Cary Boster is the Sales and Operations Manager for Mission Travel. After fourteen years working on the missionary travel planning side of missions, this February she got to go on her first mission trip herself, to Haiti. This post is part of a series to share about Mission Travel’s staff, and how God is calling each of us to use our individual gifts.
Cary has been working with Men for Missions, part of the One Mission Society (OMS), for over a decade of missionary travel planning. They have been a client that she holds particularly near and dear, and she has built several enduring friendships through the years, in additional to the professional relationship. She has always been the one behind the computer screen, negotiating for mission trip airfare and making travel arrangements for their teams. When they invited her to step out and come along to Haiti on a mission trip herself, she jumped at the chance.
While in Haiti, Cary helped build houses as part of the Bon Repos Project with OMS – a community initiative to build homes, dig wells, and provide places for worship and education to the poorest of the poor. Hundreds of construction volunteers have traveled from across the US to help with this project, and Cary is now honored and blessed to be among them.
Her team also got to visit with a local orphanage, to deliver supplies and spend some time loving and enjoying the children there.
For many children in Haiti, since there is no free public education, the only ones who are lucky enough to get regular meals are the ones with education sponsors, who can be fed at school. Many of these sponsors are abroad, back in the states or in other countries, and Cary said she felt a sense of connectedness with all the people she has helped make travel arrangements for, knowing people are coming from all corners of the world to be invested in the beautiful Haitian people.
Despite the millions of dollars that have been sent to Haiti since the devastating earthquake in 2010, much of that funding has not made more than a dent in the living standards of the average Haitian. Instead, most of the discernible improvements have come from mission and aid and relief organizations — people and organizations living out the call “to care for the least of these.” It’s the power of missionary travel – the reason we exist here as a Christian missions travel agency.
Cary describes the faith of the people she met in Haiti as amazingly strong, and a real testament to what it means to cling to God and to human relationships. There is beauty and true joy, even in the deepest of poverty circumstances, and accepting the blessings of what the locals their have to offer out in their own right — hospitality, warmth, welcome, and wisdom and strength of faith — made serving there a deep and blessed experience.
