👋 and welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti. Follow along as I share the universal lessons learned watching the purest of childhoods in one of the poorest places on earth.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The chairs were arranged in crooked lines. A wooden podium stood near the front. The sun was baking hot and it was not even 10 a.m. I pressed a button on my phone and “Pomp and Circumstance” played through a speaker. As the little children craned their necks to see, people started walking down the aisle.
Here, amidst the chaos and poverty that is everyday Haiti, was a graduation. Not a fancy graduation. Not a large graduation. To be honest, the graduating class was one student.
But that one student meant the world to us.
Ten years ago, under the academic guidance of my educator sister, Cara Nesser, we opened a school at the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage. Well, first we built it. Then we opened it. At the time, our oldest students were eight or nine. We had no middle school or high school. We recruited teachers from our staff and the community.
As the years grew, the school elasticized. We invented new grades as new grades were needed. Cara’s curriculum swelled. So did the number of kids and the teaching staff. We added a classroom. We sprawled our sessions out into the yard.
But the learning never stopped. And now, for the first time, one of our students, just shy of 18, was receiving a diploma and heading off to college in America.
Edney / Photo by Patty Alley / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
His name was Edney. He wore a blue gown with the proper blue cap, and waited until the official moment to flip the tassel. Never mind that we had to teach him that tradition an hour earlier. He embraced it with a smile that could light up the entire power grid of Port-au-Prince, which would have been nice, since we only get power a few hours a day.
“Today is simply the end of a chapter of a very, very, very long book,” Edney told the audience in a speech he had written on his own. “I started kindergarten when I was seven. I was illiterate. I didn’t know how to read or write…”
“I was not used to love when I felt alone. I was not used to words of encouragement when I screwed up…”
An education.
Learning is a bitter subject in Haiti. Almost everyone must pay to go to school – public school, local schools, private schools. Every few years, a politician squawks about making education free to the public, as it is in most parts of the world. But it never happens.
Consequently, nearly half the country remains functionally illiterate. The average Haitian adult has had three years of school. It is not uncommon for people in their 20s to still be in junior high, having had to stop and start their education depending on available money.
We knew early on at the orphanage that the only way to change this was to open a school on our own grounds. So we did. With the help of Haitian laborers, a group of dedicated American volunteers whom we called the Detroit Muscle Crew built a three-room schoolhouse, painted it banana yellow, cut a ribbon, and let the kids walk through the doors.
The Detroit Muscle Crew and local laborers work on the school building / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
School Director Cara Nesser holds up shapes at the front of the classroom on the first day of school (2011) / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Edney arrived in 2011, just as the school was starting. He was a quiet kid with a high forehead, big almond eyes, and a long grin that hid many of the deeper emotions he was feeling. But he loved to learn. And soon he was finding any corner of the orphanage to sit and read.
He became a perfectionist, mad at himself if he didn’t score the highest grade. As he grew up, he blitzed through the science and math classes that we created and was working on calculus during the pandemic. He beat the required TOEFL score to attend American college by 30 percent.
All of our children at Have Faith Haiti have a scholarship waiting for them to attend university in the U.S., provided they make the necessary grades. We do this through our own dogged fundraising and through a partnership with something called the Michigan Colleges Alliance, a consortium of more than a dozen small colleges in Michigan.
Edney will be attending Madonna University in Livonia starting this September. He told me last week that he was “nervous.” When I asked why, he said “All the kids there will be smarter than me. They’ll have been speaking English since they were born.”
I put my arm around him.
”That’s OK,” I said. “They haven’t gone through what you’ve gone through.”
Edney (2011) / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Edney lived through an earthquake that leveled his country. He lived through a hurricane that left thousands homeless. He lived through having to start his life over at age seven, learn a new language, a new home, new parental figures.
He has studied outside, at night, with mosquitos and oppressive heat bearing down on him as he tried to read beneath the light of a single bulb. He didn’t have Google to look things up, or a phone to text classmates, or internet to research anything whenever he wanted.
He earned his education the old-fashioned way. Books. Papers. Lots of homework. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fret for him, that I’m not nervous myself as he heads to our country.
Since arriving at the orphanage, none of our kids has ever spent a night without other kids sleeping in adjacent bunk beds. None of them eat alone. None of them have ever walked to school by themselves, or had to find a professor across a campus, or had a teacher they couldn’t hug after class.
I remember the moment Edney came to our orphanage. His grandmother brought him in. She explained the poverty they were living in, explained how he had no chance of schooling if he stayed with her, how there was little food and unsafe shelter. Edney was a little old for us, already seven, and quite shy. But something about him struck me. A curiosity in his eyes.
We told his grandmother OK.
Now, soon, he will be leaving us.
His graduation, just days before the Haitian president was assassinated in his home, was a rare moment of quiet loveliness in an otherwise turbulent nation.
As he finished his speech, Edney started to choke up.
“If I am here today,” he said, “I could not have done it without you guys. Thank you for making this day special for me…
“Of course, I’ll be coming back here every three, um, every few months…”
That’s when it hit him he was leaving. He stopped and wiped his eyes. The wind blew his paper off the podium.
“I just love you guys,” he rasped.
Everyone applauded, his schoolmates, his teachers, the staff, the little kids. A few minutes later, all the teenagers gathered on the porch of the school and sang the pop song “Friends Forever” by Vitamin C, with Edney in the middle as they swayed arm in arm.
“As we go on, we remember,
all the times we,
had together
Then, just as they’d practiced it, they let Edney go, and he slipped off, in his blue cap and gown, waving to them as he went.
As our lives change,
Come whatever
We will still be
Friends forever…
It was a graduation in the midst of poverty and chaos and generator fumes and barbed wire. But here at the orphanage, it’s not what things looks like, it’s what they mean. That morning meant hope for the future. So it was everything a graduation should be.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — This is a post about the outside and the inside of our orphanage, and how in Haiti there is a world of difference between the two.
The inside, I have written about. A slightly ramshackle, third of an acre rectangle with five small buildings painted banana yellow and lavender; a chapel, a trio of connected classrooms, a dorm, a music room, and a guest house. There’s a gazebo where we pray and meet, and a massive green kenep tree that hangs over our “soccer” field, which is really just a potholed grassless area with old tree roots poking up like oatmeal lumps.
The inside is also 50-plus children (we just took in nine new ones this month) who wake us up each morning with squealing and laughing and singing.
The inside is a guard at the gate, which only opens for returning or exiting cars.
The inside is safety, familiarity, a place where a teenage boy named Edney, who is about to go off to college in America, runs laps in a square wanting to stay in shape for his big trip. He passes three kids reading books on a stoop, a small group learning a card trick around a table, and a handful of teenaged girls on the steps outside the kitchen, laughing at a private joke.
The inside, in our orphanage, is the known world.
The outside is something else.
That outside came barreling over our walls last week, first in the form of a text message I received from a cherished Haitian friend whose family has been in this county close to 200 years.
It arrived with a ping at 5:30 am.
“The president of Haiti has just been assassinated. Do not go out. Cancel all visits.”
By now, you have probably heard some of the story. Like many things in Haiti, it is confusing, violent, rumor-filled and tragic.
The president of the country, Jovenel Moïse, was murdered in his home in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. A large group of commando style killers reportedly entered his property, somehow didn’t harm a single guard – or even a dog – but managed to put more than a dozen bullets into Moïse’s body, and gouge his eye out. They also shot Moïse’s wife, who was later airlifted to an American hospital.
Theories flew. They are still flying. Columbian mercenaries are part of the story, and many have been arrested, but no one is sure if they were hired to kill, capture or protect the president. Political rivals have denied involvement but are, of course, suspect. Questions are everywhere. Meanwhile, the line of succession was thrown into the hopper when the next in line, the president of the Supreme Court, recently died of COVID-19, and the next in line, the prime minister, was just ousted by Moïse in favor of a new one. But the new one could not be confirmed by the parliament – because there is no parliament! It’s been disbanded.
There are currently less than a dozen people running the government in Haiti.
Less than a dozen?
Against this backdrop, the president being assassinated in his own home leaves the average Haitian wondering the same two things: if the president isn’t safe, how can we be safe? And if the president is dead, what happens to us?
Here is what happened to us. We lost our electricity. It would not come back for days. We took stock of our water (good) our food (OK) and our fuel (not so good.) We were warned to beef up security immediately and we managed, through friends, to hire, that afternoon, two plainclothes police officers to roam our grounds and climb atop our buildings to scour the streets.
Orphanages have been attacked, most recently in April in Croix-des-Bouquets, where bandits killed a guard and raped several teenaged girls. With the outside portending chaos after Moïses’ murder, we spent the day going over panic plans, how to set off alarms, scream a safety word, and get the children to the roof of our tallest structure to try and fend off any attack.
What’s strange – maybe even ironic, an overused word in Haiti – was that the day before, the outside had been a blessing.
For the first time in nearly two years (thanks to COVID-19) we took a field trip to the beach. This involved two buses, 50 kids, 16 staff members, a police escort and two hours in traffic. Didn’t matter. Upon arrival, our kids went nuts.
The place we went to, Wahoo Bay Beach Club, had a pool as well as a beach, plus a basketball court and a small restaurant where meals had been arranged. For our kids, it might as well have been heaven. They splashed, dove, threw a beach ball around and never stopped smiling. The little ones wore inflatable wings on their arms and leaned against doting nannies in the shallow water. The teenaged boys showed off their cannonballs.
Archange, 3, enjoys the crystal clear water / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Mitch Albom helps Estafania, 11, float in the pool as Cinlove, 15, looks on / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
At lunch, the entire group welcomed a plate full of Haitian specialties, chicken, beans and rice, plantains, pikliz. They were so thrilled to be outside the walls, and they said “Thank you Mister Mitch” about a million times, although in truth, the trip was planned by our great friend Verena, and we sent her pictures to let her know what a success it was.
In fact, the only time during the eight-hour experience that there was quiet was on the bus rides out and back. On American field trips, this can be when kids make the most noise; they scuffle or poke fun at each other.
But our kids were mostly silent in their seats. That’s because they rarely get a look at the poverty parade that lines the streets of Port-au-Prince. This is the other part of the outside: crowded vendors, one atop the other, trying to sell any meager ware to get enough food to eat. Kids their age banging on car windows trying to sell trinkets or water. Women, old before their time, carrying huge barrels or trays atop their heads. Endless traffic. Choking fumes.
The outside is sobering reality, and our kids stare at it as if watching a world that they’ve heard about, but is usually hidden in the attic.
Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
With the death of Moïse, there is no hiding. The nation was stunned by the murder, and for days after the streets were eerily quiet, everything closed, everyone hesitant.
It will not last. A power vacuum in Haiti always means a scramble for control, and whether through elections, force, or martial law – which Haiti is under now – there will be mayhem and fear. The nation braces for it. We brace for it.
For one sunny afternoon, the outside was a beautiful panorama of blue water and sand and thatched-roof patios and Coca-Cola bottles. And then it was all gone, in an after-midnight murder of the president, and Haiti was once again leaderless, the outside world reverting to danger, and no walls safe enough to let you sleep without worry.
I spent the next few nights tossing on my pillow, thinking about how fast 50 kids can get to a rooftop, how we need to get someplace safer, how this country can be so glorious and so grim at the same time, and how to steer our children between the two.
Click here to watch a previously live broadcast from the orphanage, discussing the latest from Haiti.
👋 and welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti. Follow along as I share the universal lessons learned watching the purest of childhoods in one of the poorest places on earth.
PORT-AU-PRINCE – Last night I saw a remarkable thing. The winds were picking up in advance of a tropical storm that was working its way across the Caribbean. I was sitting outside the kitchen when out of the darkness I heard the tender sound of a recorder being played. The tune was “Hush Little Baby.”
I peeked over the railing and saw one of our teenagers, Nahoum, sitting crossed legged in the dirt, playing that tune to a new arrival, a three year-old boy named Archange.
Archange, a round-faced child with a shaven scalp and a constant smile, just joined us a few days ago. He was by himself on a plastic mat, because he arrived with scabies.
Scabies is a skin condition caused by tiny little mites that dig into your skin. The region Archange came from is ablaze with it. His arms, feet, fingers and toes were dotted with open sores, some red and blistering. Since scabies is highly contagious, the moment he arrived he had to be separated from the other kids until we could get it under control.
So Nahoum, on his own, decided to make the isolated child feel welcome with his own private concert.
That may strike you as incredibly kind from a teenager, but I must tell you it is fairly common here. If there is one thing all our kids share at the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage, it’s the unnerving moment when they walk through our doors and leave behind everything they knew.
This becomes their new home.
And the other children their new brothers and sisters.
Scabies scars behind the ear of our new arrival Archange, 3.
How do you take in new kids? We get that question a lot. A more accurate question might be How do you decide what kids you don’t take? Because we say no far more than we can say yes.
Summer is the season we accept new little ones, because it gives them a chance to get acclimated before school starts in September. When I first took over operations here, back in 2010, all we had to do was say we were considering new children and there was a line outside the gates. The earthquake of January 12th left nearly 10 percent of the country homeless and many kids without parents or shelter. We had uncles, aunts, grandparents and neighbors bringing us children whose parents had died.
One man arrived with a young girl, maybe 5 years old. When I asked, “What’s her name?” he didn’t know. He said she’d been wandering around for months, ever since her parents were killed by a falling structure during the earthquake. He said he had been chosen by his village to bring her to us.
Another woman brought us a child who had been left to die under a tree in the woods. When she carried him to the police, she was told, “What did you pick him up for? Now we have to do paperwork.”
Other children were left at malnutrition or medical clinics, nobody claiming them for months, sometimes years. The stories of abandoned children are heartbreaking. So is the process of deciding which to accept. There is simply no way we can take them all in. How do you choose? Every adult who accompanies a child makes a compelling case: there is no money. There is no food. There is no bed. The infant is sick. In danger. He or she will never go to school.
Who do you take? It is a Solomonic decision, one for which I am hardly worthy, but tasked with just the same. We try to apply guidelines. For example, if the children are living with both natural parents, we never take them. No matter how poor or dire the conditions, we always say, “We can’t replace what you have with a mother and a father.” The same goes for shelter. If the child is living with a parent – even a single parent – in a solid structure with toilet access, we generally say no. Not because there aren’t dire cases in such settings. But there are even worse situations – total homelessness, living in tents, living in hovels in the ground – that we feel we must address first.
Our top priority is children with no parents and no permanent home. Even then, in no case do we ever talk a person into giving a child to us. If anything, it’s the opposite. And of course, family members – sisters, brothers, cousins – are allowed and encouraged to visit whenever they can. In no case is a child ever adopted out of our orphanage or taken anywhere else.
Last week, in visiting a group from a village outside of Les Cayes, I was asked by an adult if our children are taken to other countries and given away. When I said of course not, they all shook their heads in relief. The stories of so called “orphanages” that actually are fronts for human trafficking are common enough to frighten people. Understandably so.
One of our new arrivals, Malaya, 4, being held by Enolyka, 15 / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Still, for all the children we accept and agree to raise and nurture until age 18 or the completion of our high school – since my arrival it’s been around 50 kids – the ones we must turn down stay on my mind.
One morning, a few years into being here, a mother brought in a child. He was maybe four or five years old, and wore leather and metal braces on both legs and arms, reminiscent of the young boy scene in “Forrest Gump.” He had special boots. And a cane.
I watched the boy’s labored walk. Despite a forced smile on his face, he could not take two steps without assistance. I knew there was no way we could accommodate a child in this condition, without sacrificing our entire staff to heed his daily needs. What could we do? We had 40 other children at the time. The mother cried. I cried. In the end, we connected her with a doctor and a clinic and, although it is not our usual practice, I gave her money for food and shelter.
Still, I am haunted to this day by that little boy, bound by braces, trying to walk across the floor. What happened to him? Where is he now? Did I do the right thing? Should I have done more?
The yes’s bring challenges.
The no’s bring troubled sleep.
One of our nine new arrivals, Djoulisa, who is not yet two years old.
This summer, we are taking in nine new children. It’s a lot. Last year, with COVID limiting our staff, we did not take in any. Now, with COVID running rampant, we are doubling our normal intake.
The new children range in age from a diaper-wearing one-year-old girl to a quiet, four year-old boy. Their adjustment is quick. You might think our new kids sit sullen, alone, crying for what they miss. To my surprise, that is not the case. With so many children, so much to do, and so many adults holding and comforting them, the smiles are fast and the exterior adjustment a quick turn from “What is this?” to “What do we do next?” It usually takes less than two days.
A new child, Rosemyca, steps out of the van and is immediately greeted by her new older “brothers” Edney and Kiki / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Of course, this is just the outside. Who knows what is going on inside their young minds? But I can tell you one thing that makes it easier: from the moment they arrive, they are swarmed by older kids who remember what is what like to be a newcomer here, and who seemingly know exactly what to do to calm them. Sometimes it is holding them during evening prayers, sometimes it is getting down on the floor with them with a doll or a toy car.
And sometimes, it is sitting in the dirt playing a recorder to welcome them with the soothing sound of music. Hush, little baby, don’t you cry. Comfort takes many forms in this hot country, none more beautiful than an older child to a younger one.
👋 and welcome to “Life at the Orphanage,” a newsletter about life for the 50+ children of Have Faith Haiti. It means a lot to have you here — join the conversation in the comments below, and don’t miss the bonus song at the end.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Life at the orphanage begins before sunup. If the roosters don’t wake you, the kids will. Squealing. Laughing. A lone teenager singing a pop song as he rolls a wheel barrel across the courtyard.
Early to rise is a way of life in Haiti. As soon as the skies lighten, the country comes alive. Darkness here can mean oblivion. No power. No electricity. No light to read or work. When the sun rises, you make your hay, before the world goes dark again.
I never use an alarm clock at the orphanage. There’s no point. I am jostled into consciousness every morning by childish laughter outside my window, or one kid yelling for another from across the way.
“Appo-loste! Appo-loste!’’
I sleep well here. Better than in the States. I wake up happy. The idea that there are nearly 50 kids waiting energizes the exit from bed. I use a small bathroom, brush my teeth, throw on a t-shirt and shorts, and am out the door.
Today the sun is strong and clear, the skies cloudless, the air already hot. I have been thinking about the recent news of kidnappings here, which are taking place daily, as are attacks on stores and organizations. Even orphanages are not spared. We are not in a great neighborhood. My Haitian friends tell me to be careful. To stay inside. Keep our kids away from the streets.
I make my way through the courtyard to the dorm, weaving through a parade of kids racing up and hugging me. I stop in the doorway.
I’ve mentioned that perhaps it’s time to move. I am staring at one reason why. There is a massive crack that runs above the dormitory door frame and down the wall. It screams fragility, danger. It tightens my stomach to look at it.
It has been here for nearly 12 years.
Ever since the earthquake.
I came along to find a story. Instead, a story found me.
The earthquake is ground zero for many people like me, who found themselves drawn to Haiti in 2010 and somehow, all these years later, remain. That earthquake was devastating; it struck late in afternoon of January 12th, lasted less than a minute, yet wiped out nearly three percent of Haiti’s population, or close to 300,000 people. Nearly 10 percent of the population was left homeless.
It was a siren call for help, and help came from many corners of the globe. I arrived a few weeks after the earth shook, on a small plane with a few fellow Dertoiters. I remember the stillness of the air, and the endless blue tarpaulins that covered makeshift tents. The Louverture Toussaint airport façade was cracked above the “T” in Toussaint. “Customs” was a piece of paper taped to a wall. We flashed our passports and walked out, without as much as a question as to what we were doing there.
The Louverture Toussaint airport façade / February 2010
As we drove to the orphanage, I wasn’t sure how much of it would be left. I was with an elderly pastor who operated the place at the time. He was worried the whole structure had been destroyed. I had arranged the trip as a humanitarian gesture for him.
I came along to find a story.
Instead, a story found me. The images became pages in my brain. Citizens covered in white dust. Endless small mountains of rubble, often draped with desperate family members trying to hand shovel their way inside, hoping to find a missing parent or spouse or child. Grown men in the street, on their knees, scooping up dirty rainwater to have something to drink. People dragging through crowds in a daze, missing limbs, clothes stained with blood. Everybody outside, everybody, because nobody trusted the indoors anymore. The indoors was the devil’s domain.
I often tell the story of my second day, standing on the orphanage grounds, which were covered with mattresses and makeshift tents for people who came seeking shelter. There was precious little to eat and barely enough drinking water. It was incredibly hot and I was foolishly wearing black jeans and sweating profusely inside them. My head felt light and dizzy and I was staring at all the people, so many people with no place else to go, and suddenly I felt two hands in mine.
I looked down to see a little boy on one side and a little girl on the other. They smiled at me and began walking me forward. And while I did not know it then, they were walking me into their story, their country, their pain.
And their joy.
The gazebo at the Have Faith Haiti Mission turned into outdoor sleeping quarters / February 2010
Joy. It is the fuel that makes this orphanage go. You might think it strange to mention joy in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, a place where two dollars a day is a common wage and where the life expectancy is more than 15 years shy of the average American.
But joy is everywhere in our little pocket of Haiti. I mentioned the name Appoloste. He is one of the few kids left who was also here during the earthquake. He remembers racing out of the dormitory and seeing the whole planet shake.
I met him that month, when he was 4. He took to me from the moment we arrived, and followed me around like an apprentice. He was adorable, high cheeks, mischievous gap-toothed smile. I made him Nutella sandwiches that he scarfed down before motioning for more. The first English word he learned was “hungry.”
Today Appoloste stands taller than me, with a thin, muscular frame, the same gap-toothed smile, and a terrific singing voice. He is 16. We talk often about the day he’ll leave this place and go to college in America and live not far from my wife and me and visit us every Sunday for dinner. We have been sharing the same dream for more than a decade. There is a special kinship here, I suppose because we go back to the earliest days.
Appoloste, age 4 / April 2010
A year or so ago, he began asking for photos from that time.
“Mr. Mitch, do you have the picture when I had a green sticker on my cheek? You know, from the first time you came here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Somewhere. I’ll bring it.”
I never did. Months passed.
“Mr. Mitch, did you ever find that picture with the sticker on my cheek?”
“Oh, sorry. I‘ll look for it when I get home.”
More months passed. He kept asking, and I wondered why it mattered so much. When I finally located the photo, I loaded it into my phone and brought it down and showed him. He stared at it and smiled. He didn’t show it to anyone else. Didn’t call anyone over. He just wanted the two of us to see it together.
“Do you remember when you put that sticker on my face?” he asked.
“Sure, I do,“ I said. “My first time here.”
“I was really young.”
“Yeah. But look at you now.”
He smiled again, almost wistful. And I realized, by the look on his face, that I had just learned another of the million lessons the kids here teach me. That everyone wants roots. Everyone wants a starting block. Appoloste has no evidence of the days before he got to the orphanage, no photos, no old toys, no relatives to regale him with stories of his birth.
But that photo, with the green sticker on his cheek – he has that. It plants him on the timeline. It gives him a beginning. It gives me a beginning, too, a front end to the most important story of my life, the relationships I have forged the last 11 years with Appoloste and the 50 plus other children here, the closest I will ever come to having kids of my own.
Appoloste, 16 / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
Joy is everywhere in our little pocket of Haiti.
That crack in the dormitory wall is a hanging sword that warns me we are crumbling, that our future may require a new address. But it doesn’t change the past. What started in horror and rubble dust has grown into something beautiful here, something older and more mature and more peaceful and purposeful, even amidst the dangers outside. It remains the same simple thing that commences each morning at first light, with children and roosters making the noises that come naturally.
Beginnings. No wonder we cling to them. They are beams from the shore, as we drift further into the unknown.
The crack in the dormitory wall / Have Faith Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The rain is relentless, pounding our tin roofs like invaders trying to bang their way through. Out in the courtyard, the downpour drums the rocky pavement, so hard the drops seem to bounce two feet upon impact.
Forty-three children run and squeal and scramble through the soaking storm until they are under the protection of a metal gazebo. They wipe the rain from their night clothes. Two hanging lightbulbs provide illumination against the evening storm.
“All right, bow our heads,” says Kiki. At 19, thin, muscular and with a perpetually calm look on his face, Kiki is the oldest kid at our orphanage. Not long ago, we celebrated his birthday. Later that night, he told me, “Everyone is happy for me today. But I don’t feel happy.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I am 19. I should not still be in an orphanage.”
“Your time is coming,” I reminded him. “You’ll go to college next year, remember?”
He nodded and tried to smile.
Chivensky, 19, is affectionately called ‘Kiki.’ / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
“Bow your heads,” he says now.
The children follow his lead. So do the nannies, the nurse, the cook, the teachers, the directors and the volunteers, all facing one another in the gazebo’s tight square. Some older kids sit with a smaller one in their lap, like 3-year-old Jerry, who is in flannel pajamas despite the steamy heat, or little Anne, age 4, who is already nodding off in the arms of a big sister.
“Let us pray,” Kiki says. He begins to sing. “I give myself away…” The others join in, a mix of young squeaky voices and adolescent bellows. A few kids bang on bongo drums and the song takes flight. It’s called “devotion.” This is how we end each long, tiring but uplifting day at the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage, a place I have been operating for 11 ½ years in a dicey neighborhood of the capital city of Port-au-Prince.
Haiti is a poor country the way the Sahara is a hot desert. Year after year, it ranks amongst the most impoverished places in the world. Jobs are scarce. Food and clean water are a daily challenge. Education, which must be paid for, even publicly, is a luxury. According to the Human Capital Index, a child born today in Haiti will grow up to be only 45% as productive as they could be if he or she had enjoyed full health and schooling someplace else.
A half-life, essentially.
We are here to try and change that…
And the power goes out.
We are in total darkness. It happens every night. The kids don’t miss a beat.
“I give myself away,” they keep singing, “so You can use me.”
Their voices grow louder as they finish, and for a moment, those voices drown out the rain.
A big, sprawling, wildly different family.
I am here, at the orphanage, as I am every month since 2010, when I took over operating it after the terrible earthquake of January 12th. That earthquake killed nearly 3 percent of Haiti’s population and left nearly 10 percent homeless. It created a steady stream of children whose parents had died, grown too sick to care for them, or abandoned them altogether out of health or poverty, sometimes leaving babies out in the woods, or dropping them at clinics and never returning.
I began admitting a few children that first year, and then a few more and then a few more. Over time, we have taken in more than 60 kids. We have 43 on site right now. They range in age from 3 years old to 19 years old. None of them are ever adopted out. We are called an orphanage because that is how we are classified by the agency that oversees us.
But in my mind, we are a home. And a family.
A big, sprawling, wildly different family.
Have Faith Haiti Family Photo / September 2020 / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
I want to share the cacophony, the wild curiosity, the unmitigated joy and often heartbreaking life lessons that bloom every day in this boxed-in, third-of-an-acre facility.
I have never written regularly about this place. I’ve done some feature pieces. I wrote a book about one special child named Chika, who briefly became a daughter to my wife and me as we searched the world trying to find a cure for her brain tumor.
But I’ve never chronicled what goes on day to day in this most remarkable place, where, surrounded by abject poverty and sometime in the echo of gunshots, real childhood takes place – true, unfettered childhood, with no TV, no Internet, no cellphones, no screens (heck, we barely have a mirror!)
I am going to write about it now, every week because I want to share the stories of these incredible children who have overcome so much already. Because I want to share the cacophony, the wild curiosity, the unmitigated joy and often heartbreaking life lessons that bloom every day in this boxed-in, third-of-an-acre facility.
And because, approaching a dozen years here, as I look around at the small lakes of rainwater that have collected in our potholes, and the leaky tin roofs, and the fading yellow paint, and our kids, many of them shoeless, stomping in the mud, a thought is turning into a decision.
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.
Appoloste, age 4 / April 2010
Appoloste, 16 / Photo by Danielle Cutillo / Courtesy of Have Faith Haiti
