Steel container to be transformed into mobile classroom for Haitians

TIPP CITY, Ohio — As people drive down Main Street in Tipp City you may have noticed a big steel box sitting in the parking lot of Tipp City United Methodist Church.

That steel box will be turned into a mobile classroom and will be sent to the country of Haiti.

Organizers will be spending the next few weeks transforming the steel container into the portable classroom.

Pastor Dan Glover said when Angie Woo first brought the idea to him, he had no idea how it would work.

Woo, a mission team member, said “We can’t go to Guatemala, Tanzania or Florida for our mission trips this year so why not bring our mission trip to the community and our parking lot.”

The church worked on missions in the past in Haiti, packing more than 100,000 meals to ship off to the developing country.

“The people of Haiti are just on our hearts,” Woo said. However, sending an actual classroom across the world is a whole new feat.

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Woo said, “Knowing what COVID has done in a country like Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, there are in dire need.”

Something Glover said he felt compelled to do, not just for the kids in Haiti who will benefit from this, but for the healing it provides to his congregation.

“Coming out of COVID, realizing how blessed we’ve been, we’ve had a lot of deaths and a lot of difficulties just like everyone else,” Glover said. “So, we decided to take that, turn it around and take what we’ve been blessed with and bless other people.”

This project is something the whole community is getting involved with.

Woo said, “We’ll have men, children, put drywall in, insulation, electricity, build it up to a classroom. The high school will make cabinets so the teacher will have cabinets.”

Once finished, the steel container will be taken to a U.S. port, loaded onto a boat and then shipped off across the world. Then, the classroom will sit with three others just like it.

It may seem small, but this is intended to be a high school that will be loaded with things like hygiene products, notebooks, pens and pencils that will provide four more years of education to teens in Haiti.

Starting Wednesday, March 24, organizers will start painting the outside of the shipping container and over the next six weeks, the container will be transformed into a classroom.

Organizers ware taking the following donations for the mobile classroom: wood pencils, glue sticks, pens, Crayola crayons, rulers, scissors, pencil sharpeners, notebooks, loose-leaf paper, wet wipes, tissues, hand sanitizer, construction paper, shampoo, toothbrush, toothpaste, washcloths, soap and deodorant.

For more information, check out their website at https://tippcityumc.org/mobileclassroom

Cox Media Group