Image: Dr. Paul Farmer at the new Butaro Hospital built by Partners In Health for the Rwanda Ministry of Health. | Location: Burera, Rwanda. (Photo by William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images)
What takes you off your path? What catches your eye, your heart, your mind, and lures you to wander ever away from the road that others — and maybe even you in an earlier time — had so carefully laid out?
Paul Farmer was one of those wanderers. He was a student at Duke, headed to medical school, when he visited nearby migrant labor camps and met some Haitians working there. He liked them. Grew interested in their stories. Upon graduating, he wrote a long article about their plight. He called it “Haitians Without A Home.”
By the time he was in Harvard Medical School, he was tugged all the time. He spent much of his class time in Haiti, taking his books with him, flying back for exams, then returning to Haiti, where he was volunteering at a hospital and imagining ways to bring medical care to isolated, impoverished regions.
Eventually, Farmer and some partners established Partners in Health (when he was just 28). PIH began in a desolate area of the Central Plateau. It has since grown to 16 locations, employing 7,000 people across the country. Through education, equipment, research, and distribution of medication and vaccinations — in Haiti and in several other countries — Farmer is easily responsible for affecting millions of lives, saving a great many of them.
We were supposed to meet this year. I’d admired him for a long time, knew he was still coming to Haiti, met people who knew him, got a message to his people, found out he would be willing to meet me and tried to coordinate our varied and harried schedules.
Then, last week, Paul Farmer died, suddenly, in his sleep, while visiting one of the many operations he started, this one in Rwanda. He was 62.
CANGE, HAITI – JANUARY 23, 2010: Naomie Marcelin, shown on Jan. 23, a registered nurse who works at Partners in Health’s Cange hospital, lost a sister and a niece in the Haitian earthquake and still continues to work. (Photo by Dina Rudick/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A wealth of service
Farmer’s death left me sad and depressed. He was still doing so much good. He left behind a wife and children and so many he had touched. But his story got me thinking about how many others Haiti has beckoned in her lonely, desperate way, and how those people, like Farmer, strayed off the easier path to try the difficult way of changing things that Haiti demands.
One of the earliest hospitals Farmer tried to work with was the Albert Schweitzer hospital of Deschapelles, in central Haiti, a few hours north of Port-au-Prince. You’d think by the name that Schweitzer, the great humanitarian physician, might have established the place.
He didn’t. That hospital was actually built by Dr. Larimer Mellon and his wife Gwen. If the last name sounds familiar, it’s because Mellon was part of the famously rich Mellon family. His great-uncle was Andrew Mellon, the banker who founded Alcoa. His father was William, who co-founded Gulf Oil.
So Haiti was the last place a guy like Larry Mellon would end up. But something lured him. Something about Haiti’s awful poverty stirred the dream of a beautiful thing rising from its desperation.
Mellon and his wife left behind a life of luxury in Arizona and moved to the Arbonite Valley, where life expectancy was about the lowest in the western hemisphere.
And they built a hospital.
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI- NOVEMBER 1: Cholera patients lay connected to IV solutions in the Albert Schweitzer Hospital November 1, 2010 in Port au Prince, Haiti. (Photo by Antonio Bolfo/Getty Images)
That hospital operates to this day. It is where the Mellons are buried. A man named Jean Marc de Matteis, who was running a highly successful construction company, became aware of some challenges the hospital was facing through his wife, Verena, who was on the hospital’s board. He could have shrugged and said, “Not my problem.” Instead, he offered to help, provided guidance, got deeper and deeper involved, and now is the Hospital’s CEO.
Lured off the path.
Family legacies
There’s an orphanage in Grand Goave, Haiti that is home to more than 60 children. It’s called Be Like Brit, named after Brittany Gengel, a passionate, caring, 19 year-old from Massachusetts who came down in 2010 to to help Haiti’s children. One day she texted her mother: “I want to move here and start an orphanage myself.”
Three hours later, the earth shook, and Brittany, along with nearly 300,000 others, was killed.
Her family could have, understandably, wanted nothing more to do with Haiti. Instead, they raised money to make her dream come true. In 2012, they opened the Be Like Brit Orphanage, which now features a school, a large staff, and a first-class operation.
Len, choking back tears, and Cherylann Gengel address the media after receiving word earlier in the morning that the U.S. State Department had identified and recovered the body of their daughter, Britney Gengel, in Haiti on Feb. 14, 2010. Gengel was in Haiti on a mission working with an orphanage during the Jan. 12 earthquake. (Photo by Kelvin Ma/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images
I’ve met Len Gengel, Brittany’s father. He was in construction in the U.S. and never figured he’d be founding an orphanage. But something about his daughter’s dream, which was to nourish Haitian children’s dreams, got to him. He told me it was something “We had to do.”
Lured off the path.
Children from Have Faith Haiti were welcomed at Be Like Brit in July, 2019. They played basketball, volleyball, ping pong, and even swim at the beach with their new friends.
I never got to meet Paul Farmer. In this life, I never will. But the spirit that brought him to Haiti is actually all over this hot country, in hospitals and schools and orphanages and missions. People who, like Farmer, see hunger and try to cure it, see sickness and try to heal it, see open arms and try to embrace them.
What takes you off your path? Something purer? Something more satisfying? Here’s a nod to all those who have bravely taken that left turn from an easier life. Their impact, like Farmer’s, will ripple for a very long time.
Each issue from “Life at the Orphanage” chronicles the joy and lessons learned among 50+ children in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Our kids at the orphanage don’t know much about technology, but they sure do know cameras.
Although we lack computers, television or decent internet, pretty much everyone who comes to visit brings a camera. Might be an iPhone. Might be an SLR. Might be one of those big fancy things with a long lens. Might be a cardboard disposable.
But everyone wants to take a picture, and for the most part, we are OK with it. Even our youngest kids now know you smile when someone yells “souri!” (the Creole word) and then you curl around and look at the person’s screen to see the results. In a place that has very few mirrors, it’s the best way to check yourself out.
Over the years, we’ve been blessed to have some amazing photographers visit our little third-of-an-acre facility. They’ve captured the spirit, the color, the happiness and the shabbiness.
Some were quite accomplished. Rick Smolan, the award-winning TIME, LIFE and National Geographic photographer who created the “Day in the Life of“ series has been to the orphanage, bringing his family with him. He left behind a few cameras that were way too good for us. We used them anyway.
Photo credit: Rick Smolan // Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Rick took some incredible portraits of our kids and captured moments (some in mid-air) that we would otherwise never get. The kids hung all over him. “Let me see! Let me see!” they yelled, every time he clicked his shutter.
Other photographers have dropped in as well, including Romain Blanquart, Mike Shore and Jenny Risher out of Detroit, along with numerous cameramen with local and national TV shows.
Last week, we were joined by Brian Kelly, a photographer and video director out of Grand Rapids, and his videographer Mark Andrus. They brought a good deal of equipment, lenses, camera bodies, a steady-cam harness. You might think a team like that, loaded up, would cause a disturbance or a distraction amongst 54 kids.
Rick Smolan clowns around with Variola // Romain Blanquart, photojournalist and the co-founder of Capturing Belief, a youth mentoring program in Detroit that works with students at our SAY Detroit Play Center.
But somehow, with all the general mayhem that takes place in the yard, the new guys just blended in. You glanced around and there was a street hockey game, there were kids coloring at picnic tables, there were Brian and Mark taking pictures, and there were babies sleeping in the gazebo. It all just meshed together.
I guess I am partial to having good photographers visit because like many parents and guardians, I want to chronicle our children’s lives. Their growth. Their development. As you get older, the moments become so precious, and being able to see them again, especially when we are away from Haiti, brings us great joy.
Photographer Brian Kelly with kids from Have Faith Haiti
Brian had been here once before, seven or eight years earlier. During that time, he had most of the kids take portraits by a narrow palm tree in the middle of our yard.
The tree has since been removed to make room for the kids to play. But Brian was able to get some of the kids to pose in the same spot, which allowed us to see their astounding growth in side by side photos. If you want to get a real sense of how fast kids grow up, this is how you do it.
Some feel you can overdo photographs with kids, and there’s merit to that argument. But I confess, I love having pictures after the fact. Over New Year’s, I showed the kids photos from 10 years earlier, and the shrikes of laughter and delight I heard made any inconvenience worthwhile.
Videographer Mark Andrus shows the little ones a view from the lens
Photographs for some may be a series of selfies you could easily do without. But for our kids, who have no access to their baby photos, don’t have a school photographer, will never have prom shots, and can’t get to the local portrait artist, these photos by visitors are more than quick snaps. They are history. Their individual histories. Their shared histories.
There’s a country song by a singer named Richard Laviolette that has these lyrics:
My childhood’s a blur somehow
One day I’ll forget me now
I might need someone to tell
My story when I’m gone
These photographs, and the men and women who have taken them, will tell our story and the story of the orphanage when we’re gone. For that, how can I not be grateful?
(Click the Instagram post above to see then-and-now photos of Bettinie, Esterline, and Danois, taken 10 years apart by Brian Kelly.)
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Faith comes from within, but that doesn’t mean you can’t import a little help. This week, the kids found themselves taking a class with a 73-year-old rabbi named Steven Lindemann.
“Who here knows who the first Jew in history was?” Lindemann asked.
“Abraham!” came the response.
Will miracles never cease?
Lindemann, who is a rabbi emeritus at a synagogue in southern New Jersey called Temple Beth Shalom (my childhood congregation) had been talking to me about coming to the orphanage for months. He is not the first man of faith we have hosted. Not even the first rabbi. A decade ago, Rabbi David Wolpe, of Los Angeles’ Temple Sinai, came down and helped us put tiles on the floor.
We’ve had pastors and priests from both America and Haiti. Church groups will periodically visit. Still, as a Christian-based orphanage, it was interesting to watch the kids seeing Hebrew words drawn on a chalkboard, and hearing about ancient commentary on the Bible called the midrash.
I listened in as “Rabbi Steve” (as the kids now call him) told the story of Exodus, the Jewish people’s escape from Pharaoh, and how the Egyptian army pursued them and perished in the Red Sea. The factual account, the kids knew from their Bible studies. But the midrash that Steve added was something new.
“After the Egyptian army was killed,” he explained, “the Israelites rejoiced at being saved. And the midrash says the angels wanted to rejoice and sing with them. But God told them no. God said you should not rejoice because you (the angels) were never in danger. You were not saved. And you should not rejoice in the death of the Egyptians, who were my people, too.”
Those were my people, too
I have heard that commentary before. I love it. I love it because it takes two peoples, two historical enemies, and shows that they are all one under the human umbrella, and in the eyes of God. Those were my people, too.
I think this speaks to why volunteers come to Haiti. Many of those who staff orphanages here, or operate NGO’s, dig wells or make medical field trips, are not Haitian. They can’t claim a national kinship with the people they aid.
But if we are all alike in the family of man, then anywhere you go, you are helping your people.
So here was Lindemann, who for 30 years stood on the pulpit in a spacious suburban New Jersey synagogue, now scraping chalk on the board in “Classroom 3” of our three-room schoolhouse. He had already endured an eight-hour plane ride, navigating a Haitian dinner, sleeping on an air mattress and being awakened before 6 a.m. by the machinery in the waste management plant on the other side of our wall.
Yet there he was, Thursday morning, his sliver hair topped with a yarmulke, his eyes twinkling with a teacher’s delight, spelling the Hebrew name for Abraham (Avram) and explaining that it meant “great father”, as 15 Haitian students wrote it down in their notebooks.
And a new wrinkle was added to their lives.
Photo credit: Brian Kelly Photography // Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Hungry to learn
What’s the best you can do for your kids? Prepare them for the world. Let them know of its dangers, sure, but also its wonders, its vastness, its beautiful tapestry of people.
This is why I cherish visits from outsiders like Rabbi Steve, and why we invite so many people to come and spend a few days with our kids. Haiti these days is simply unsafe to navigate. The gangs that rule the streets make even simple trips a risk. COVID-19 is a silent, unknown lurker. Outside of two brief day trips last summer, our kids have not physically left the orphanage in two years.
Two years. The same third-of-an-acre view. The world can feel awfully small when you are stuck behind walls and a gate.
But when outsiders visit, teach, sing, perform, it’s a glimpse of the world our kids are missing, a reminder that life is beautiful outside these walls as well as behind them. And one day, that world will be available, and it will be theirs.
When Rabbi Steve finished his first class, I asked him his impressions. A smile spread across his face. “They’re very engaged and engaging kids. Asking good questions. And they are so focused. They want to learn. They’re hungry to learn.”
As he spoke, we watched the kids eating lunch at picnic tables in the yard. There were no cell phones. No selfies. No checking email. They were talking and laughing and eating. Pure childhood. I asked Rabbi Steve what made him want to come all the way down here.
“Well, first I wanted to see what you were talking about for so long, because you speak with such love about these kids.” He paused and looked around at the peaceful scene, and I was reminded of the psalm that begins “How good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell together.”
“I guess,” Rabbi Steve said, “I just wanted to make a small contribution.”
A 73-year-old clergyman. A collection of young Haitian kids. A Thursday morning at the orphanage. Maybe miracles never do cease.
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.
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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.
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