At what age do you take children in – and why?

Sep 15, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

This is what it means to be the youngest child at our orphanage: your feet never touch the ground.

You are passed from one set of arms to another, one doting teen to another, one nanny to another, one visitor to another.

The oldest child at the Have Faith Haiti orphanage has a certain status, some special privileges, some baked-in authority. But the youngest gets all the attention. It has been this way since I arrived. I have seen it writ large in the last few weeks.

The youngest child we ever took in was named Bettinie — or Babu, as she is better known. Her grandmother brought her to us, desperate for help. She told us she was almost three, and while she looked kind of small for that age, we were sympathetic to her poor conditions and accepted her. Months later, when we finally get ahold of her birth certificate, we realized the grandmother had slightly exaggerated. Babu was not three.

She was one and a half.

So for the next few years of her existence, everyone doted on her. She was, after all, so young by comparison to the others. The teenaged boys would lift her high over their heads until she squealed, and the teenaged girls would hold her in their laps during evening devotion, during which she would inevitably fall asleep. It was a beautiful thing to watch, these budding young women who for the most part, had known no motherly affection of their own, instinctively showing it to little Babu. The only problem was there was only one of her to go around.

In time, Babu grew — she is now 12-years-old — and the title of “youngest kid at the mission” was passed on to others. This speaks to a question I often get “What age do you take children in?”

Babu in 2011 (left) / Babu holding Rosemyca in 2021 / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

Well, like everything is this incredible journey, we had to learn our lessons the hard way. At first, we sought children in the 5 – 6-year-old range. Our (naïve) thinking was that they already had developed certain language skills, certain physical skills and emotional maturities. And — funny as it sounds — they were potty trained. Wetting the bed is a huge issue at any orphanage, especially if you have a limited supply of mattresses.

What we learned, however, was that with age comes other problems. The majority of 5 or 6-year-olds we were taking in, we glumly discovered, had been sexually abused. Especially the girls. It was rampant. We learned this through agitated behavior, unusual physical affection issues (too reticent to be touched, or too anxious) and some good work by doctors and psychological specialists. Nearly all of the kids had been sleeping in shared spaces with older siblings, uncles, grandparents, family friends. In many cases, this resulted in the abuse, as well as heightened awareness of sexual behavior (as I often tell visitors, people don’t stop having sex just because there are children living in the tent, or the one-room shack. The kids end up seeing a lot of things they don’t understand.)

As a result, we slid our scale down, to 4-year-olds, 3-year-olds, and now, what is more common, 2-year-olds. This inadvertently created a new competition: cutest — and smallest — new addition.

Remember that our kids never get to see Mommy pregnant. They never get the speech about “You’re going to have a new baby sister. You need to be nice and share.” At our place, it works more abruptly. One day, suddenly, we have a new 2-year-old. And the cooing and fussing begins.

Jerry / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

Recently, that title belonged to a round-faced beaming little boy named Jerry. He came to us through a staff member who knew of his plight (no father, a mother with medical issues) and for months after his arrival, Jerry, who is ridiculously cute, merely had to lift his arms and someone would swoop him up. “Oooh, Jerrrrr-y!” the kids would exclaim. They all but fought over holding him, and he didn’t seem to mind a bit. At one point, I had to tell our kids, “You need to put him down and let him learn how to walk!”

Jerry held the crown for a while, and life for him was one blissful lap after another. Then, recently, we accepted a couple of kids from a nearby orphanage that had been struggling. Jerry was about to turn four, and these new ones, Kim (a boy) and Malayka (a girl) were barely three. The older kids took turns passing the new little ones around, and I could see a look on Jerry’s face that, were it a cartoon bubble, might read: “Whoa! What just happened?”

Jerry / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

A few months later, we took in a half a dozen new children from the western regions of Mirogoane and Les Cayes, and they were even younger. One, a quiet, big-eyed boy named Belcome (who we now call Jeff; don’t ask) was only two, thin and easily lifted. And boy, was he lifted!

And then, last month, came Djoulisa, who was just slightly past 18-months-old, still in a diaper. She opened her arms and fell into a few dozen embraces, and that was that. A new Boss Baby had taken over. By this point, Jerry was walking around (walking! the very idea of it!) and looking for the complaints department.

Djoulisa on her first day, crying on a nanny’s shoulder / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

Meanwhile, I don’t know which astonishes me more. The pure and immediate love our older kids (and not just the teens, kids as young as seven or eight) show their new, tiny brothers and sisters, or the incredible adaptability of the infants themselves, who laugh and giggle and rest their heads on all these new shoulders as if they had been sleeping there forever.

All I know is that, while the expression is “It’s good to be the King”, around our place, it’s more like “It’s good to be the baby.” As Edgar Winter once sang, “Come on and take a free ride.” You’ll never have to touch the earth — at least until the next littler one arrives.

***

The baby bunch / Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

Feature image photo credit: Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

The found and the forgotten

Sep 8, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

👋 and welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti.

This is the tale of two fates.

The first belongs to a little Haitian boy whose name is Archange Chery. He was brought to us a few months ago, when we visited Les Cayes. The man bringing the boy was his grandfather, Pierre Chery, whose fate is the second in this story.

Pierre, a thin man with bags under his eyes, told us the boy’s mother, his daughter, had disappeared shortly after giving birth. The boy’s father was unknown. Pierre had been trying to raise Archange for nearly three years but with seven other people living in a cramped structure in the middle of the woods, the little boy had no chance. There wasn’t enough food or water to go around. He would never be fed well. Never get educated. He was already withering and infested with scabies.

We took him into our orphanage two months ago. Five weeks later, a massive 7.2 earthquake hit Haiti, and hardest hit area was the Les Cayes region, where Archange used to live and where Pierre still does.

At the time of the quake, a Saturday morning, Pierre was in church, attending a funeral for a woman from the community who had died when the baby she was carrying arrived too soon. The child died. The mother died. Then, in a twist of fate that could only be called “Haitian,” during the funeral service, the earth shook and the walls of the church crumbled.

“Everybody ran,” Pierre says. “I ran. The walls were falling. Pieces of rock came down. I tried to pull some people from under the (crushed) walls. Some of them were already dead.”

When he finally made it back to his ramshackle home, “Everything was destroyed. There was nothing left.”

The collapsed church. Featured image shows the interior.

Had little Archange still been living with his grandfather, there’s a chance he would have been in that structure, or that church, and he might not be alive today.

Instead, as Pierre and the others scraped through the rubble of their flattened home, Archange played innocently in the yard of our orphanage, unaware of the seismic event that shaken his roots forever.

Luck favors the timely in Haiti, and the boy escaped just in time.

The grandfather did not.

A thousand natural shocks

It is this dichotomy that haunts me in Haiti. For nearly 12 years, we have been visiting shattered homes, crushed dwellings, areas devastated by natural disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes. Usually we wind up leaving these places with children. Last weekend, we went to the families who remained.

Because I thought it important that our older kids understand what goes on outside our gates, I brought 12 of them with me over several days. We went to Jeremie and Les Cayes, two of the hardest hit regions in the recent quake. We visited the extended families of the children who are part of ours. It seemed the right thing to do.

In Les Cayes we rented an old car that rattled as it drove and made our way over uneven stony paths that wound through the thickets of trees, until we reached a collection of dwellings. These are places that no one bothers with, places that you can only find if you know someone who lives there. Ramshackle domiciles of tin and metal and cinderblock, many of which — thanks to the earthquake — are now piles of useless debris.

It was here that we found Pierre.

The undiscovered country

“Have you gotten any help from the government?” I asked him.

“No.”

“From any NGO?”

“No.”

“No help from anyone?”

“No.”

The village where Pierre lives is called Edward, named after the grandfather of a resident who had lived and died there decades ago. It is hard to call it a village, as there is no organization to the homes. There is one here, one there, then nothing over a hill, or around a bend, then another structure, then a brown dirt path, then another. Water comes from a communal well. There is no plumbing for toilets or sinks. You use the woods. Toilet paper is a luxury.

From tarp to tent

You would think fate would leave bad enough alone in such a place. But the earthquake flattened Pierre’s tiny house as if God’s fist itself had come down upon it. We gave him a tent that he set up in the shadow of the rubble. We gave him flashlights, sacks of food, bags of water and other staples. We gave him a solar light. Finally, we gave him a small envelope with some money inside.

He was beyond grateful. He said we were the only people who come to his aid. The only ones who seemed to even acknowledge his existence or the existence of the people he knew by name in their isolated outpost.

John Carey holds little Archange’s hand. / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

Meanwhile, Archange played with a soccer ball alongside his 50 new brothers and sisters. He is a round-faced, giggly kid, who is perpetually smiling. When we returned from the long day in Les Cayes, I sought him out, just to observe him. I watched him walking with a three year-old’s waddle. Saw him holding hands with one of our older boys. I wondered if, when he grew up, he would even remember coming here, or where he had been before. I doubt it. Many of our kids ignite their memory banks with their arrival at the orphanage. What preceded that moment is a story someone else tells them.

But they are stories just the same, real ones, hard ones. Before we left the village of Edward, I showed a small video of Archange to his grandfather. In the video, Archange is eating a piece of cake from a paper plate. He licks his fingers to get all the frosting. He looks happy and content, and for a moment, as he watched, the wrinkles lifted from Pierre’s weary brow, and he looked the same.

Two fates. One bloodline. Haiti.

A door opens, another shakes behind you

Sep 1, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

Welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti. Keep up with me on Instagram and Facebook for surprise details from Haiti

When the 7.2 earthquake struck Haiti two weeks ago, a couple of young Haitians heard about it, read about it, and watched its destruction on TV. But they were not with their brothers and sisters to feel the ground move. They were in America, preparing to go to college.

Edney, Jhonas, Siem, and Kiki in Michigan.

A door opens. Edney Fanfan, 18, and Jhonas Nelus, 20, are the two most recent exports from our orphanage. They, like two others before them, are now in Michigan, attending a school called Madonna University, even as their fellow Haitians are digging out from a disaster. College in America is more than just an option for our kids. It’s their North Star. The pot of gold at the end of their rainbows. Every one of them is trying to get there.

Sunday night, we moved Jhonas and Edney into their dormitory apartment. The possessions they brought from Haiti fit in one bag. The rest — towels, blankets, desk lamps, etc. — my wife Janine and some friends shopped for.

To say in felt strange would be like saying soup is watery.

“Mr. Mitch, can you help me?” Edney said.

I entered the room to see him struggling with a fitted mattress cover.

“How does this go on?’’ he asked.

I helped him stretch it around the edges. Then I helped him put on a top sheet. And a blanket which sort of amused him. Blankets are hardly needed in Haiti, not when the room is steaming with humid air and the concrete walls seem to trap the entire day’s heat.

Edney and his new dorm room bed

We plugged in his desk lamp. We found a spot for his photo frame, which contained pictures of him with his brothers and sisters from the orphanage. He put his pens on the desk and a laundry bag in the closet. That pretty much did it.

I remembered the day I moved into college. I needed family members to help carry a giant trunk. I brought milk crates filled with albums. The biggest thing, it seemed, was where I set up my stereo system and how far apart I could set my speakers. Also, what posters would adorn my walls (John Belushi, Albert Einstein, Rocky.)

With Edney and Jhonas, there were no posters. No stereo system. No speakers. Within half an hour, they were all moved in. Then came the waiting in this strange, spacious place. When you’ve never had a room of your own, you’re not sure what to make of it at first. Gone is the constant drone of conversation, the sight of another person’s dirty clothes, or the snoring at night that proves you are surrounded.

“How do you like sleeping on your own? I will later ask Edney.

‘’It’s kind of lonely,” he will say.

Jhonas at his new desk

“What are you going to do when you graduate our high school?” I sometimes yell when the kids are gathered in the gazebo.

“Go to college!” they yell back.

“And where will you go to college?”

“Michigan!”

OK. So that last part, I admit, is me being possessive. The transition from sleeping every night with 11 other orphans to having your own bed, mini-fridge and college email account is jolting. It streaks by you, new thing after new thing, like watercolors bleeding into one another. I guess I want to be part of the canvass. The kids come over most weekends, and since the college is nearby, we are able to keep up with their lives and issues.

Only one percent of Haitians ever go to college. Far fewer than that ever leave the country to do so. You will not find large Haitian populations at American universities. But they bring a unique perspective to education, starting with the fact that up to that point, someone had to pay for every class they took. School is not free in Haiti, not even kindergarten or grade school. Since Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, this means many of its children only go to school sporadically — when there is money to pay for that month — or they never go at all.

So there was no problem getting Edney and Jhonas excited for their classes. They had their schedules memorized. They mapped out where to go. When their alarm clocks went off Monday morning (another new purchase; who needs alarm clocks in an orphanage?) they were up and out the door well before they needed to be.

Two days later, we were packing up supplies to go to Haiti. This trip will be largely about aid, flying to the coastal cities of Jeremie and Aux Cayes, both rocked by the recent earthquake, to tend to the poor families of our children, many of whom lost their dwellings and possessions. Tents for the homeless, food for the hungry, lights for those in the dark, these all filled our garage floor and soon will fill our vehicles on the island.

Against this backdrop, going to college seems like another planet. Yet that’s how it is. Whenever one of our kids comes north for higher education, there is a pull that is beyond homesickness or missing loved ones. It is a pull tinged with guilt, especially when a disaster strikes Haiti, as it too often does. You feel like you are getting a chance to improve your mind with study while your countrymen are just trying to survive the morning.

Siem LaFleur, who I have written about and whose family lost its home in Aux Cayes, is torn between such obligations. He went back down to Haiti the week before school started, returned the day before classes, and will go back to Haiti again this weekend to try and help rebuild his mother’s destroyed home, before returning on Labor Day for classes he knows he can’t miss.

A small portrait of relief packages provided to families in Aux Cayes — food, tents, lighting, and other general supplies — made possible through your ongoing support. Siem led relief efforts last week. More is headed there over the next few days.

This is the yin and yang of academic opportunity for our kids, all of whom are required to return to Haiti once their degrees have been earned and to work at the orphanage for two years, as a way of giving back.

That last part is easy. They want to come back. Haiti never leaves their hearts, no matter how spacious a dorm room feels, or how impressed they are with Wifi that actually works.

“When you get down there tomorrow,” Edney asks, “can we call you so we can talk to the kids?’’

“Sure,” I say.

He smiles, as if relieved. They say the transition to college is challenging. Try trading 50-plus brothers and sisters for a universe you only imagined weeks earlier. A door opens. You walk through. But it stays open even as you pass, and the voices you left behind beckon you, comfort you, and leave you yearning.

***

Header image: Chapel, Madonna University, via Wikimedia Commons

‘Your job is to carry me’

Aug 25, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

Welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti. Keep up with me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for surprise details from the kids in Haiti.

We rarely take brothers and sisters into our orphanage. It just seems unfair, when so many in Haiti are suffering, that two of our limited slots go to the same family. Frequently, when children are brought to us, they are the youngest of the lot, an infant that tilted the balance for a single mother teetering on survival, or a child that a neighbor could not afford after taking in so many others.

But once in a while, we make an exception to the sibling rule. Eight years ago, a pair of brothers were brought to us by an impoverished single mother who so desperately wanted them educated, she offered to bring them from an hour away every morning, sit outside our gate while they went to school, and take them back in the late afternoon. We were so struck by her perseverance, that we agreed to try it. The first day they arrived they had holes in their pants, and we could see they didn’t own underwear. Within a few months, they were both living with us.

There was one other time we bent the sibling code.

It was more personal.

Some of you are aware of a brash and funny little girl named Chika (I wrote a book about her called “Finding Chika”) who was brought to us when she was three after her mother died giving birth to a baby brother. There was no doctor present. There rarely are for poor pregnant moms in Haiti. Hospitals are not easy to get to. Money is always an issue. So many babies are born at home.

Chika’s mother died in the same bed where she gave birth. The newborn son was taken away by an uncle.

Chika was brought to us.

Carrying Chika

What we carry defines who we are

Suffice it to say that Chika’s personality was twice the size of her diminutive frame. She bossed the other kids around, told them who could use the bathroom, who could use the soccer ball, where they should stand in line, you name it. The older kids just laughed. We laughed, too.

Then, at five years old, Chika developed a brain tumor. A killer called DIPG, which doctors said would take her life within four months. We stopped laughing. But Chika never did. Not once during the two amazing years in which she became our adopted daughter, did she ever fret or complain about her health. We traveled the world with her, looking for a cure. Along the way, we became a family.

“Mr. Mitch, where are you going?” she asked me one day, near the end of her life, when the cancer had robbed her ability to walk and I had to carry her from place to place.

“I’m late for my radio program,” I said, rising from the table where we were coloring. “I have to go.”

“No, stay and color with me,” she instructed.

“Chika. I have to work.”

“Mr Mitch. I have to play.”

“But, Chika, this is my job.”

She crossed her arms and made a face.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Your job is carrying me.”

And the effort we make is our legacy

Instantly, I knew she was right. My job was carrying her. It was the best job I have ever had, the biggest honor, the most important weight. For much of my life, I had filled my arms with books, broadcasts, films, work, accolades, money – and suddenly, all that had to be dropped to carry a 7-year-old from place to place.

There was no comparison.

Your job is to carry me. Our job is to carry all our children. Through hard times. Through illness. And if we have the means, then it’s our job to carry the poor children of the world, the sick, the forgotten, the orphaned. At least that’s how I see it.

When Chika died, we brought her back to Haiti to be buried. After the funeral service, we invited those in attendance to come back to the orphanage. Amongst the guests were Chika’s uncle, who had been raising her baby brother. After an hour or so, he wandered over and asked to speak to me in private.

“Moise (the little boy) is now three years old,” he said. “We have children of our own and we don’t have money to take care of them, let alone him. But I see this place” – he motioned to the orphanage – “and I wonder…could you take him in?”

I looked over to Moise. He had the same wide cheeks as his sister. His mouth hung open as hers often did, curious at his surroundings. I called his name and he turned to me and blinked his big eyes and in that moment, having just said goodbye to our little girl, I swear he resembled her so much I almost cried. I opened my arms and said, “Vini”, which is Creole for “come,” and he ran to me and jumped into my embrace.

Moise / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

He has remained there ever since.

Moise, we discovered, has Chika’s love of laughter, sense of mischief, rock-hard stubbornness and incredible strength. Chika was always strong, but Moise is like Bam-Bam of the “Flintstones.” Honestly, he can climb your body like a wall, no help from you, then hook his legs around your waist and drop himself all the way back, then pull himself all the way up, no hands necessary. He has been ripped since he was six years old.

He has become an integral, attention-grabbing, joyous part of our orphanage. I see Chika’s spirit in his smile, and I hear her in his voice.

Chika and Moise resemblance, at age 3

Families are like pieces of art

The story doesn’t end there. Not long after we took Moise in, we were contacted by the people who were taking care of his and Chika’s older sister, a nine year old named Mirlanda. We invited her to come visit us and her baby brother, whom she had never lived with, since their mother died when Moise was born.

Mirlanda was tall, quiet and polite. She spoke no English, but she played with the other girls at the orphanage as if she’d known them forever. The next day, when time came for her to go back, she went to our security guard, on her own, and told him “When those people come for me, tell them I’m not here.”

When I heard that, my heart broke.

A month later, she was living with us as well.

Mirlanda and Moise are the only brother and sister duo we currently have. They are bookends to Chika, and the kids love having them. As I say, we don’t break the sibling rule very often. But in this case, it felt like we were pulling a new family together just as ours — Chika, my wife and myself — had been ripped apart.

Moise and Mirlanda, little brother, big sister, are a reminder of how life goes on in this hot and weary nation, and how families here and everywhere blend and bend, but do not break.

Janine and Mitch with Mirlanda

***

Top photo: Chika dressed as a sheep in the Christmas pageant, December 2013 / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti

How much could you take?

Aug 17, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

👋 and welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti.

Emmanuel had been through it before. The earth shakes. The buildings rock. You hear screaming from the streets. You see children running.

“The ground just starts moving,” he says. The last time this happened, he was 12 years old, reading a notebook in the yard at the orphanage. He heard a loud noise. The ground began to sway. He dropped the notebook and started running like the other kids. He ran through the kitchen, saw the propane tanks fall over, ran back out, grabbed onto a post and squeezed it as if it were a ship rail in stormy waters.

“Back then, I didn’t even know what it was,” he says of the 2010 earthquake.

This time, eleven years later, he knew what it was. He was in the same place as before, the yard of the orphanage, when the ground started rumbling. Again, the children began to race in circles. Again, he saw their terrified faces.

“It’s an earthquake,” he tried to tell them.

It’s an earthquake. Another earthquake. In a country that just saw its president assassinated and its streets terrorized by gangs, a country on the cusp of a tropical storm that could bring flooding everywhere — and suddenly, it’s an earthquake. Another earthquake?

Honestly. It’s enough to make you shake your head. If the ground hadn’t been shaking already.

[View video on Twitter]

Frantic calls

Siem had been inside the dormitory back in 2010. He grabbed his bed and held on for what seemed like minutes. Then he raced outside. The air was thick with white smoke. People screamed. Some would die in the streets. It took months before anyone trusted going indoors again.

This time, Siem was at an airport, coming back to Detroit from Haiti for his sophomore year of college. He got a text.

“There’s been an earthquake. In Aux Cayes.”

That was his hometown. He frantically dialed a friend, who answered the phone and told him, “Your mama’s house is destroyed. Your aunt is dead. Her son is dead. Your brother is hurt—”

And then the phone died.

“I couldn’t reach anybody for three hours,” Siem says. “I didn’t know who was alive and who wasn’t.”

Siem’s family lives in the heart of the earthquake’s path, Aux Cayes, which sustained major damage and saw hundreds dead and thousands wounded. Some of his family had been at a funeral service when the ground rumbled and the church collapsed. Those who came to bury a loved one were buried themselves.

“They say 30 peopled died in that.”

Siem’s eyes moisten. You can tell he is a young man out of time, here in the safety of an American college year, but emotionally in the center of a hometown that has just been crushed.

“I have to go back,” he says.

Although his college classes begin in two weeks, he is returning home Saturday. He can’t be here, with all this safety, when his mother, who has been too traumatized to speak to anyone, sits by herself, wailing in the streets, under threatening Haitian skies.

Americans sometimes get worn out by Haiti’s problems.

Imagine how the Haitians feel.

Whenever there is another setback, there comes an inevitable chorus of “That poor country, it never gets a break.” But part of why it never gets a break is because it’s such a poor country. California suffers earthquakes. But with rare exceptions, they are absorbed by structures and roads built to withstand them. The southeast gets tropical storms. But with rare exception, good planning and strong building keep the damage within reason.

Streets are dangerous in America, but, with rare exception, a police force is expected to respond and a justice system expected to investigate. Political fights are commonplace in the U.S. But with rare exception, they do not end in bloodshed between legislators.

Money makes the difference in every case. And Haiti doesn’t have money. Not for preparation. Nor for protection. Not for relief.

So Siem’s mother is living in the streets, and others victimized in Aux Cayes are huddled in an outdoor soccer pitch. The roads to that area are infested with gangs, who may or may not let relief convoys past. There is no FEMA. There is no AllState representative. There is no abundance of hospitals or clinics or hotels.

What feels safe?

At the orphanage, the children have returned to sleeping inside. There were small aftershocks that came Saturday night, and our nannies, who remember the last earthquake, did not want to go back into the dormitory. I can’t blame them. The building, which we inherited, is not earthquake proof, and last time it developed a huge crack in its ceiling and wall that needed to be buttressed with a giant beam. Even so, I don’t trust it.

The school building, which we constructed after I took over operations, was built with more support, rebar all the way through. Plus, it is only one story. The nannies took the kids and made them all sleep inside the classrooms. They felt safer. Why shouldn’t they?

It’s another reason I yearn to move. Find a new place. A more stable home. Until then, I worry about every natural disaster. Every storm. Every rumble of the earth — in a nation where rumbling is omnipresent, political rumblings, violence rumblings, the rumblings of a hungry child’s stomach.

And now, once again, the rumblings of an earthquake. Another earthquake. As Siem prepares to fly to the rubble of his mother’s home, as we prepare to fly back to Aux Cayes to see if our new kids’ families are still alive, as our children eyeball every building nervously before they enter, we take a sigh, then take the next step. It is all you can do in a land that makes you feel like you are forever walking uphill.

***

The scholarship program is hosting a fundraiser on August 19 at Madonna University. Info and tickets are available here. Please spread the word!