The phone call came in the middle of the morning. The voice, a member of our staff at the Have Faith Haiti orphanage, was hushed and scared.
“There might be someone on our property.”
She was calling from the third floor of our school building, where our kids and workers were already huddled and hiding, the doors locked, desks and chairs pushed up against them. Outside, our security guards were circling the exterior.
There’d been a call from a neighbor saying a man on the run might be nearby. Even though it would prove to be a false alarm, when that happens, we go into preparation mode. We sound an emergency alarm, all kids come running, their teachers and counselors account for all of them, and we race to the highest and safest ground.
It is no way for children to live. Yet it is part of daily life these days in Port-au-Prince, where a gangs vs. people war has escalated to daily confrontations. I have been to Haiti every month for 13 years. It has never been so bad.
You’ve probably read about how gangs have choked off much of Port-au-Prince, shutting down essential services, blocking roads, extorting money, stealing homes and committing random murders.
You may not have read how the people are fighting back. Tired of waiting for overmatched and overmanned police, they have reluctantly accepted that the rest of the world doesn’t care enough to intervene, especially, disappointedly, the U.S., despite being Haiti’s closest big neighbor.
So they have taken matters into their own hands.
It has become bloody.
Katherine Graham Photography
We’re addressing immediate safety needs with this GoFundMe campaign. Click to learn more.
In recent days, a van full of suspected armed gang members was captured by police in the Canape Verte area, which is close to our orphanage. Somehow the citizens took control of these men, killed them and burned their bodies in the street.
It was, like similar recent acts, a message from the people, that they will not be overtaken, they will not accept gang rule. They are worn out. Exhausted by the terror. But they are fighting back – with violence, with beatings, with burnings, with guns.
And we are in the crossfire.
Katherine Graham Photography
Our children have been beyond brave. They know this life. They accept their country. But they are still children, and when they hear gunfire, they are frightened.
When they see security guards circling, or police cars arriving, they are frightened.
When they have to stay inside a single space for hours, no school, no play, no eating, they are frightened.
As one of our kids, a 14-year-old girl, wrote after the incident: As the gunshots rained in the air, I felt frightened and weak. But with one of my younger siblings wrapped in my embrace, it reminded me that I had to be stronger than this.
That’s beautiful, but tragic. A 14-year-old?
We are not vigilantes. We are not warriors. We are an orphanage.
When I tell these horror stories to Americans, they say “How can people live like that? Why don’t they leave?” Many Haitians are desperately doing that. Tens of thousands are running away, applying for asylum in an overbooked U.S. system, or heading for the Dominican Republic.
We’re not running. We can’t run. Not with 100 kids and staff. Our mission has always been to give the most needy children a chance to change the narrative, so that they can one day make their country the flourishing place it deserves to be. We are not giving up on that.
But given the current dangers, we are temporarily realigning our fundraising to focus strictly on security.
Photo: Theresa Finck
We currently have a decent force of guards. We need more. The joy of our new home is the space it provides the kids to learn and grow. The downside is the size. Protecting seven acres of property requires greater manpower than we have. There are effective, armed security operations here in Port-au-Prince for hire. But they cost money.
We also want to build a “safe floor,” an area in a building that is bulletproof, secured by steel doors and window coverings, and equipped with the essentials inside. We want to do it for the worst case emergency, and because it’s smart. This can be done quickly. But it costs money.
Watch our campaign video
Lastly, we want to establish full lighting, motion detectors, alarms and remote cameras around the perimeter of our property. The key to stopping any trouble is spotting it before it happens. We need to see and alert. But it costs money.
We pray this will not continue forever. We are grateful that we have never had a breach. But we want to keep it that way. We want our staff to be secure. We want the volunteers who join us to feel secure. Above all, we want our kids to be safe, every day, every night, every minute.
You can hear the gunfire from our playground. The outside is always close. In Haiti, you can hide but you cannot run. And so our orphanage family must say what almost every Haitian family is saying these days:
This is no way to live. Please help us.
How you can help: Support “Help Us Build a Safe House in War-Torn Haiti” any way you can
Dear Readers,
Since the launch of “A Year of Thanks & Giving,” we’ve asked a lot. And your generosity has showed up time and time again. We’re asking once again, but know that any level of support is welcome: give at GoFundMe if you can, share this on your social media profiles, email everyone you know. Every bit helps.
**If you need to give offline, checks may be sent to Have Faith Haiti Mission c/o A Hole in the Roof Foundation / 29836 Telegraph Road / Southfield, MI 48034 with “safe house” in memo line. For institutional giving, DAFs, and more questions, contact erika@havefaithhaiti.org.
You know the Greek myth of Sisyphus, punished by the gods to push a giant boulder up a hill, only to have it fall back on top of him, again and again?
That is the story of our medical care in Haiti.
When we first began the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage, our “doctoring” consisted of vitamins, antiseptic, bandages and Tylenol, all of which we brought down with us.
We could clean a wound if a child fell on the chunky concrete. We could bandage it up. If a teenager had a fever or a headache, we had the Tylenol. And every day we gave the entire population vitamins.
Beyond that, we were pretty helpless. If one of our kids developed a more serious medical issue, we took them to a hospital. Care there was hit or miss. Depended on the doctor. Depended on the problem. Often, we’d have to move the child to a second or third hospital before finding a qualified person or the right medicine.
“This can’t go on,” I said. “We have to be better prepared.”
So we hired a nurse, a Haitian woman with some experience. And we increased the medicines we brought down with us. Fungal creams, ointments, cold medications, dental care items.
Pushing the boulder up the hill.
When the climb gets steeper
The cabinet of supplies that stands in for a clinic
As the years passed and our population grew larger, we hired a second nurse, to be there when the first one could not. We also cleared a small alcove in the orphanage office and put it in a rack of shelves. We stocked them with the various pills, gels, syrups and bandages we’d accumulated.
We established a connection with a Haitian doctor, who worked out of a Port-au-Prince hospital. We arranged for her to come assess our kids every three months, and if a problem arose in between, we paid her to be on call for us.
Pushing the boulder higher.
Then the gangs took over. The streets became dangerous. Making a house call, in certain areas, meant taking your life in your hands.
The hospitals we’d come to rely on were soon without staff, or without medicine. When one of our kids suffered a seizure, we were told we’d have to go find the medication somewhere, then bring it to the hospital for them to administer it.
Another time, after discovering a new child we’d taken in had tuberculosis, we were told to come get him out of the hospital just days after brining him there, because the place was closing down due to the violence in the streets.
Our on-call doctor can’t get out of her neighborhood. Medications are scarce. All the progress we felt we’d made suddenly feels like no progress at all.
The boulder comes falling back on us.
More hands can push farther
Haiti is a series of adjustments. If this is the new state of affairs outside, then we need a new state of affairs inside.
We are hoping to build our own medical clinic, on our grounds, staffed by a doctor and two nurses and stocked with all the medication we can legitimately acquire and administer.
ManesKnox and Gaelson, both of whom have had dealt and continue to deal with health challenges
We want our kids’ first stop to be within our gates. We already have kids with ongoing issues that we could address. Knox and Ziggy must deal with cerebral challenges that require regular therapies. We could do that in a clinic. Not long ago, Manes dislocated his kneecap playing soccer, and needed surgery and long rehab. He’s had to do it in the boys’ bedroom. We could do that in a clinic.
And then there is Bradley.
He came to us last summer, at three years of age. He weighed 10 pounds. That is not a typo. We don’t know how he was alive. His mother had nothing to feed him. She told us she’d already lost two other children in their infancy.
So we took Bradley in, and began a guided feeding program to pull him back from the brink. He is a joyous, curious child, but after being starved for so long, he has serious challenges. With a space to deal with them — right now he is in a small bedroom — we can take care of him. Somebody must.
So we are pushing the boulder back up the hill, but it’s a different hill now. It’s our hill. If you are able and inclined to help us, we are hoping this month to raise $65,000 to build out, stock and furnish the clinic and pay the salary for an on-site doctor for the first year, after which we will find a way to fund it ourselves.
One man pushing a boulder is likely hopeless. But many hands and a strong will might just get it over the top. Then at least it doesn’t come crashing back down on our children.
It is the kind of sentence you dread when running an orphanage. The sudden, burst-in-the-room, out-of-breath interruption that changes everything you were doing and everything you had planned to do.
When? How long? Where is he now? How’s be being treated? Who is here that can get him to the hospital?
There is a laundry list if protocol questions that we run down, even as we rush to the child’s side. Moise, just 10 years old, was indeed having a seizure. His arm and leg were flapping uncontrollably. His face was twitching. His eyes were glassy and he was unresponsive, making a high, guttural sound.
Scary? Hell, yes. Concerning? Of course. Overwhelming? It can’t be. There’s no time to be overwhelmed. We have faced this type of thing before.
Within minutes, Moise was on his way to the hospital, the nearest one to us, a few miles away.
But that is hardly the end of a medical issue here.
It’s usually just the start.
Bittersweet
Now all this was happening when so much good was taking place at the Have Faith Haiti orphanage. Bulldozers were moving earth for an upcoming soccer field. Plumbers and electricians were hard at work in the new kitchen that your donations have made possible, and painters were finishing the new nursery that your donations, in part, have also made possible.
Our home is improving in great leaps, and the kids gather behind construction fences or on mounds of dirt just to watch, wide-eyed, at all the changes you have helped make possible.
It is the yin and yang of being here. So much good, set against so much suffering.
So many new possibilities.
So many old problems to deal with.
Good grief
Moise is Chika’s younger brother. Some of you may recall Chika as the lovable, bossy little girl who was the subject of my book “Finding Chika.” She came to us when she was barely three and stole our hearts. At five, she developed a facial droop, which was ultimately diagnosed as the byproduct of DIPG, a deadly brain tumor that would, two years later, take her life.
But that diagnosis didn’t come in Haiti. It had to wait until we got Chika to the U.S. It took months. And this is the dilemma we face every time we have a serious medical issue with one of our kids.
Do we trust the care they are getting here, or do we need to leave the country?
In Moise’s case, the treatment wasn’t comforting. Whatever medication they had at the hospital wasn’t effective against his seizure, so we had to drive around, on a Sunday evening, until we could find a pharmacy that sold a version of phenobarbital.
We raced it back to the hospital for the doctors to administer.
All this time, Moise’s seizure continued.
Yes. You read that right. You have to get your own medicine here. You also have to go someplace and get blood drawn, then bring it back in case they need it for your loved one’s potential transfusion.
Not only is the staff care here not what we are used to in the U.S., but supplies, equipment, and medication are frequently absent. Hospitals are severely short-staffed, if they are open at all, given the current violence in the country.
Thus, whenever we get one of those breathless, burst-in-the-room announcements — Moise is having a seizure — a whole series of worries begins, not just for the child, but how we are to navigate his or her treatment.
Awfully good
The good news is, Moise, with the phenobarbital administered, eventually stopped his shaking. We got him a CT scan, which was negative, and arranged for an EEG test, but we haven’t been able to get the results because gangs started fighting near the hospital and so it shut down and hasn’t re-opened.
Another thing to deal with.
Meanwhile, Moise came back to us, and we’re taking it easy with him. He is great, as easygoing as so many of our kids are. You ask him how he feels and he says “Good.” You ask him if anything hurts and he says “No.” you ask him if he wants to play in the yard, he says “Yes.” He is all smiles again, and solid as a rock, maybe the strongest kid we have ever had.
But I worry about him so much, given our history with Chika. Bad old memories mix with good new memories, and that is how it is here, in the sunshine of late winter, in a land of such joy and such dysfunction. We go to sleep hoping only to be awakened by the sound of the morning bulldozers, and not someone rushing in the room to share bad news.
Make a Garden Grow
Garden stones — in support of the building of a vegetable garden and chicken coop — at Have Faith Haiti are still available.
With a donation you will become part of the building blocks of food security — and your name will be painted onto a garden stone by our children.
Let’s talk about growth. It comes in so many forms. The other night, we sat down at the dinner table in our Michigan home, my wife, Janine, the baby, Nadie, our recent college graduate from Haiti, Manno Gedeon, and myself. Just before we started eating, Manno asked if he could say something.
“First of all,” he began, “I want to say, everything that I’ve been able to do has been because of you guys. So thank you.”
I looked at my wife. We smiled. It was such a sweet thing to say, but I wondered where he was going next. Manno, the second-oldest kid from the orphanage, has always been a trailblazer, and perhaps because of that, he’s a bit hard to gauge. He is frighteningly intelligent, reads voraciously, keeps quiet much of the time, is gentle, kind, yet marches to his own beat.
He was our first student admitted to college and our first to graduate — with perfect grades and highest honors from Madonna University. All the kids at the orphanage look up to him.
Knox, right, with Manno on the day of his graduation from Madonna University
Manno has been living with us since his graduation, working for a year at a health clinic in Detroit. And my immediate thought was, “He’s thanking us because he wants to get his own apartment.”
So you can imagine my reaction when his next sentence was: “I got into medical school.”
I screamed. My wife screamed. And Nadie — startled by the sudden explosion of joy — burst into tears.
We jumped up and hugged Manno, who was all smiles, while lifting Nadie and trying to stop her tears. The young. They keep you hopping.
Watch: Manno shares the good news about his acceptance with the kids in Haiti
Trees bearing fruit
I said this was about growth, and it is. Manno’s acceptance into Michigan State’s medical school marks a new high point on the Have Faith Haiti growth chart. Our first graduate student. Our first future doctor (although the way the younger ones are churning, he won’t be the last.)
It was an unimaginable goal when we first got started in Haiti, 13 years ago. We didn’t have a school. We didn’t have a classroom. Manno, not even a pre-teen, had been dreaming about going to school — not medical school, any school. He often spoke about seeing kids in the street walking to school with backpacks and feeling so left out, wishing he could be in lockstep with them, smiling and chatting and en route to a day of learning.
Eventually, we were able to provide that for him. And he grabbed the opportunity with passion. He studied constantly. We never had to get on him to do so. I still recall watching him at nights, under a single light bulb, writing on his knee because he didn’t have a desk.
So to see him now, en route to medical school, where he plans to focus on pediatrics (not surprisingly) so he can one day take care of kids like him back in Haiti, well, it doesn’t make me proud. It humbles me. It fills me with wonder. The possibilities in life, if you just water the soil a little bit.
Roots of goodness
This brings us to our February project. As many of you know, we are in the midst of A Year of Thanks & Giving. Our move last year to a new facility has brought tremendous opportunities – and tremendous costs. We are taking 12 months to focus on essential building blocks to create the safest, healthiest and most nourishing home for our 60-plus children.
To date, thanks to your help, we have been able to build a kitchen, finance a safe vehicle, and begin construction on a nursery for our infants.
This month, traditionally the time to get a jump on spring, we are targeting a garden and chicken coop. A place where we can plant our own vegetable and fruits, and cultivate our own eggs. With over 100 mouths to feed (between kids and staff) every day, three times a day, the idea of self-sustenance is not just appealing, it’s all but essential.
At the old orphanage, we had a small garden that we literally created out of the concrete. It had wire mesh around it and we grew a few vegetables, while fighting off the rats and other creatures that threatened it.
Making the old garden work with what we had.
As meager as it was, we saw the amazing development when kids learn to plant, water, and cultivate what the earth can provide. Our children were fascinated. They couldn’t wait to see the green shoots.
Now, finally, we have the land and the soil to do a real garden and a real chicken coop. We have the space allocated. We just need the tools, the equipment, the basic land clearing and soil placement, the perimeters, the watering system, the coops and the fences.
The area we’ve picked out for the new garden and chicken coop to be built.
To build this, we’re offering the opportunity to reserve one of 100 stones in the garden that the children will paint with your name for each $500 donation — and we’ll send you a picture of it. I know we are asking a lot this year, and we remain eternally grateful to all of you who can help even a little bit.
Growth takes effort. But the blessings it bestows, well, they are immeasurable — whether they be watching a baby grow into her first words, a curious young boy grow into a medical student, or a seed grow into a meal. We are privileged to watch the development this universe offers us. Come watch it blossom with us.
Not long after this new year began, I got a rather dispiriting letter from a doctor who has worked in Haiti for a number of years. He said he admired what we were doing at our orphanage, but he felt that all of our efforts were “in vain.”
He said the situation continues to get worse in the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and that “nothing had really changed” and nothing would.
Now I understand glum assessments of Haiti. Anyone who has walked the streets of Port-au-Prince (if they dare) has seen the destruction, depression, endless poverty and constant danger. Gangs run amok. People live in fear. The government, what little was left of it, just shrunk down again — to a single person. A prime minister, Ariel Henry, who has done little beyond keeping himself in office
But I will differ with my saddened medical correspondent in one way.
Change is always possible.
Change is happening all the time.
I know. Because I see it.
Sa ou fè se li ou wè — What you do is what you see
I see it in our precious little Nadie, who came to us at six months without ever having tasted food, just sugar water. Her eyes were closed, her body fit in the palm of a hand. The diagnosis was severe. The prognosis was dim.
Nadie at the piano
But today, thanks to your help, and the kindness of a few American doctors, Nadie is a thriving little girl, 13 months old, 17 pounds, with enough energy to speed across a room on all fours, enough strength to lift herself and walk along couch edges and cabinet doors, enough intelligence to distinguish her nose, mouth and ears if you ask her, enough language skills to squeal out “Up!’ and “Wa-ba! (water)” and “bye bye” and “night night” and “Amen” after putting her hands together as if praying.
That is change.
I see it.
I see it in the new kitchen that you have helped bring to life. The walls are now done, the ceiling and plumbing and electrical complete, an adjacent bathroom constructed, a pass through window to hand out enough food to feed 100 people is finished and beckoning.
There is no comparison between this spacious new kitchen and the cramped, steamy, bug-infested space we had been using. Every time I see our cook, Chef Harry, he smiles and puts his hands together and gushes, “Mesi, mesi.”
Thank you.
Change.
How the new kitchen started…
How the new kitchen is going!
Pitit se richès malere — Children are the wealth of the poor
An essential safety car
I see it in our ability to consider transportation once again, thanks to the generous contributions donors have made to purchase an armored vehicle. Sure, it’s sad that you have to have bulletproof steel to feel safe driving around the city. But is it better to hide inside, never get to the hospitals, supply centers or food stores that your children need?
That’s how we had been living. Now we don’t have to.
Change.
I see it in Louvenson, a 17-year-old who had been fainting from a racing heartbeat multiple times. Doctors in Haiti could do nothing. But through your help, and the fine doctors at Mott’s Children’s Hospital, we were able to get him thoroughly checked and tested. He’s going to be fine. He even got to try an American sandwich and get to see a college campus.
Change.
Louvenson in Michigan
Finally, most of all, I see it in the ever-growing bodies and developing faces of our smallest children. Even coming to Haiti every month, the changes I notice in our infant population are huge. Suddenly, this 2-year-old is speaking English. Suddenly this 1-year-old is walking on his own. Suddenly, this little boy who was covered in scabies and nearly comatose from malnutrition is laughing and holding our hands and taking first steps.
Change? Life is nothing but change for the under-three population at the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage. And if we are able to complete our nursery and hire a specialist to run the program, it will change yet again, into an even more caring, nurturing center for the ages that need tenderness the most.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose finite hope.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
So I have to say to my dispirited reader that while frustration in helping a place like Haiti is accurate, honest, and to be expected, you should never give up on change. To do that is to give up on hope. And to do that is to give up on life.
We’re not going there. Too many promising things. Too many new smiles. Too many frist steps. Too many people saying “mesi, mesi.”
As the fairy godmother once sang in the Cinderella musical, “Impossible? Things are happening every day.”
They are.
They are. They are change. I see it, You can see it, too.
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.
It’s time to answer some questions.
There has been a great deal of media attention to the evacuation of our staff, volunteers, and founder. It’s likely you’ve read or watched the story by now.
Our founder, Mitch Albom, addresses the questions that may be running through your head; they are likely the ones we grapple with every day.
