Hello Everyone,
Thank you so much for your prayers that were answered, according to God’s will, and the 9 containers of food were approved to be released (over 2,600,000 meals!).
But we have another prayer request that we humbly ask you to lift up before the throne of God:
The way the system works with containers is that the U.S. company that leases/rents the containers for our cargo, charges us a daily fee, called a demurrage fee, of $40 per container. After the first 2 weeks the container is here in Haiti in the port, they start charging those daily fees. They just provided us with the cost for these “demurrage charges” to date, and it is over $22,000. Since some of the containers came in October, and some in November and December and due to the delays in customs here (mostly due to holidays and end of fiscal year/beginning of new year paper work that is required, and which we filed on time, but which is taking an inordinate time to be approved), the containers incurred a large demurrage expense. If customs had NOT granted us the release of these food containers (through your prayers and God’s response), ahead of the paperwork being approved, we would still be incurring more and more charges for an unknown period of time.
The request for prayer is this: Our freight forwarder, Pilot Freight, who handles all of our shipments is contacting the container company to see if they will waive those demurrage fees, or at the least, reduce them seriously. They can do whatever they want, and we pray they will be favorable. We are asking you to pray that they will waive the fees entirely. The cost varies between $1230 to $3,300 per container, depending upon how long it has been on the ground here in Haiti and each day that goes by the fees continue to tack on to the bill.
This delay in processing documents was not expected. We anticipated a one month turnaround time, per what we were told. It has now been almost 4 months, thus these extra charges. In an effort to be good stewards of all God gives us we really want to work hard to get these fees waived or reduced. A certain amount of fees is common but this is excessive due to the timing and delays in customs.
Please continue to pray for blessings!
Thank you in Jesus,
Gretchen L. DeVoe
Co-Founder & Chief Ministries Officer
