiti and for those who are ministering there. Be praying now as well for each family that the Buckets of Hope will be helping. May the Lord use these staples to provide physical and spiritual sustenance!

– Robert Reeves