about us

a 40ish second review...


CONTACT US @ LivesayFamily@gmail.com 
Hi, we are Troy and Tara.  We mostly grew up in Minnesota.
Troy in White Bear Lake, and Tara in Brooklyn Park.

(Tara is from Nebraska - Troy, Illinois)

We met in 1996 and got hitched in 1998.  We were 23 and 26 at the time. When we got married Troy became a step-dad to Tara's two girls (Britt and Paige) who were four and eight yrs old at the time.

That made Troy a baby-daddy. (A daddy that was just a baby himself.)

We wanted a child. Long story shorter, we decided to adopt to grow our family.  In April 2002 we went to Haiti to visit an orphanage. We were woefully uninformed of international adoption issues at that time. We met and fell in love with two brilliant children named Hope and Isaac.  In late 2002 they joined our family, left Haiti, and moved to MN.

We had a surprise baby named Noah in early 2004.  Suddenly we were the parents of five kids.

In mid 2005 we were pretty certain that for some bizarre and unknown reason it seemed that God was prompting us to look into a move - we felt like we were being drawn to move our family to Haiti.  We said tearful goodbyes to families and friends and moved January of 2006.

The first two and a half years in Haiti were spent living in a village outside of the city.  There were many challenges. We learned a lot about joy & love and pain & suffering.  We learned that there is much in life that is incongruent. We experienced Malaria and Dengue Fever & another surprise pregnancy  (Lydia) & another surprise adoption (Phoebe). We faced other really difficult things that aren't so easy to go into in a 40 second window.

By the end of 2007 we were parents to seven kids. We were also doing foster care for our (then infant) niece (same age as our youngest daughter, Lydia) during her two year adoption process too.

In Aug. 2008 we moved our family from the rural village to Port au Prince to work with John and Beth McHoul at Heartline Ministries

We love the work we're doing. We are the luckiest to be allowed to do it.

Tara trained and studied in Haiti from 2009 to 2014 and is a midwife  (CPM) working full time at a relationship-based Maternity Center.

In January of 2010 there was a massive earthquake.  Explaining the ways in which the earthquake impacted Haiti and her people and ministry and our family would take longer than you have because it has been at least 30 seconds.

In 2016 we stepped into the role of Directors of Heartline Ministries Haiti. Troy and Tara now understand that married people sharing a job and leading together is a way to test your marriage.

There are tabs on top and links on the right side of the blog with lots more background information.

We mainly write about: Maternal Health, Poverty, Haiti, Justice Issues, Adoption, and Parenting this crew of fabulous freaks.

Welcome!  Thanks for reading.