HOW TO PURCHASE
"Don't Dance on the Street Corner and Other Lessons I Have Learned in Haiti" is a collection of memoirs written by Lori Cresap. It goes on sale on Feb. 9, but you can buy a copy early by emailing the author at HaitiMemoirs@gmail.com.
You can pre-order the book online through Tate Publishing at www.tatepublishing.com or via Amazon at Amazon.com.
Many people in and around the city know Lori Cresap as a police sergeant with the Fairfield Police Department.
And a few know her as a missionary who takes one-week trips twice a year to Haiti.
She is also now a published author, and her first book, "Don't Dance on the Street Corner and Other Lessons I Have Learned in Haiti" is a collection of memories she recorded over her first eight trips since the devastating earthquake that ravished the already impoverished country in 2010.
Cresap said she started going on medical and relief mission trips to the country because she couldn’t shake the idea — which she described as a “heavy weight” — that she had to do something, anything to help.
“I don’t doubt it was a calling from God. I guess he has a purpose and plan, but I definitely felt that heavy weight that I needed to go,” Cresap said. “I hadn’t thought of it ever before.”
The book is the collection of her thoughts, experiences, emotions and interactions with the people she met and helped during some of her first trips to Haiti. And the journal entries, Cresap believes, were also a higher calling.
“I never in my life written really anything. I’ve never journaled in my life, and I never journal outside of Haiti,” said Cresap, who had previously only shared her journal entries with family, friends and other missionaries. “I just have this calling to journal everything we do. … I just feel really drawn.”
Those who read her journal entries encouraged her to publish them. All of the proceeds from the book support Destiny Village, an American-run and American-supported orphanage in Pierre Payen.
“It’s no doubt the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done,” said Cresap about her missionary work in Haiti. “It’s a very trying week, both emotionally and physically exhausting, but there’s just so much joy in seeing the faces of people when they see your truck pull in.”
Every summer, a medical mission group sets up camp at Destiny Village to help thousands of children and adults, according to Dr. Robert Lerer, who leads the medical mission.
The work Cresap and the others do makes a difference, said Lerer, who is Butler County’s health commissioner.
“One to three children out of every thousand we see are near death,” Lerer said.
In 2013, Cresap began her own mission, which ranges from 10 to 14 people, providing relief supplies to Destiny Village and the surrounding areas. She now partners with Princeton Pike Church of God on the mission trips.
“We probably take 5,000 pounds (of relief supplies),” Cresap said, adding that missionaries will spend hundreds of dollars on rice, beans, oil and water.
And every time the children of Destiny Village see the truck pull up, Cresap said she sees contradictory emotions on their faces: the desperation of their situation mixed with the excitement of hope that the missionaries bring with supplies.
“It can be very heart-breaking and very joyous all at the same time,” Cresap said.
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