This week has been all about transformation. Not just change, but a dramatic, from-scratch process that turns a small plot of dirt into a new house, a child’s stare into a beaming smile, and a group of short-term volunteers into Americans who understand a little more about a new country, culture, and people.

This man is standing in the doorway of his new house, one built this week through a partnership between Haitian workers and our group of (largely inexperienced) volunteers. We mostly handed them tools and cinder blocks and sheets of tin for the roofs, and they led the building projects out of their knowledge of how things work best here.

“Photo! Photo!” Everywhere, kids call out for you to take their picture and then show it to them. Many of the boys strike fighting poses or make tough faces. This boy, a fixture at the church where we ate our lunches, asked me to take this photo:

After I showed it to him, I asked him to smile for the next one. Maybe more than any other single ministry opportunity, this week was about spending quality time with kids. I watched my teammates love sacrificially all week, patiently holding a cell phone so they could marvel at a game on the screen; learning hand clapping games to pass the time before lunch; stooping down to pick up a shoeless toddler on the dusty road to our work sites. And earning smiles like these:

Tomorrow, we’ll travel to Blanquette up in the mountains. Illinois churches have partnered with Pastor Evens there; as recently as last week, a Go team of students was there for Vacation Bible School. We’ll report more tomorrow on our visit, and the team’s final impressions of Haiti.

In Port-au-Prince, this is how we start each morning before heading to our work sites. Enjoy the video, and then check out a few photos from today. Coming tomorrow: a wrap-up from our last ministry day in Haiti.

A few snapshots from Wednesday in Port-au-Prince:

Philippe Armand remembers well the day of the earthquake. Philippe, a former school teacher, is working this week as a translator for a team of Illinois volunteers serving in Haiti. He has done so several times since the January 2010 quake, which killed more than 200,000 in his country.

Philippe was in a meeting when the ground began to shake in the late afternoon January 12. The group thought it was a plane crash, since the meeting was near the Port-au-Prince airport. But when they went outside and saw the great cloud of dust covering their city, “We just thought it was the end of the world,” he says.

He started walking home, desperate to see if his wife and children were ok. All the way home, he saw death and destruction- “I can’t stop crying,” he says, recalling the hour-long walk home. “I tried to call my wife; I can’t because there was a problem. You can’t find anyone on the phone or text message.”

He remembers seeing one large house in ruins and thinking about what might have become of his own small home. When he finally got there, everyone was safe and the house was still standing. But fear had set in. Philippe says people lived outside for a long time, because they thought at any time, the shaking could start again.

Baptist Global Response (BGR), a ministry partner of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, arrived on the scene soon after the quake, first to deliver food and later to help rebuild homes and churches. Including Phillipe’s church, Damien Baptist. And because school was out indefinitely, Philippe found a job as a guard at the BGR compound. That’s how he met Bob Elmore, the leader of this week’s team and several others over the past couple years.

BGR built several hundred homes, and other mission teams left their mark on Haiti too. But the change isn’t just physical. “After the earthquake a lot of people accepted Jesus,” Philippe says.

“Before the earthquake, there are many religions, many voodoo priests. After the earthquake, even the voodoo priests cry out [to] God. ‘God save me! If I am alive right now, [it’s] because of God.'”

Philippe Armand (far left) studies a Christian book translated into Haitian Creole in a group led by Brian Harriss (third from left), a volunteer from First Baptist, Columbia, Ill.

When Bob Elmore described what our team would be doing this week in Haiti, he was careful to remind us we wouldn’t be building houses. Rather, Bob said, we’re here to help local workers build houses. And to remember that the “bosses” and their helpers know a lot more about what works in Haiti than we do.

It has to be a bit of a burden, taking on 19 American volunteers, many who have little to no construction experience. But the Haitians we worked with today greeted us with smiles every time we saw them, patiently reminded us how to say “what is your name” in Creole (more than a few times), and took us under their wing on two hot, dusty construction sites that will hold new cinder block homes in just a few days. They’re sacrificing to partner with us.

They’re also teaching us the basics of Haitian construction, from sifting dirt to be used as mortar, to creating an assembly line to get cinder blocks where they need to go.

And in return, hopefully we’re loving them well, even knowing many of us may not come back to Haiti, at least for a while. Our sacrifice is forgetting the heat long enough to loop both arms around kids when they want to walk down the street with you. (Five wide: you in the middle, one kid under each arm, and two more holding your hands).

Our sacrifice is having the courage to love them well, as one group member said during tonight’s devotion time. “It’s easy not to fall in love,” Emily Ebert said, not because the people aren’t lovable, but because it would be easier to hang back, build what we need to build, and leave on Sunday. It’s harder to start an awkward conversation in a foreign language, knowing we’re going to look like we don’t know what we’re doing.

Bob told us tonight that on his first trip to Haiti a few years ago, he focused on the work to be done and didn’t really meet many people. But on several subsequent trips, he decided the relationships were more important. Today, as we stood on the bank of the Grise River (named for its gray color), one of Bob’s Haitian friends – Phillip- told him, “You are from Haiti now.”

Bob Elmore (in yellow) gives instructions at the beginning of the team’s first work day in Haiti.

Pastor Estaphat of Gosen Church leads the volunteers in singing before they start their work. His church building was built in November by volunteers led by Bob Elmore.

Bigarade is dotted with houses built by Baptist Global Response after the 2010 earthquake. Southern Baptist missionary Sam Yorke was instrumental in the building of those homes, so the locals call the community “the city of Sam” and “Sam village.”

The volunteers are magnets for friendly kids.

Courtney Fallon gets the beauty shop treatment on the work site.

Tad Arndt and Cara Atienza shovel and sift to make mortar for the homes under construction.