Abundance can be confusing. When you are used to so little, a lot can be too much. I had this in mind last week when three of our kids from the Have Faith Haiti orphanage came north with me for medical checkups and therefore were present for an American Thanksgiving.
Bringing our kids to America has always been a delicate process. First, there is enormous paperwork involved. Birth certificates. Passports. Visas. Interviews at the embassy. Permission from the Haitian agency that oversees us. Flight arrangements.
Still, the most challenging part comes when the plane lands. America and Haiti are different enough for adults who can read, watch movies and go online for a glimpse of what lies ahead. But for kids? It’s all unimaginable. From the roar of the jet engines to lifting into the clouds to the people behind the customs counter to the new model vehicle they get into at the airport.
Everything brings stares and hushed reverence. I have noticed our kids are mostly silent during their first few hours in the U.S. Sometimes they whisper to each other and point. But it’s a bit like landing on the moon. You’re almost afraid to speak too loudly, as if you might awaken something you never imagined.
With us now are Knox, 10, Gaelson, 10, and Babu, 13. Knox gets regular therapy treatments for an early childhood brain injury. Gaelson and Babu both had surgeries in America that require periodic checkups.
It’s hard to say what impresses them the most. The smoothness of the roads on the drive from the airport. The massive green signs on the highway. The flashing neon of strip malls and fast food places. All of this is alien to them. All of it draws stares.
And then comes the house. The fact that they get their own beds, no one sleeping above or below them. The kitchen that is right in the middle of things. The television set. Oh Lord. That thing becomes the biggest challenge.
My wife and I often keep a small TV in the kitchen playing a music channel. All that appears is the name of the song, the artist, and a logo. But within minutes I see the kids gaping at that TV, watching the logo float around the background, and I realize the awesome power of a lit screen to a child. And how quickly you have to break that trance if you want to maintain human contact.
And then there’s snow.
Babu decided what to eat on Thanksgiving
“Can we go outside and play in it?”
That was the immediate request when a blanket of white covered our back yard. Snow is the Holy Grail of strange American experiences for our kids. Obviously, they are never going to see anything like it in Haiti.
But the same goes for the Thanksgiving meal, where the abundance of food is overwhelming. Thanksgiving is a big deal in our home, we host it, and family comes in from all over the country. Consequently, the ovens are packed, the tabletops overflowing, the bowls and trays loaded with delicious edibles.
I remember my early years as a social worker in New York, back in the early 1980s, and how immigrants from Russia had to be accompanied on their first trips to the supermarket because the abundance of available food often left them in tears. It hit them, in the aisles full of snacks and the frozen food freezers, how far they were from home, and how much they’d had to do without while other parts of the world were indulging.
I worry about the same thing with our kids in Thanksgiving. We constantly explain “This isn’t a normal meal” and “Not everyone in America gets to eat this way” and they nod and say they understand, but sometimes I wonder.
Gaelson at breakfast.
Each morning, when the kids get up, they find me and we go make breakfast together. I ask them to help me, so they see food is something you must prepare, not simply order. They quickly jump in, cracking eggs, toasting bread, pouring milk over cereal. We pray before every meal. They say “thank you” for everything and help us clean the dishes.
But you can make all the rules you want. The eyes don’t lie. And what our three young ones see is consumption and possession on a scale that is unimaginable for them in Haiti.
Clockwise from top left: Babu and her American “cousin” Mia; Mitch and Knox watch “Lilo and Stitch”; Knowx with a new faux furry friend.
It is a fine line we walk, keeping that in perspective. I am heartened by the fact that, of all the activities that are offered — from a trip to the frozen yogurt store, a visit to a zoo, a drive to a trampoline place or even the snowman making in the yard — the thing they get most excited about is calling back to the kids in Haiti.
We hold up the iPhone and, through garbled transmission, they squeal and wave at the kids back home and ask what they are doing and, almost remarkably, “What are you eating?”
I can only imagine how faraway the children here seem to the ones back at the orphanage, as if they were calling from the moon. It feels like a moon visit sometimes. We navigate the craters as best we can, even mindful of how blessed we are in the country, and how to spread those blessings without overwhelming the large-eyed children who briefly share this strange new world alongside us.
Today, being Thanksgiving week, I want to talk about gratitude. They don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Haiti, and Lord knows there are enough reasons to feel more forsaken than embraced in this hot and impoverished country.
But I remember one of my early visits to the orphanage, being struck by a song the kids would sing in the darkness of the evening before they went to bed, a slow, swaying melody behind these words:
There’s a roof up above me
I’ve a good place to sleep
There’s food on my table
And shoes on my feet
You gave me your love, Lord
And a fine family
Thank You, Lord
For your blessings on me
To hear those high-pitched young voices, tired from the day, yet pushing such gratitude out into the heavens, well, it was beautiful.
It remains so.
Why does it seem that those who have the least often seem the most grateful? Our kids are taught to say “thank you” after food servings, cups of water, birthday gifts, even compliments. But it’s not the words that impress me. It’s the actions they take.
When I leave the orphanage, it’s not unusual for a child to slip me a folded-up letter. Sometimes it’s in the shape of an envelope or a heart. Almost always it contains a brief handwritten message, like:
“Dear Mister Mitch – Thank you for taking care of me. Whenever I have a problem I know I can come to you. I thank God that he sent you to us and that he will protect you.”
There is nothing special that prompts these notes. Nor are they always from the same kids. It appears to be a surge of gratitude that bubbles over from time to time, and child to child.
Our kids seem to take a certain delight in saying thank you. In the U.S., we often express thanks out of obligation — a thank you card after a wedding, birthday or particularly generous gift. Kids, especially, often need to be reminded to show their appreciation. It’s what makes the sentence “What do you saaaay?” so common in parenting.
But the kids at Have Faith Haiti get almost giddy when given a chance to express their appreciation. When a batch of Christmas gifts arrives from a church group, we have the kids sit down and draw thank you notes. They never roll their eyes. On the contrary, they attack the task, using multiple crayons, markers, pens. They write extra sentences beyond what they have to.
When a staff member is leaving or a volunteer’s time is up, the kids orchestrate productions that include speeches, songs, handmade gifts and heartfelt tributes. Honestly, I keep hearing Mickey Rooney squealing, “Let’s put on a show!” every time someone says goodbye at our place.
Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
This past weekend, a couple of our American volunteers were going home. The kids could have waved goodbye and gone about their business.
Instead, they organized an “appreciation celebration” akin to a variety show. It had an emcee (Babu) and musical performances (by a group of our young girls who sang “I just wanna thank you, for being you, you, you”) and a speech by J.U., our 16-year-old wanna-be lawyer, who opened by saying to the two young women:
“You are very, very wonderful and beautiful and smart and we are happy we got to know you…and we want you to know that there are no mountains that are too high to keep us from seeing you again…”
He went on to thank them for coming to his country “during its darkest hours” and being brave enough to stay and teach the kids. He added that they weren’t totally leaving because “Haiti is now your home, too.”
This, by the way, for volunteers who had only been with us a matter of months.
But that’s what gratitude is in our cozy little run-down orphanage. It’s not an obligation, it’s a celebration.
It occurs to me that too often, we don’t find the joy that comes in saying thank you. It is bigger than all our turkeys, and in its own way, even more delicious. What a privilege to get to see something so huge in such little bodies. As that song says, a fine family. What more can we be thankful for?
I was speaking to someone the other day who asked why our kids at the orphanage are so loving towards Americans. It’s pretty simple. From the time those kids arrive, pretty much every American they meet has come to help them.
The volunteer spirit is alive and well here in the thick heat of Haiti. Our current orphanage was actually built in part by volunteers, a group of 23 roofers, plumbers, electricians and construction guys I gathered together after my initial trip.
The Detroit Muscle Crew, July 2010
They called themselves “The Detroit Muscle Crew.” From 2010 through 2012, they came to Haiti nine times, lugging tools, tarps and materials. They built toilets, showers, a kitchen and a three-room school building. From wood to windows to tiles to paint, the orphanage rose through the strong hands of those volunteers.
They were a blast. They rose with the sun, sang while they worked, slept pretty much anywhere, ate pretty much anything, and reveled in the kids, letting them spread grout or make cement or slap paint on a wall. They often hoisted the little ones high into the air and watched them squeal with joy.
Detroit Muscle Crew 2010 – 2012
Once the building was complete, a new category of volunteers arrived. These folks live with us in small guest rooms. They sometimes sleep on blow-up mattresses. I’m not sure what to call them, since they have no formal job description. They are teachers. Counselors. Practical nurses. Game organizers. Arms to rock. Shoulders to cry on. Laps to fall asleep in.
They are, for want of a better term, full-time kid lovers.
We just call them “part of the family.”
Family is found
Over the years, the cast of people serving in these roles has been as varied as a checkout line at a supermarket. There was a Michigan woman named Michele who’d spent several years in the military. There was a North Carolina couple named Jennifer and Jeremiah who brought four kids of their own and stayed for over a year.
Clockwise from left: Jennifer and Jeremiah // Anachemy // Jennifer // Patty & Jeff
There were Patty and Jeff, who, in their 40’s, took leaves from jobs with Costco and Aisin to spend a year with us. And there was Anachemy, whom I met when I spoke to her senior class at a New Jersey college. She made an impressive valedictory speech, and began it by saying “When I was growing up in Haiti…”
I looked at a friend who was with me. By the end of the night, we had invited her down for a visit. A few months later, she came. Somehow, I knew it would click.
Sure enough, she agreed to spend a few months helping to run the school.
She stayed for nearly four years.
That happens more than you’d think. Another high-energy woman named Gina, came to us after her mother met me at a book signing and said, “I think my daughter would love to volunteer in Haiti.” I scribbled an email and told her to contact me.
She did.
She, too, came for months, but stayed for years.
Before and after were many others, like Kate, who held advanced degrees in applied chemistry, yet spent many months at Have Faith Haiti overseeing everything from water balloon races to TOEFL exams. There were Bob and Amy, a retired couple from western Canada who started our workshop and our sewing classes, and who somehow — and don’t ask me to explain this — figured out how to take heat coming off the generator and capture it, redirect it, and create hot water for showers. On the scale of volunteer miracles, we equate that one with the parting of the Red Sea.
There were recent college graduates like Laura and Kelsey, who made great connections with our teenaged kids, and still-enrolled college students like Eli, George and Alisa, (from MIT and Harvard) who took off a semester to live at the orphanage. Those three taught everything from high level mathematics to toy design during the worst months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and allowed our children to thrive academically when most other Haitian schools were closed.
Kate, Laura Beth, and Gina, 2015 – 2019
Family is commitment
You may notice a pattern here. There are no short-term stays. Oh, sure, friends, church groups, and visiting doctors or dentists have stopped by for a few days to pitch in. But as a rule, the shortest stay to volunteer full-time is three months, or about the length of one of our school semesters.
The reason for this is not arbitrary. Our kids grow quickly attached to people who come to play with them, tell stories to them or hold them as they sleep during evening devotions. Within a week, a bond has already formed. When that bond is snapped after seven or ten days, the child is saddened, sometimes to tears. Our children already have abandonment issues. All of them share that in the stories of how they got here.
To put them through micro forms of that abandonment repeatedly seems cruel. And so we established the longer time frame, because people who stay for at least three months tend to be people who will come back again and again, and remain a part of the kids’ lives. In this way they are more like extended, far-away relatives, the kind we see every Thanksgiving or Christmas.
And the delightful little secret is, most people who stay for three months want to stay longer.
Danielle, Celeste and Halie // Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
Families are strong
Our current crew is just outstanding. Four women, from diverse backgrounds, who have weathered the most difficult stretch of security and COVID issues with courage, humor and endless work.
Two of the women have nursing backgrounds, Halie and Celeste, both from Michigan, and they’re able to deal with medical issues while also teaching science, English and math classes, organizing games, soothing tears, and singing devotion songs.
Halie, who only arrived a few months ago, said early on, “I can’t imagine not being here when these kids graduate.”
It’s that kind of connection that I witness constantly. It’s magical. I wish I had a better word, but that’s the one that describes it.
Our two other volunteers are Danielle, who was in Haiti with another orphanage for three years and who takes our photographs, teaches journalism, and chronicles our best moments. She, Halie and Celeste are all in their 20s.
Maggie, 2021
And then there’s Maggie, whose age is “retired,” whose degree is in gerontology, who previously was director of an assisted living home in Muskegon, Michigan and who now, at her request, is a nanny for our youngest kids, reveling in their sweet moments like a new Mom.
“I just want to be with the little ones,” is her mantra.
And they want to be with her.
Our volunteers are fuel that keeps our engine running. They are also ambassadors, who teach young Haitian children that love comes in many forms, many colors, and many languages.
Why do our kids take so quickly to Americans? Perhaps because we’ve so quickly taken to them.
We gather in the evenings, around a long fold-up table on the concrete slab we call “the patio.” One of the teens is designated the secretary for that night, and he writes in a notebook.
Eight teenaged boys.
Countless teenaged issues.
Growing up.
How do you deal with adolescence in a crowded, third-of-an-acre orphanage? The very backbone of adolescence is spreading out, isn’t it? Testing new boundaries? Finding new friends? Discovering yourself?
How do you manage that when the setting stays the same, the school stays the same, the other kids stay the same, and life itself stays the same?
We call it “The Young Gentlemen’s Club.” That’s the boys’ version. (There is a girls’ version and we’ll get to that in a moment.) The Young Gentlemen’s Club came first, mostly because I could see my own teenaged struggles happening with our 13 to 18-year-old males, and I realized I needed to do something about it.
When I was growing up, I had the kids at school, the kids at summer camp, the older kids in the neighborhood — and of course my parents. All of them helped me navigate my early grappling with growth spurts, pimples, girls, sexuality, unexplained embarrassment and raging hormones.
But our teenaged boys at the orphanage have none of those outlets. Their friends are the same boys they took naps with as children. There is no summer camp. No Mom or Dad.
But they still face the same adolescent issues as any kid. Their bodies transform from thin, soft, hairless children to tall, muscular, low-voiced teens. Some of their faces break out. All of them privately wrestle with attractions to girls they’ve known since kindergarten who are now themselves changing into beautiful young adults.
“Mister Mitch, I have a question.”
“Fire away.”
“How do you know if a girl likes you if she doesn’t talk to you?”
Getting past “awkward”
The Young Gentlemen’s Club adheres to Roberts Rules of Order. We declare the meeting open, someone must second the motion, we read Old Business first, take questions, vote to move onto New Business, take questions, vote to close the meeting. I’m not sure why I did this. But it seems to work. The formality of the meeting stands in contrast to the personal nature of the issues raised. It seems to make them feel less self-conscious.
And that’s the whole trick, isn’t it? To tamp down the embarrassment? To get teenage boys to ask the questions they’ve been wrestling with for months but have been too embarrassed to put into words?
No topic is off limits. Over the years, we have discussed every aspect of sex, STD’s, pregnancy, birth control. We talk about how to respect girls, how not to misread them, how to understand when they seem to be mad or teasing.
Surprisingly, many of the questions have to do with impending adulthood.
“Mister Mitch, what does it mean to be a good man?”
“Mister Mitch, when we go to college can we put our hair in dreadlocks?”
“Mister Mitch, when can we start shaving?”
Widley works on shaving.
That last one, by the way, led to quick action. We brought razors, shaving cream and a couple of large mirrors and had a “learn to shave” day up on the balcony. The boys took turns running the blade across the cheeks and chins. And while most of them didn’t have much to cut off, they ran their hands over their smooth skin afterwards and smiled as if they’d finished a masterpiece.
Trust makes it a safe space
There’s no shaving with the girls’ club. But there are just as many questions.
The girls like shifting the name of our meetings. At one point it was called “The Amazing Girls Squad” and then something else that I forgot, but now it has morphed to “The Special Meeting Without A Name,” a moniker dripping with the self-consciousness typical to adolescence.
The Special Meeting Without A Name / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
But there is little typical about these gatherings. The girls will ask about everything from ear-piercing to condoms.
“Mr. Mitch, can you get pregnant when you are already pregnant?”
“Mr. Mitch, when will we be old enough to have a phone?
“Mr. Mitch, what does it mean to ‘hook up’?”
I have such admiration for our teenaged girls. I’m sure they would rather be discussing such things with an older female, but they soldier on with me, and they don’t hold back. We have a very strict policy at the orphanage that forbids our boys and girls getting involved with one another in any romantic or physical way, a necessity in such close quarters and at such tender ages.
But you can see the longing our teen girls have to form new relationships, to be cared for, admired or feel attractive to others.
“Mister Mitch, when is the right time to let someone kiss you?”
“Mister Mitch, when we get to college, how late can we stay out?”
Sadly, between Covid-19 and security issues, our kids have not been allowed to fraternize with other kids from other orphanages or summer camps for nearly two years. It has made the teen years that much more frustrating, having to stifle their natural attractions and emotions, mindful of the 50-plus sets of eyes who watch their daily activities.
The Young Gentlemen’s Club and The Special Meeting Without A Name are but small breezes against the hurricane that adolescence brings, but at their core they are about trust. Trust that questions won’t be laughed at. Trust that peers are going through the same weird feelings. Trust that an older person — in this case, me — has gone through the same things and survived them.
And trust is what teenagers look for most, beneath the mountain of emotion, laughter, depression, curiosity, embarrassment and desire that smothers the teenaged years. Trust that they are not so different. Trust that they will be OK.
I try every month, around that long fold-up table, to let our Young Gentlemen and Amazing Girls know they are trusted, and embraced, and above all, loved. It’s may not be a coming of age like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but here in the grip of this hot and shut down country, it’s something we can do.
There is almost nothing in abundance in our orphanage, or in Haiti for that matter, if you don’t count heartache. We have one working bicycle. We have one freezer. We have a single deep well of water. We have no dishwasher.
But one thing we have plenty of is books. Books line the metal shelves of our “living room.” Books stack high in our makeshift classrooms. Books can be found under the beds, half-open on picnic tables, or, most commonly, stretched between the gripping thumbs of our kids.
Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
With no Internet, no TV, no iPhones, no video games, books are, as they once were in America, the great escape for our children. They don’t read them as much as bury themselves in them. When someone arrives with a boxful of new volumes, perhaps donated by a church, or a school, or just someone who cleaned out their attic, it’s like honey in the hive. The kids swarm. They choose quickly. Sometimes two of them will tug on the same book and tears start to form.
Reading is precious at the orphanage. And since my arrival, I have made it the one indulgence that I cheerfully encourage.
“Any book that you want to read, I will get you,” I tell them. This, in the middle of the hot, empty yard, is like a gushing fountain. They take full advantage, drinking in book after book. Adventure stories. Dragon stories. Immigrant stories. Biographies. Magic books. Science books. They strangely love biology texts and anything having to do with animals, from dinosaurs to sea creatures of the South Pacific. There is almost no book they won’t embrace, running off to a corner of the gazebo, or a shady spot outside the church, they lose themselves for a few hours in the glorious possibilities of the written word.
Reading books in Creole, April 2018 / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
So you can understand why, when it came time to write a new novel, I didn’t mind doing much of it at the orphanage, in the presence of the book-loving children. Haiti can be an inspiring place to create, if only because there is so little other interference, audio, video or otherwise. No cable news to distract my attention. No newspapers lying around to steal my tenuous attention span.
I sit outside at a grey folding table on concrete landing we call “the balcony.” The sun does not hit this spot until noon, so the mornings are bearable. And for the last year, during those mornings, I worked on a novel called The Stranger in the Lifeboat.
Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
That is, when the kids allowed me to.
“Mister Mitch, what are you writing?”
“A book.”
“What kind of a book?”
“A novel.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it’s fiction.”
“What does that mean?
“It means I’m making it up.”
“You’re not supposed to make things up.”
“Not like lying. Making it up like we make up stories.”
“Oh.”
“Understand?”
“What is it called, Mister Mitch?”
“The Stranger in the Lifeboat.”
“Who is the stranger in the lifeboat, Mister Mitch?”
“You know what? Why don’t you read it?”
And they did. My earliest readers of this book — which explores a lifeboat filled with 10 desperate castaways who, after three agonizing days at sea, pull a stranger into their boat who claims to be God — were the teenagers at Have Faith Haiti. They are voracious readers and their eyes lit up at the chance to get in on something early.
So I handed them manuscripts I had printed out and off they went — to the gazebo, to the picnic table, to the steps outside the kitchen, to their bunk beds, to devour my words and make up their own minds.
Within a day, most of them had finished it.
Now, it’s daunting to be reviewed by professionals. But it’s equally anxious when a group of 16 and 15 and even 13 year-olds are judging your work. I found myself glancing over to where they were positioned. Are they yawning? Are they looking around at the kids playing soccer? Am I losing their attention? Do I need to change the plot?
By the end of the week, I had my answers. And I am happy to say the book, as they say in the business, garnered positive reviews.
There were questions, of course. Was the young stranger in the boat really God? Did the rainstorm in the book come from him? Did the police inspector know who blew up the yacht and killed all those people? Why did God say, “I answer all prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.”
And of course, “Mr. Mitch, where did you get this idea?’’
Widley reading a bound manuscript / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo
What I didn’t tell them, not entirely anyhow, is that I got the idea partly from them. The faith of our kids, their unblinking belief that something bigger is watching over them, was an inspiration for a book that examines what do we do when we ask for help and help seemingly arrives — but not the way we thought it would, and not the way we imagined it would look? Do we trust it? Do we dismiss it? Are we able to see that sometimes, as Mick Jagger once sang, we can’t always get what we want, but we get what we need?
I know that, nearly 12 years ago, I was not looking to take over an orphanage. But I do know 20 years ago, my wife and I wanted to have children, my wife especially, and it did not happen. And it was possible to think that prayer went unanswered, that asked-for help never arrived.
Yet here we are now, the two of us, surrounded by 53 of the most loving, joyous — and literate — children we could ever imagine. And so that prayer, over time, was answered. Just not the way we thought it would be.
If you ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up, many will answer “A writer.” I know some of that is just mimicking my choice. But a lot of it stems from reading, because, before you can dream of writing, you must read. They read. A lot. If there is one thing to have in abundance in a country that has so little, perhaps stories that make you dream is it.
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Have Faith Haiti Mission
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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.
