Friend Ships January 2013 Activities Report

FRIEND SHIPS at PORT MERCY, 1019 North First Avenue, Lake Charles, LA 70601 Tel: 337-433-5022 Fax: 337-433-3433 Email: info@friendships.org Website: www.friendships.org

Dear Friend Ships Family: We hope you had a wonderful holiday and the New Year has gotten off to a great start! Thank you so much for standing with us to help people in need and minister the Gospel. At the end of 2012, we were blessed with a wonderful new refrigerated truck complete with a beautiful graphic. This gift of love came from two local companies who are faithful supporters of our work and will be a terrific addition to our equipment. We also received a top quality refrigerated semi-trailer. These vehicles will be especially helpful when transporting donations of perishable food. The Sea Hawks returned from Christmas break and have been training, helping with ongoing projects and reaching out to the community. It has rained hard and consistently in this area with flash flood warnings throughout the region. We were asked by local disaster relief personnel to send out teams for flood assessment in Lafayette and were happy to participate. A team also helped in an outreach with a local church to do car maintenance for single Moms and widows. StoreHouse One, both at Friend Ships West in California and in Lake Charles, Louisiana, continues to collect and distribute thousands of pounds of food to help people in need. The team in Roatn prepared to house a team from the US that is building a new church on the island, hosted a group that came to utilize the Village facility for a time of fasting, ministered to the children at the local orphanage and enjoyed the help of local church teams who came out to help maintain our roads and grounds. You may remember that in early 2010 when a terrible earthquake devastated Port-au-Prince, Haiti killing 200,000 people, we sent a ship to deliver aid and left a team of crew and Sea Hawks who lived in pup tents on the side of a mountain for a good part of a year to help with the relief effort. The team built temporary houses for the Haitians inside a beautiful tent donated by Denny Nissley of Christ in Action that we used as a workshop. The team did their job well and held the line, passing out food, shelter material, helping to administer shots, apply stitches, set bones, bandaged wounds (at times with blood flowing) and more as they stood in the gap for medical facilities that had been damaged. The ship we used for this trip into Haiti and many voyages that followed was Friend Ship Integrity, an incredibly valuable part of our operations. The ship is able to carry 1000 tons of supplies interior as well as equipment, mobile medical clinics, containers, forklifts, trucks and our helicopter on deck. The vessel houses sixty crew, is fuel efficient and in very good condition mechanically. She has a rear cargo door that makes it possible to load and offload quickly, easily transport needed vehicles and work in areas when normal port facilities are disrupted because of damage from a disaster.

Sailing from Port Mercy with supplies and equipment including Friend Ships helicopter

Offload from the rear ramp

In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, port and crane operations were severely damaged and completely out of commission for many months. While most supplies had to be delivered to the neighboring nation of the Dominican Republic and trucked into Haiti, we were able to bring Integrity to a cement pad dock directly into the affected area right away and quickly forklifted supplies off the ship, rather than utilize crane operations. We made six voyages with Integrity bringing in disaster relief workers, Carries 1000 tons interior and more on deck including medical containers trucks, forklifts, generators, medical clinics, our helicopter and six thousand tons of food, water, tents, tarps, medical supplies, clothing, pre-fabricated housing and other critical emergency aid. It has come time that Integrity visit the shipyard for routine maintenance and repairs. It will cost $65,000 and we have a generous offer of matching funds so if we raise $32,500, this will be matched and we can take the ship into dry dock. We would like to ask you to pray about and consider helping with this as the Lord leads you. You may send a check designated for Integrity shipyard or donate online at www.friendships.org/Donate.html and mark your gift for this purpose. We are preparing now to host our first Disaster Relief Training seminar next month aboard Mobile Conference Center Pearl for the church community. The first session will be in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Thank you again for your love and support. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13 Together in Christ,

Don and Sondra Tipton and the Friend Ships Teams

Integrity's last dry dock in the shipyard