Each issue from “Life at the Orphanage” chronicles the joy and lessons learned among 50+ children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Comment below, and follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The other day I get a call from Haiti saying one of our kids accidentally sniffed a cup of bleach and now he is sick.
Before you worry, he’s fine. I’ll give you details in a second. But it speaks to something I rarely write about and don’t often talk about. Something that is there all the time, looming in the back of my mind.
Any parent will share this feeling. It’s the worry that at any moment, something you overlooked, some small, barely perceptible detail, may cause harm to one of your children.
It’s haunting enough in a modern, suburban American home. But imagine in a craggy, potholed, sometimes rickety old orphanage facility, where 50-plus kids race around daily with boundless energy and constant curiosity?
We take every precaution. We warn staff and volunteers. We put things on the right shelves. Lock the right doors. But there’s no way you can guard against everything.
Will a loose toy piece fall from a box that a toddler decides to put in his mouth? Does a little one who wanted to help in the kitchen tangle with another kid and tumble near the propane stove?
Will a shoeless kid land awkwardly in a concrete divot and gash a foot? Break a toe? Tear a muscle? Will a child come bounding down the stairs, in a hurry to get to dinner, and trip and land face first on a hard tile floor?
What kind of insect might a four-year-old pick up and fondle? What if a curious grade-schooler gets into the medicine shelf? Someone drinks dishwashing liquid? Someone climbs a tree and falls out? Someone thinks bleach is a box of sugar?
Which by the way brings us to the most recent incident. It involved a 12-year-old named Dorvensky, to a kid with a big, wonderful toothy smile that takes over his face. He was helping our staff do the dishes. A daily chore. Somehow, a cup of bleach was nearby, and for some reason, before an adult could mix water in it, Dorvensky sniffed it, maybe to see what it was.
Well, sniffing bleach, even a little bit, can have negative effects, and soon Dorvensky wasn’t feeling well. And that began a series of texts to me:
💬 Dorvensky is not feeling well.
💬 He was vomitingtoo.
💬 I am taking him to the hospital.
💬 He is at the hospital now taking an IV.
💬 He is stable now.
💬 We are going home.
Dorvensky after his little excitement.
Dorvensky is fine now. Crisis averted. To be honest, given the breadth of our place, the number of kids, the hours in the day, and all the potential surfaces to bang into, fall on, slip on, or trip over, I’m surprised at the relatively small number of incidents we have actually had.
Which is not to say we don’t have bumps and bruises. Some kids tend to flaunt them. I can’t count how many times little Moise will run up to me and, in his husky little voice, say, “Mister Mitch, look!” And he’ll have a cut on his foot. A gash on his finger. A knee scrape. He never cries. Quite the opposite. He usually seems fascinated. Even amused.
I am less amused. I worry constantly. I see danger in railings, stairs, countertops, table edges, tree branches, swing sets and soccer nets. I imagine the worst. When I’m not there, I brace for a phone call. I wait for a text.
The one I wait for the most is “Everything is OK now.” Then I take a breath, and start thinking about what else could be sticking out or poking through and sitting on the wrong shelf with the top open. The kids never stop. Your brain doesn’t either.
He arrived with his father. That was unusual. It was 2011, and to that point, every child we admitted to our orphanage was brought in by a woman, sometimes a single mother, sometimes an aunt, a relative, a friend.
So a man arriving with a child took me by surprise. He told a sad story. His wife had died giving birth to the boy. He had no work. He had six other children and no way to feed them. Since the 2010 earthquake devastated their tiny home, he had been walking the streets looking for food. One day he passed the gates of our orphanage. He knocked on the door.
Now here he was, with his young son, a week before the boy’s 7th birthday.
As he finished his story, the man looked at his child and wiped away tears. I had to hold back my own.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Jonathan Jean.”
A few days later, Jonathan became part of our family.
He didn’t stay Jonathan for long. We admitted another Jonathan, last name Ulysee, and so, in order to keep them straight, one became J.U. and the other J.J.
I’ve been thinking a lot about J.J. recently. He’ll turn 18 in a couple months. Legally a man. He was one of four students from our orphanage awarded a scholarship last week to attend Hope College in Michigan this fall.
His life is on the cusp of changing so dramatically.
But then, he should be used to that.
What I didn’t know until recently was how hard life had been for J.J. before he got here. Only recently, when writing an essay for his college application, did he reveal that he remembered the horrible poverty he endured in his early years.
“All I could recollect was crying for food and milk,” he wrote. “I had to wear the same torn clothes every day. Instead of regular sandals, I used water bottles and tied them with string under my feet. I could feel the pain underneath my feet, but there was nothing I could do about it.”
We didn’t know any of this when he arrived. J.J. was quiet at first, as most new arrivals are. But then, in the years that followed, he often became angry. He would fight more than most of our kids. He talked back to the nannies. He had a short fuse if other kids teased him.
By the time he was 10 or 11, I was worried that he would be a real handful as a teenager. After an incident in our school where he got into it with a teacher, we did something we rarely do.
We called his father. And we suggested he take J.J. back for a little while.
It was never going to be long. We both agreed that a visit to his former life might make him appreciate the opportunities he was getting at the Have Faith Haiti Mission. In the end, he was gone less than two weeks.
But it made a difference. He came back humbled, more grateful. He began to change. To mellow. The surliness turned to humor. The teasing by other boys turned into good natured teasing back.
Then he discovered my iPad.
I bring it down each month to show the kids movies. They are mostly animated films, but it’s still a big deal when we show them, all the kids sitting on the living room floor, marveling as the screen comes to life.
J.J. started asking if he could help me set it up. He was a quick study. He figured out how to plug in an HDMI cord, and how to connect the sound cord to the speakers. He soon learned how to scroll through the movies, make the selection, get it to play.
It’s a small thing, I know. But you could see how it made him feel special. Every Friday night, after devotion, before anyone else could ask, he would run up to me and say “Can I help you get the movie set up?”
That led to other offers of help. He took on other chores. He volunteered for things. He learned to play the bass and the drums and the keyboards. I gather he liked the way the other kids looked up to him and I know he preferred to have the adults happy with him rather than scolding him.
Today, J.J. is one of our most mature kids, with a kind heart and a quick offer to help, be it carrying your bag or running to get something you forgot. When the four college hopefuls had to take their English proficiency tests, it was J.J. who helped figure out how to work the computers and get the scores to post.
I look at the pictures of him when he arrived to our doorstep, a high forehead, a slow smile, and I see him now, a strong, powerfully framed young man, with thick cheeks that push up into his eyes when he laughs, and I am flush with that feeling you get when you are almost done reading a good novel, down to the final pages, and you realize how much you have enjoyed the story and how much you don’t want it to end.
He arrived with his father, a little boy lost. But he is fully on the cusp of manhood now, having endured, having thrived. I wonder, when he gets to college, if he’ll go back to being Jonathan, since there will be no confusion with the other one. I hope not. He’s J.J. forever to us.
In the recent movie, “News of the World,” Tom Hanks plays a former Civil War soldier who travels from town to town reading newspapers to the locals. They pay ten cents apiece and gather together, anxiously awaiting his words. He is their connection to the outside universe, their conduit to something new that could delight them, fascinate them, maybe even change their lives.
Although I don’t read newspapers to our kids, I sometimes feel like that Hanks character, arriving with an announcement that, for the moment, only I know, an announcement that will surely elicit a response. I stand in front of our assembled horde gathered in the gazebo, the smallest kids sitting on the older kids’ laps.
“All right, timoun (children), I have something to tell you!”
Sometimes, it’s nothing more than “Tonight we are going to watch a movie!” which still elicits a huge cheer. Sometimes I share that a beloved former visitor is returning the next day (more big cheers) or — and this is a huge one — that we are going on a field trip the next day to the beach (leaping, screaming, hugging, mass hysteria!)
Still, the best announcements are when I get to share some good news about one of the kids. These are some of my most cherished memories in 12 years of bringing the news to our little orphanage.
Previous good news: Manno rocks a Madonna University t-shirt while celebrating his graduation from high school. He’s currently a pre-med student at the Livonia, Michigan-based university.
One of those moments came last week. It was really special, and I asked someone to film it so I could share it with you here.
I’ve written how our four oldest kids, two young men (JJ, Chivensky) and two young women (Samanza, Esterline) have been grinding to get their English language testing completed for their college application process.
It has been a nightmare. COVID-19 and kidnappings wreaked havoc on the TOEFL testing schedule. Our weak internet foiled multiple attempts to take the Duolingo English test online. It felt like tossing clay pigeons into the air. Every time the kids tried to post a test score, they got shot out of the sky.
Finally, after Yonel, our Haitian director, went to the internet company and begged for better modem boxes, we were able to get a strong enough signal for the kids to take one test a piece. And all four passed with high scores. We quickly hurried the results into the college application process. And we waited.
This ultimately led to the moment I want to share with you.
Because my email is listed as the contact email (since our kids lack regular access to computers or email accounts of their own), I was notified last week that ALL FOUR OF THE APPLICANTS HAD BEEN ADMITTED to Hope College in Holland, Michigan, an excellent, liberal arts college on a beautiful campus that goes back more than 150 years.
All four?
I read that email and nearly fell to my knees.
But then came the best part. Sharing the news of the world. Having just returned from the orphanage, I didn’t want to wait until my next trip.
So I called Yonel and arranged to dial in during our nightly devotions. And with Yonel holding up his cell phone, I yelled as loud as I could for JJ, Chivensky, Samanza and Esterline to stand up and get close to the speaker.
I then read aloud the email that announced that all four of them had been admitted, and — on top of that — each had been granted a partial scholarship!
Because the internet is so weak, I couldn’t see any images. And because Yonel’s phone was being held up, I couldn’t hear any one voice reacting. But when I said the word “Congratulations!’ I heard a whoop of high pitched squeals, and I shivered, as I almost always do, and my eyes began to tear up.
There is nothing like delivering good news to children who have so little of it. And there is nothing like delivering hope — or in this case Hope College — to kids who so desperately cling to it.
Esterline, Samanza, JJ, and Chivensky
When I saw the video, I smiled. It brought me back to other moments over the years when a piece of news prompted spontaneous cheers: the news that Emmanuel had been admitted to Madonna University, our first college acceptance. The news that Edney had scored a 96 on his TOEFL exam, the best performance of any kid to that point. The news that 7-year-old Gaelson, who had been airlifted to America with lung disease and a hole in his esophagus, was out of the hospital and coming back to the orphanage.
Big screams. Big whoops. Spontaneous joy. Group happiness.
It is such a privilege to be the bearer of good news, and to get to watch it register on young faces. In a place where stories of hurricanes, earthquakes, disease and death are often the words that arrive on your doorstep, now and then, the orphanage lets me be the mailman of hope.
Do you remember taking your SATs? Chances are you went with some fellow classmates. Maybe the school helped arrange the paperwork. A parent likely drove you to wherever the test was given. You showed your ID. You took the test. Your parent was waiting when you got out.
Something like that?
That process is considerably different for the kids at the have Have Faith Haiti Orphanage hoping to go to college. The test they need to overcome is called the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). It’s a difficult test if you didn’t grow up speaking English. Heck. It’s a difficult test if you DID grow up speaking English. I know. I’ve tried it. And I write for a living.
But these days in Haiti, the test itself is just part of the problem. We have seven kids currently ready to go to college next year, four young women, three young men. All of them have been taking a TOEFL class for the last two school years. To say it has been a challenge is like saying Haiti’s weather is sometimes warm.
The first huge hurdle came last year, when the man who was teaching the TOEFL class, an affable, always-smiling instructor named Vladamir “Phedre” Delinois, came down sick with a fever. He was taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19.
He never came out.
His sudden death, at age 56, shook our orphanage from top to bottom. And the most affected were the kids in his TOEFL class, who had come to love his booming voice and his warm, teasingly loving approach. Working them through their grief was an enormous challenge.
Then we had to try and find another teacher capable of picking up the class.
Mr. Phedre’s last TOEFL class. Edney, far right, is now a freshman in college.
This is Haiti
We were able to hire a pair of fine Haitian instructors, one named Rose, an older, elegant woman with an amazing educational resume, and a younger woman she suggested named Marie Claude. Together they tried to pick up the pieces from Mr. Phedre’s death and continue steering the kids forward.
Then came the challenge of physically taking the test. The TOEFL is only offered sporadically in Haiti, in a few select cities, and at a single location in Port-au-Prince. We tried to schedule it several times, only to learn the test was cancelled due to COVID concerns, or manifestations in the streets, or the threat of kidnapping from gangs.
I don’t remember having to deal with that with my SATs.
When we finally booked a date that wasn’t changed, we then had the challenge of identification. It’s not like our kids have driver‘s licenses or social security cards. We needed to get them passports. But the only way to get passports is to bring a parent to the offices to vouch for the child, or death certificate paperwork proving there is no parent.
Well. You can imagine the challenges here. In some cases, our kids have no parents. In most cases, there are no death certificates. One of our brightest and most promising students, a teenaged girl, has a mother living somewhere in the provinces, but we went months without being able to reach her. This is common. People move. Phone numbers change or are disconnected.
Finally, after exhaustive searching, someone was able to reach the mother. Which is when we found out she had no identification paperwork herself. Nothing to prove who she was. Without that, she could not come to the city and vouch for the passport. So we first had to arrange to get her registered with the government to establish her existence. All that before we could try and get a passport for her daughter.
We are still waiting.
Meanwhile, the daughter remains unable to take the TOEFL test. Any chance of her going to college come September has basically disappeared. This is Haiti.
Happier testing times: 2018 and 2019 test takers celebrate their achievement
That old college try
On December 18th, one week before Christmas, we were able to take six of our kids to the TOEFL exam. Thanks to friends who have high end security, we were able to get them a safe ride back and forth. The kids were so brave. They’d never been to a testing center before. They were split up into different sections and could not sit near each other. The test itself was delayed by an hour, with no explanation given. And during the test, there was no one available in case of a problem.
One of our kids, Esterline, 17, could not submit the test when it was finished. She kept pressing the “submit” button on the computer, but nothing happened. The only other button was “cancel.” Without aid or guidance, she finally pressed that one.
Her entire test was cancelled. She never received a score.
The others fared better. Some did amazingly well. The colleges they were shooting for required a score of 79 or better. Two of our younger kids, Junie-Anna and Widley, both scored high the 90s. Unfortunately, both of them are going to have to wait a year to go to university, because we simply didn’t have the budget to send so many at one time.
Meanwhile, the four oldest students scored in the 70s. Good. But they could do better. They all expressed confidence they would improve greatly with a second chance, now that they’d seen how the testing center worked.
Unfortunately, we recently learned that all TOEFL tests in Port-au-Prince are canceled until April.
And our new TOEFL teacher suffered a kidnapping attempt and was shot in the hand. It was shocking. She is recovering, thank the Lord, but understandably, her participation and our classes had to come to a halt.
Dèyè mòn, gen mòn: Beyond mountains, there are mountains.
— Haitian proverb
What do you do? You improvise. You search. We discovered an alternative online test called the Duolingo English test that many colleges accept. Our kids began studying that one just before New Year’s. They worked hours every day, taking practice exams.
Finally, they were ready for the real thing. We set them up in separate rooms. We moved the small internet boxes close to them. They took the test. They pressed “upload.”
It started uploading at 2 percent an hour.
And 2 percent an hour.
It took two days. And finally, when the number reached “99 percent”, it flashed and started back over at zero.
None of the scores counted.
Djouna works on her college essay.
I don’t remember my college entrance tests being this challenging. That’s because they weren’t. Mountains beyond mountains. The old Haitian proverb. I know our kids will find a way. We always do. But the word “test” has a whole different meaning in this hot and endlessly challenged country. And our kids, when they finally get their passing scores, will surely have earned them.
The holiday break means a lot of things at the orphanage. In the last few years, it’s also meant a concert. A big one. I’ve written about how our kids have formed various music bands to work on songs they love and practice the instruments they’re learning. And how they can’t wait to get “on stage” — meaning the front porch of our three-room schoolhouse — and perform for the rest of the orphanage.
We did our first of these concerts a couple years ago. A simple, three song endeavor.
Now we do Woodstock.
OK. Maybe that’s pushing it. But I did write a novel a few years ago called “The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto” and in researching Woodstock for that book, I learned that backstage at that famous music festival was a one massively confused, train-station cluster of musicians, equipment, cords, wires, roadies, fans, friends, and major hallucinogens.
Our concert has all that, minus the drugs.
We had our headliners, the Hermanos Brothers, our oldest band, all teenaged boys, who were set to close the show with a four-song set.
The Hermanos Brothers // Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
We had our delightful teenaged girls’ band, Destiny 7, who were working on two Christmas numbers.
Destiny 7 // Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
We had our precocious younger ensemble “Tet Chajey” (Creole for “troublemakers”) who were up for anything.
“Tet Chajey” // Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
And we had a new group, The Future Stars, made up of young promising talents, who were preparing the classic — and how can you do a holiday concert without this one? — “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”
Tickets were free.
A messy backline
Preparing for this big show, which takes place on a Saturday morning, is a mini comedy in itself. The day of the performance, an all-hands-on-deck call goes out, and everyone from 20-year-old Kiki to 4-year-old Jerry descends on the music room to move every microphone, keyboard, guitar, amplifier, drum, cymbal, tambourine and wood block outside. Of course, they do this one piece at a time, bumping into each other and tangling each other in cords and wires.
Eventually we set up our “stage,” which, given the need for power on an otherwise empty concrete slab, involves running one extension cord after another through the school windows and into classroom plugs. By the time we are finished, the school looks like it is regurgitating orange cords onto the patio.
Oh. Wait. Forgot the chairs. We need to bring them from the kitchen, the living room, the balcony, and anywhere else we can find them. They get set up in the gravel and dirt that fronts the school. Ta-da! We have our venue. It’s not quite Max Yasgur’s farm in 1969.
But hey, we ARE outside.
Now comes the introductions. I handle those, mostly because they are more instructions than introductions (“OK, Future Stars, you come up now. Yes. Uh-uh….Come on…Yes….Now…No, not you little guys! The other…Wait!…”)
The concert begins. The first performance is charming. The Future Stars sing the Hippopotamus song. But more impressively, they feature Babu on the keyboards, Danois on the bass, Louvens on the guitar, Nickenson on the drums, John Carey on the accordion (the accordion?) and Mark on the violin. All of them are under 15 years old.
I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
I don’t want a doll, no dinky Tinkertoy
I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy…
Big applause. Relieved smiles. A quick bow.
Next act.
But still joy to the world
The teenaged girls in Destiny 7, clad in their pink band t-shirts, start with a cover of the Darlene Love classic “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home).” During rehearsals we spent time doing a little choreography on this song, where they extend their arms Supremes-style with each line. It looked great in practice, but when they start on stage, it lasts just one move. Teenaged embarrassment takes over. And no amount of me waving my arms from the back is going to change that.
They finish with a cover of John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas,” which they wanted to perform alongside some of our youngest girls, aged 5-9, who joined in only on the chorus. Still, hearing those sweet high-pitched voices singing the lyrics “War is over” sent a warm surge through my bones. It’s a beautiful song anyhow, but when children sing it, it becomes a wish.
I thought about what some of those singers had already endured in their young lives; abandonment, hunger, dirt-level poverty. There is technically no war in Haiti. Yet every day is a battle. War is over. If only.
But back to the show. My favorite highlight came during the teenaged boys set, their final number, a rendition of the old Three Dog Night classic, “Joy to the World.” It featured the first ever lead vocal performance by Widley Montrevil.
Despite a name that sound like it comes with a French castle, Widley has had to endure more than most of our kids. He arrived as a five-year-old with a severe skin condition that lefts bumps and white marks all over his legs and arms. Every night he needed special medication spread over his body. Then he had to wear long sleeves and pants to keep himself covered. This went on for years. Poor Widley, on 100 degree days, always wrapped up from the neck down.
He needed glasses young, and the combination of his skin issues and his spectacles could easily have weighted him with a “nerd” tag had he been a typical American middle-schooler.
But our kids are kinder than that, and Widley can hold his own. He’s strong willed and extremely intelligent. At 16, he’s already aced the TOEFL test he’ll need to go to college in two years. He reads incessantly. And true to form, musically, he chose to play… the violin.
And there he was, Saturday morning, singing the lead on “Joy to the World”…
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog!
Was a good friend of mine…
And then, moments later, he launched into our first-ever violin solo during a rock song. Yep. You read that right. He pulled it off flawlessly, and I couldn’t help but scream a guttural “Yeah!” when he did. In Woodstock terms it was like Jimi Hendrix playing the national anthem.
The “Tet Chajey” group joined the chorus of this finale as they sang
Joy to the world
All the boys and girls
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me!”
With their final note, the concert was complete. Polite applause met their exit, and the holiday festival was history.
So maybe it’s not Janis, Sly, Jefferson Airplane or Country Joe. But it was beautiful noise and our own mass confusion, and it was a blast. I only hope we put everything back in its box. We have to do this all again before you know it.
Top image: The crowd at the Woodstock music festival, August 1969. (Photo by Ralph Ackerman/Getty Images)
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.
