We invent many things at our orphanage in Haiti, mostly because we have to. Haiti is a place where the given is not a given, where paperwork disappears, where essential records are lost.
So at times we have to have birth certificates created, for children who come to us with no history. We have to decide birthdays. We have to invent addresses and build medical histories.
We also invent siblings. But that requires no formal action. The kids do it on their own.
I was lucky enough to grow up with a sister and a brother. I was also in the middle, so I knew what it was like to be “younger than” and “older than.”
Our kids come often come from families with many children, so they have brothers and sisters somewhere. But they don’t know them and rarely meet them. They don’t know the younger-than or older-than thing, or the pecking order around a dinner table or when loading into a car.
On the other hand, as we always tell them at nightly devotion “Look around. These are your brothers and sisters. And they always will be.”
You’d be amazed how they take that to heart.
Little sister
Brave little Fedyana waiting for her MRI, and not loving the socks they gave her to wear.
I wrote last week about little 5-year-old Fedyana, who came to the orphanage last summer from Miragoâne in the provinces. From her arrival she limped, and displayed a weakness on her left side. She was also prone to bedwetting and fits of indiscriminate crying and howling. A Haitian CT scan concluded hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain) and a possible tumor. We brought her to the U.S. last week to meet with a brain surgeon and get an MRI.
I am happy to report that the Haitian scan was not accurate. Fedyana does not have hydrocephalus, nor a tumor. We have to thank God for that. She does have some congenital brain damage from something that likely happened during her mother’s pregnancy. It has left certain parts of her brain undeveloped, and the results are a form a cerebral palsy that affect her movement on the left side.
She’ll need therapy and a sharp eye to watch out for seizures. But the news could have been a lot worse, and, outside of waking up from anesthesia and not being able to speak to the doctors in English, she came through her hospital day pretty darn well.
That’s largely because her “big brother” Knox was at the hospital with her. Knox held her hand. He shared his toys. He gave her a choice of popsicles when she woke up from the procedure.
Knox and Fedyana are not related. At the orphanage, they don’t spend much time together. But “these are your brothers and sisters” resonates deeply with our children, and Knox slipped into big brother mode as if he’d grown up his whole life with Fedyana in the next bed.
Knox and Fedyana together at therapy
Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together.
Big brothers and sisters
This happens all the time. Our older kids carry our younger kids. They let them fall asleep in their laps. They share their food with them, take them to the bathrooms, scold them if they are acting up.
It’s a beautiful thing to witness, the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood so willingly embraced. I see it when our teenaged girls make meals together, or when our teenaged boys play in their band. I see it when our little ones walk arm in arm. I see it in my own home when Knox reminds little Fedyana “You have to pray first” before she eats her cereal.
Clockwise from top: Knox and Gaelson; Knox, Gaelson and Babu watching a movie in America; Gaelson sharing his food with little brothers Jeff and Archange
And I realize it when I speak to Edney, one of our kids in college, and I ask him about making friends in the U.S. versus how he had to make friends at the orphanage. “That’s different,” he says. “Those are my brothers.”
Edney visits with Knox and Fedyana over Easter weekend.
In the book “Finding Chika,” I wrote “Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together.”
The time and circumstance that bring 55 kids under one roof at an orphanage, or a pair together in a hospital waiting room, are part of that artwork.
They don’t have the same last name. They don’t look like one another. But like so many of our precious children, “Big Brother” Knox and “Little Sister” Fediana were every bit a family this week. We didn’t have to invent a thing.
There are toys on the floor. Little shoes by the door. The sound of “Curious George” playing on the morning TV.
Kids from the orphanage are at the house in America.
And life is not the same.
Our monthly visits to Port-au-Prince are all-encompassing. From the moment the heat and humidity hit our skin, we are in Haiti-mode, all things are about the kids, the facilities, the water, the generator, the school, the devotions. Our American life is put on hold until the plane touches back down in Michigan.
But when children return with us, Haiti comes with us as well. This started when we brought Chika north for brain surgery seven years ago. It continued when we started bringing Knox four years ago for physical therapy. It got intense when Babu came in 2019 for an operation, and Gaelson was rushed here needing a lung removal and an esophagus repair.
Now, a new arrival has brought the sounds of Haiti to our Michigan mornings. Her name is Fedyana, her nickname is “Ziggy”, she is five years old, missing her two front teeth, and, in sudden news to us, has a brain issue.
We began noticing something wrong just weeks after she came to us from a village outside the coastal town of Mirogoâne. Her gait was a little off. Her left hand curled a bit. She pulled at it like someone trying to tug a rope through a hole.
She cried often, for no reason. She wet the bed constantly. We took her to a neurologist, who ordered a CT scan. The report, in French, came back with a diagnosis.
Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain.
We took a deep breath.
And we went into action.
Fedyana practices her letters on the flight to America.
Not again, and yet, again is inevitable
Now, when you take care of 55 kids, you expect medical issues. The numbers alone make this inevitable. But when you take into account the crippled Haitian health care system, the malnutrition, lack of access to basic services, no prenatal care, no pediatricians, we’re actually surprised we don’t have more issues.
That doesn’t make the ones we do have any easier. We have learned, in 12 years, which kind of problems are solvable through Haitian hospitals and which require a trip to America.
Fedyana, who may need brain surgery, is the latter.
This is never an easy proposition. First, we need to gather paperwork from doctors. Then we need to clear things with the proper Haitian agencies. Then we need to write the American embassy and seek an emergency visa for medical care.
Fortunately, we have found the U.S. embassy in Haiti extremely positive to work with. Their staff understands what we do, and they respond quickly. Previous ambassador Michele Sison and current acting ambassador Kenneth Merten know our orphanage and have met our kids. That goes a long way.
But getting a child through the arrival process is only the start. Then there’s the adjustment to America. Being away from 50 other kids, sleeping in their own room, cold weather, green grass, all these strange people speaking nothing but English — well, you can imagine the disorientation. It’s like waking up on another planet.
Knox takes Fedyana under his wing in Michigan
Minding a full nest
Meanwhile, my wife and I — and our friend Connie Vallee, who is indispensable when it comes to our Haitian visitors — all know the routine. Buy the cereal and the milk that we otherwise never have. Stock up on kids’ vitamins, snacks, pull-ups, new shoes. Pull out the story books, make up their beds with colorful blankets. Take anything breakable off of the lower shelves. Prepare for lots of trips to the park and the trampoline place.
And pray. Pray that things work out OK. That doctors won’t come back with the “I’m sorry, we have some bad news” message. Little Ziggy is an incredible joy. Thin and wiry, she bounces around the house making weird sounds, laughing constantly, climbing up my legs and torso, carrying around her beloved pink water bottle, speaking a steady mix of Creole and English.
And our house is transformed. Knox is here as well for his regular therapy sessions, and he has taken on the role of big brother as if he’d been doing it his whole life.
“You have to brush your teeth, Ziggy,” he says.
“You have to pray before you eat.”
“You have to take a shower.”
The last few nights, at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m, Fedyana has been crying. There seems to be no reason. No cause. She is not in pain. Nothing has happened. She cries then she falls asleep, and we wonder, as we hold her, what is going on inside that beautiful little head.
Her doctors’ appointments are next week. She’ll have an MRI and a thorough examination, and we will know more about what truly ails her. In the meantime, we adjust to the in-between life, when Haiti is here and the sounds of Creole wake us up in Michigan. We take the deep dive into another medical adventure and pray the happy sounds of the morning will reflect the diagnosis still to come.
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What readers are saying about “Life at the Orphanage”
I absolutely love reading about the children. I continue to be amazed by their resilience and abilities to overcome adversity. I learn so much about what it means to be content in all our circumstances through the eyes and voices of the children. Thank you for sharing your family with us. I am always anxiously waiting the next issue. – Terry P.
A big, sprawling, wildly different family at the Have Faith Haiti Mission & Orphanage
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Every night, at the end of devotions, we sing the old Nat King Cole song “L-O-V-E,” and we end it with a chant:
“1-2-3…Goodnight, Chika!”
It is meant to remind us — all of us, the kids, the nannies, the staff, my wife and myself — that Chika is never gone. But, of course, she is gone, at least in one sense. She isn’t running around the yard, wagging a finger at the other kids, telling the older boys who can use a soccer ball or balloon, pulling someone into the gazebo to dance, or singing with that booming Ethel Mermanesque voice that you could rattled through the hard concrete walls of our Haitian orphanage.
It’s been five years since Chika died. Five years today. It’s sunny and warm here in Haiti and it was sunny that morning as well. Chika had performed a miracle the day before. Her breathing had slowed to an almost imperceptible level, and her heartbeats, measured with a stethoscope that my wife and I shared, had dropped to five per minute. The hospice nurses had told us this was the end, the moment we had to say goodbye to our precious child.
But there was a sound. A small, soft groan. We were flanked around Chika in our bed, the way she always liked it, a game she referred to as “cozy, fluffy bed camp” where the idea was to get as close to one another under the covers as you could.
So there we were, little Chika between us, choking back our tears, and I asked the hospice nurses what that small noise meant.
“Those are just the sounds children make when they are about to go,” we were told.
But I didn’t believe it. Neither did Janine. People had been wrong about Chika before. They were wrong when, after discovering she had a DIPG brain tumor, they said she wouldn’t live more than 4-5 months. They were wrong when they said that a second round of radiation wouldn’t help her. People had been wrong about Chika and her survival abilities so many times, that we doubted anything the first time we heard it.
“No,” I told the nurses that morning, “she’s trying to fight. She’s trying to stay with us.”
My wife agreed. And so we lifted her and I began pounding on her back with a small rubber device, and we suctioned her with a nose tube, and in moments, her respiration improved and her heart rate rose to 35 beats a minutes. The hospice nurses were stunned. She lived another day, and gave everyone who loved her a chance to come by and say farewell.
“In all my time doing this, I’ve never seen anything like that,” one nurse said.
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A tiny miracle
Of course, most of us had never seen anything like Chika. She survived the terrible earthquake of 2010 when she was three days old. Her single-room, cinder block house collapsed around her, yet she and her mother lived. She slept in a bed of sugar cane leaves that night, out in the field, under the stars. That was her bed for weeks.
Two years and half years later she endured another tragedy when her mother died giving birth to her baby brother. Chika was taken away that day by her godmother, who brought her to us at the orphanage.
For several years she was our youngest, loudest and bossiest child — and everyone loved her. Then the drooping face started, and the neurologist, and the MRI, and the diagnosis, and the trip to America that was supposed to be for a surgery that cured her and wound up as a one-way ticket into our lives.
Chika lived just shy of two years after her diagnosis. That’s incredibly long for DIPG patients. The disease usually strikes kids between 4 and 9, and is nearly always fatal. During that stretch with Chika, we got to know many other families enduring this horror. Some remain friends to this day. And some amazing work is being done to try and wipe out DIPG, particularly by our friends with Chadtough Defeat DIPG Foundation.
Haiti is home
But while we don’t miss those days of treatments, steroids, radiation, plane trips to New York and Germany, and the endless, maddening, race to find a cure, we sure miss Chika. We miss her every day in our home in America, which she filled up with singing and laughing and dolls strewn all over the floor.
But here in Haiti, we miss her differently. We miss her being a part of the group. She loved being our de facto daughter in America, loved the fuss we made over her and her alone, the trips for ice cream, the visits to an arcade where she collected tickets that you traded in for little prizes, the snuggling in bed between my wife and me while we watched a Peter Pan movie.
But Haiti was never far from her mind. She would always ask when she was going back. She would always ask if we could FaceTime devotions, so she could see the kids praying. She told everyone in the U.S. she had “five houses,” and she rattled off all the places she had slept for more than a night; yet she always added the qualifier “but my HOME is Haiti.”
And it was. I remember the first time we brought her back after a round of treatments. She was bloated up from the steroids and didn’t quite look like the Chika who had left months earlier. But she was bouncy and happy and could not wait to get there.
When we pulled into the driveway, you could hear the chants starting. “Chika! Chika! Chika!” The kids had all gathered awaiting her arrival, and when she emerged from the van, it was the loudest roar I’ve ever heard from our group. They grabbed at her and bounced her from shoulder to shoulder, and when they finally put her down, she ripped off her little sweater — it was Haiti, after all, and it was hot — and she ran to the swings and she jumped on.
Other kids jumped on with her. And they flew back and forth, Chika smiling like this was all she ever wanted, her legs extending to heaven with each ascent.
I often picture her on that swing, going higher and higher, and finally just lifting out of the banana seat and soaring gently into the stars. That’s why we look to the sky every night when we finish singing to her. Good night, Chika. There’s not a day that you are not with us.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — So how do our kids stay in shape?
American children have soccer, little league, gymnastics, high school sports. They have swim meets and health clubs, football fields and baseball diamonds.
We don’t have any of that, it’s true. But within our cramped, third-of-an-acre rectangle, our kids are hugely active. And I’d dare say they are faster, stronger, and more trim and fit than most of their American counterparts.
So how does that happen? Well. To begin with, we don’t have TV. We don’t have computers. We don’t have iPhones. So sitting on a couch — except to read — is the last thing our kids are interested in.
Secondly, while some rooms have air conditioners, many do not. And with temperatures usually hovering between 90 and 100 degrees, you don’t want to be inside.
Which brings you outside to our “yard.” It’s not exactly an LA Fitness, but if you look carefully, it has its features.
For example, we have a 50 by 25-foot patch of lumpy concrete. This serves as our soccer field, our street hockey rink or our “tennis court,” depending on what nets or sticks we use. But there is rarely a moment our kids are not engaged in some sport on that slab of concrete, and the games can go for hours.
‘Round the loop
Then there’s the “loop.’’ That’s what we call walking or running around the perimeter of our facility. And while there are no markings, lanes, or measurements, you do have to navigate potholes, mud, trash barrels, laundry lines and the occasional stray toy. This keeps you on your toes.
Ask J.J. One of our oldest boys (he’s 18 and heading to college next year), J.J. wanted to drop some weight. So he started running every morning with one of our incredible volunteers, Halie Chambers. They run early, before the sun starts baking the pavement. And just by doing that, in six months, J.J. has lost over 40 pounds. He’s trim and slim and ready for university. No membership fee required!
We also have our own version of a “weight room.” Granted, it’s upstairs, outside, on the roof of the living room, and it’s never gonna rival the Dallas Cowboys training facility.
But it does have a half-broken pulley machine, some loose barbells, a few free weights, a bench with no cushion and this old metal contraption that you can use for chin ups.
And somehow, using this regularly, most of our young men look like a page out of “Ripped!” magazine.
Basketball on the “court” / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo Photography
In constant motion
But more than anything, our kids stay fit through perpetual motion. You know those PSA commercials encouraging kids to put in an hour a day of physical activity? They’re definitely not needed here.
As I write this, I look over the railing and see nine kids playing concrete soccer, four kids swinging hula-hoops, two riding bicycles (we only have two bicycles) and one running laps. Most of the rest are racing from one corner to the next, or dashing up the steps, or down the steps, or dancing, or holding hands with the nannies as they walk from spot to spot.
The orphanage is in constant motion. They run from school to music class to dance to the dining room. There’s no snacking between meals (we don’t have any snacks!) and so they eat breakfast, a big lunch and a small dinner at designated times. And while their diet, despite our efforts at full nutrition, still tends a bit towards rice and starches, they burn it off daily, and you’d be hard pressed to find any of the 55 children who you would label overweight.
J.J.(left) and Appoloste (right) ready to pump. you. up. / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo Photography
So our kids rate high on the physical fitness scale, and I am amazed at all they can do without breaking a sweat. But the nicest part is, for whatever reason, there’s no vanity in any of this. We have almost no mirrors in our facility. So no one is primping, posing, studying their proportions or taking selfies of their muscles.
The kids are in shape because they lead a life of active, engaged routines, that’s all. They have no idea how beautiful or fit their bodies are in relation to some magazine glamour scale.
What we see when we see them at the end of the day is a group of strong, limber, growing bodies. What we see is health. And health, in this hot and poor country, may be the most beautiful feature there is.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Outside my window, I hear a musical sound. Pa-Ping! Pa-Ping! It stops for a few seconds, then starts again. Ping! Ping! It goes on for half an hour — Pa-ping! Ping-ping-ping! — until finally, I drag myself out onto the morning heat to see if someone left an alarm going somewhere.
No alarm. It’s the sound of a language program being studied by Bianka, one of our teenaged girls. The program is called Duolingo. Every time you answer a question correctly, you get a ding.
Bianka is studying Arabic.
Pa-Ping! Pa-Ping-ping-ping-ping!
She’s getting a lot of questions right.
Bianka and Cinlove speaking Arabic
Some kids collect baseball cards. Some collect friends on Facebook. Our kids collect languages.
They never get tired of them. I suppose it makes sense. From the time they are eight or nine, they are already speaking three tongues — Creole, French and English — so adding another is hardly daunting. The bigger challenge is finding one that’s not taken.
“I can speak Chinese,” Junie-Anna would always tell me. This was when she was 13, 14, 15 (She’s 17 now). She would then rattle off sentences she had learned from the books I would bring her each month. She didn’t have a tutor. She had no one else to speak it with. But she wanted to learn Chinese. When I asked her why she said, “I want to go there one day.”
Maybe she read about it. Maybe she saw a movie. Maybe, because she dreams of being a veterinarian, she liked the pandas.
But she sat for hours and hours with those Chinese books, repeating phrases softly to herself.
And she’s not alone.
Junie-Anna and her Mandarin study books / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo Photography
“¿Cómo estás?” / “Koman ou ye?”
Samanza, our oldest girl, is headed to Hope College in the fall. In the meantime, she studies Hebrew. Why? Who knows? We’ve had Jewish visitors over the years, including several rabbis and a young man who speaks Hebrew in his home. It inspired our kids. Samanza and Junie-Anna quiz themselves on how to say “How are you?” and “What are you studying?” in the original language of the Bible.
It doesn’t stop there. We have a wonderful teacher named Priscilla. She is from Brazil. Not surprisingly, we now have a cadre of young Portuguese speakers.
And since the Dominican Republic is on the other side of this island, Spanish is never far from our kids lips.
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro…” you’ll hear out little ones rattling off.
Our music instructor, Dennis Tini, makes sure the kids learn songs in different languages. Our boys’ band (who call themselves “The Hermanos Brothers”) has done “Feliz Navidad” and “La Bamba.” Our little kids sing French nursery rhymes.
And of course, between the volunteers from various parts of the world, and our mostly Haitian staff, you’ll hear conversations start in English, continue in Creole and wiggle around in French.
All in all, it’s like living in a language lab, or the lobby of the United Nations.
Ordinarily, I’d stop with this observation. Our kids like languages. Pretty simple.
But I think it’s bigger than that. I think the willingness to communicate in a second language shows a sensitivity to the rest of the world, who may not speak yours.
In the U.S., we often have the expectation that English will be spoken wherever we go. That’s because, when it comes to North America, it pretty much is. And even when we go to, say, Europe, you can pretty much count on finding English speakers to make things easier.
Haitians don’t have that luxury. They know that Creole doesn’t travel. If they want to, they need to adjust.
John Carey holds an American Sign Language Workbook / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo Photography
So they do — with fervor, with gusto, without complaint about the fairness of having to learn other nation’s tongues while no one is learning theirs. It’s one thing to love your language. It’s another to love them all.
Thus our orphanage is a cacophony of communication, a smorgasbord of syntax, an assembly of articulation, a tonnage of tongues.
And if you gave them time, I bet our kids could translate that sentence. At least five different ways.
Make your check payable to “Have Faith Haiti Mission” and send to
Have Faith Haiti Mission
c/o A Hole in the Roof Foundation
29836 Telegraph Road
Southfield, MI 48034
Have Faith Haiti is operated by the A Hole in the Roof Foundation, a 501(c)(3) org (TAX ID# 27-0609504). Donations are tax deductible.
About the Mission
The Have Faith Haiti Mission is a special place of love and caring, dedicated to the safety, education, health and spiritual development of Haiti’s impoverished children and orphans. You can learn more here.
