If you’ve never been on a mission trip, we would encourage you to go. It will change your life forever… you will never see life through the same lens again.

Our story begins long ago but more importantly, is still being written everyday. After 25 years of working in our own business, we – Jeff Gacek and Alyn Shannon are now blessed with the opportunity to seek our God-given purpose here on earth with a focus on faith, transformation and living our lives with significance.

It is a challenge in the world we live to put God in the center of our lives, and keep Him there, but that is what we seek to do every day. When we get to heaven, and we stand before our Lord, and He asks, “What did you do with the gifts I gave you?” we want to say “We used them for Your purpose that You put us on earth to fulfill. We worked hard to become more like You and live a life of love.”

Matthew 25:35-40

 

Why Haiti?

After years of supporting missions financially, we took the time and went on our first mission trip to Haiti in January of 2006. What we saw there tore our hearts wide open. People living in extreme poverty, with no clean water, no electricity, no toilet, little food… where 10-12 people live in a one-room shack with a dirt floor, and where the floor turns to mud during the rainy season. Can you even imagine?

Haiti is a country where 1 in 8 children die by the age of 5 from curable or treatable diseases, where 20 percent of women die at childbirth from lack of medical care, and where 80% of the people live in poverty making less than $1 per day. While our children have the time of their lives at Disneyworld, 90 minutes away by plane, children of Haiti fight for their lives. This is a country right in our back yard—considered One of the Americas—and yet the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Bono from U2 says, “The accident of longitude and latitude should not determine whether you live or die.”

We are so blessed to have been born in the longitude and latitude of the United States. Through our faith, God has blessed us with so much and through our walk in faith, we believe these blessings should be given away.

What are we doing in Haiti?

In the spring of 2006, with the generous help and support of our “friends and family”, we were able commit to helping a small school in the mountains of Lespinasse, Haiti. Reiser Heights was built by Fr Reiser and other charities from Minnesota years before. It is the only school in this rural mountain area and was beyond capacity and overflowing with students.

In Haiti, only about half the children are able to attend school. Many parents just cannot afford to purchase the two uniforms required and/or need the children to help support the family by working in the fields or carrying charcoal or vegetables to market. Of the children that do attend school, many of the parents send them because they are fed a meal. For many of these children, it is the only meal they get each day. With the illiteracy rate at 50%, the future of Haiti lies in the children, they must receive skills and tools needed in order to change their future.

In the summer of 2006, we broke ground on a 4-room school addition, a 30,000-gallon cistern (to collect clean water off the roof of the school), a 4-stall sanitary block (concrete outhouse) and a kitchen to replace the tin shack that was being used to prepare food for the children. We finished construction and dedicated the project in July, 2007.

You can see some of the other projects we are currently working on listed on buya.org under our mission, “Healing Haiti.”

So how did buya.org come about?

We started buya.org, a non-profit charity with the mission of helping small grassroots charities market their causes online. The place where people who have much and need little can connect with those who have little and need so much. We believe that if you knew about the needs of the poor, the vulnerable, the disadvantaged, and believed that you could actually do something to fulfill a specific need, that you would. Buya.org empowers you to make a difference in this world, one person at a time. And if you had “proof” of the “impact” you made with your gift, you would shop more often for opportunities to “make a difference.”

So we give you buya.org, a window to the world outside your own. Where you can:


Please let us know about your experience on buya.org and any recommendations that you might have so that we can better serve both the needs of the poor and your need to “make a difference in this world.” Who knows—the life you change may be your own!

Thanks for visiting buya.org

Blessings…

Jeffrey Gacek and Alyn Shannon