The season of difficult choices

Jul 7, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

👋 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.

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Watch the LIVE from Friday, July 9th interviewing some of the older boys at the orphanage.

‘Joy cometh in the morning’

Jun 28, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

👋 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

Their voices can drown out a storm

Jun 21, 2021 | Life at the Orphanage

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.

“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.

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.

Maybe it’s time to move.