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.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — You think you are teaching your children. All the while they are teaching you.
We rang in the new year as we always do here at the orphanage, with pizza and juice and cake and long tables and a ceremony of sparklers poked in the dirt, with wishes for the coming year draped over their twinkling.
When the sparklers extinguished, we sang “Auld Lang Syne” (mostly we la-la-ed it) and hugged and kissed and yelled “Happy New Year!”
Then we went to bed, woke up, and got on with new business.
The new business this year is infancy. There are more babies in our program than ever before, and in their joy and tears and squeals and diapers, they have taught us something:
We can go early. We can start sooner. And the smaller we begin, the bigger difference we can make.
So this year, with your help, we are building a nursery, hiring specialists, and, yes, after 13 years in Haiti, diving into diapers!
Photo: Erika Carley
Opening new doors
Now this was not always the case. Admission to the orphanage has been a backsliding number, slowly dropping, like the ball in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
When I first I arrived, we only took kids that were six or older. The thinking was at that age, they might have had a bit of schooling, possessed language skills, and, significantly, no longer wet the bed. We were going through mattresses like crazy!
After a couple of years, we realized that kids that age in Haiti brought other issues. Many were seriously behind in communication. Starting school at age six or seven was a challenge. And worst of all, most of them, by that age, had been sexually abused, a plague that brings so many issues in a crowded, young environment.
Photo: Erika Carley
So we began dropping the number. Five year-olds. Four year-olds. Still, we found abuse. Three years-old became the new entrance point. And we stayed there for some time. The thinking then was similarly simple: they are young enough to have eluded the abuse, but old enough that we don’t need to delve into diapers, bottles, pacifiers, and the attendant staff that kids younger than three require.
Nadie, as regular readers here know, arrived at 6 months and seven pounds, severely malnourished, anemic, and hanging to life by a thread. With love and food and incredible medical care, she has blossomed into our brightest new light, and, having just passed her first birthday, is speaking, engaging, nearly walking (more like running) and developing into an intelligent, curious and well-adjusted child.
“She’s a miracle,” many say.
But she doesn’t have to be.
Nadie being fawned over by other children of Have Faith Haiti
Providing a head start
What Nadie taught us is that early intervention can make all the difference here in Haiti, where infant mortality is unacceptably high, and nearly 50 out of every 1000 babies don’t live past their first birthday.
We were walking around our new property last year, and inside what we call “the white house” is a large room with its own double bathroom and a door that opens to a small yard that is conveniently self-enclosed.
“You know,” someone said, “this could make a great nursery. We could fit around eight beds. The kids could sleep in play in this big room. It’s got lots of closet space. They’d have their own bathroom, two toilets, a shower and bath. And they could go through this door, play outside, and be safe.”
I thought about it. Visions filled my head of little rug rats racing about, the din of happy squealing, the tender sounds of lullabies as they slept in cribs or Pack ‘n Plays. I felt myself smiling.
Then I thought of the nutrition problem we could solve, and the early stimulation we could provide, and the jump start we could give their language and education process if they began with us at age one or younger. And I smiled some more.
As the days passed, my fear of diapers and bottle feedings faded. The fact is, even the kids who come to us at age three so often have been neglected, left to sit in the mud of a tent, the chance at early development evaporated by the poverty of this beleaguered country.
“OK,” I said, “Let’s do it.”
Photo: Erika Carley
Turning miracles into purpose
So we are. We now have seven children three years or younger, including Luxie, MyLove, Pouchaline and Nadie. We have a one-year-old named Marvin who is battling tuberculosis. We have a three-year-old named Bradley who arrived so severely malnourished, he cannot walk or talk.
These children are teaching us. They are teaching us that we can make an even greater impact with the right facility and staff.
Our goal for January in our Year of Thanks & Giving is to fund the building-out of the nursery and the hiring of a program director. Our target is $47,000. The great news is the program is already in operation, we just need a home for it, and the right person at the helm.
This month starts my 14th year in Haiti. If you had told me, when I first arrived here, in the dust of the 2010 earthquake, that I would be welcoming newborns, buying formula, and changing diapers 14 years later, I would have laughed.
Now I laugh, but for different reasons. I laugh because our babies make us laugh, and fill the new year with the remarkable possibilities. Look at these faces and try NOT to smile.
Thank you, as always, for any and all help you can give us.
We put the baby in her car seat. We pulled a pink hood over her head. We shut the doors and drove off to the doctor. It was a short ride, with the windows up and Christmas music on the radio.
When we got to the office, the staff welcomed us with cooing and oohing and “Look how big she’s gotten!” We sat for a few minutes in a waiting room filled with toys. Then they ushered us in for her check-up.
We put baby Nadie on the scale. Fifteen pounds, nine ounces! I let out a shout. In less than six months here, she had more than doubled her weight. After measuring her and consulting his tables, the doctor, Marty Levinson, looked at me and smiled.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but she’s on the chart. She’s in the range now. Her head. Her weight. Her height. If I didn’t know her backstory, I’d think she was simply a smallish, normal one-year-old.”
Never was anyone happier to hear the label “normal.”
Nadie when she first came to usNadie turned 1 this week
Brought to us when she was six months old, and weighing only seven pounds, this little girl, we were told, had eaten nothing but sugar water since birth. She was severely malnourished, and severely anemic. Her eyes were closed by conjunctivitis. She barely moved.
But because we were able to get her to America, where the kindness of doctors, friends, and caregivers was abundant, Nadie opened her eyes. What she saw was a small village of loving adults, all holding out their arms. From that moment forward, her thriving had begun.
It has culminated in a healthy, ebullient, constantly-in-motion child of one, whose curiosity ranges from pulling hangers off racks to sticking pieces of avocado in her mouth. She eats constantly. She spews countless sounds. She pronounces words like “Mama” and “bye bye” and “Amen.” She waves when you wave. She smiles when you smile. She is alert, aware, in the moment, and endlessly happy.
She is also extremely lucky.
Others are not.
Three years behind
Down at the orphanage right now, we have a three-year old boy named Bradley. He was brought to us last month weighing ten pounds. Ten pounds? At three? His spindly legs were not strong enough to support him. His eyes were crossed and he seemed dazed. He did not speak. He barely moved.
His birth mother, a young woman in her early 20s, apparently had two other children before him. Both died. She had no means to support this one, and was sleeping from place to place, with no room to call her own. Eventually, Bradley was brought to our gates.
Bradley
He is not as lucky as Nadie. We scramble to find him formula that is good for him in his condition. There are no doctors easily available. No waiting rooms with toys. No good news reports. Bradley struggles each day, as we employ a full-time nanny to watch over him, change his diapers, try to get him to use his legs.
We would like to get him to America, as we did with Nadie, but opportunities like that are limited, the process can be long and the U.S. embassy is on an emergency-only basis now.
Meanwhile we pray he improves.
How much, we don’t know.
In addition to Bradley, we have one-year-old Marvin, who came to us with tuberculosis. Marvin is weak and glassy eyed. He has been isolated in a room at our old mission for four months now, due to the highly contagious nature of TB. We took him for tests, got bounced from one hospital to another, and were told the medicine he needed was in a clinic located in the heart of gang activity, which was impossible to reach.
It took weeks until we were able to navigate our way there and get the pills. Now months later, we are told in order to get his phlegm tested to prove he is no longer contagious to others, we must take him to a specific place that is, once again, in the heart of the gang violence and civil unrest. Nobody is willing to drive there.
So Marvin waits, in isolation.
Marvin
In need of safe passage
I wrote recently about the need for a “safety vehicle”, one that is armored against bullets, with a trained driver who knows how to evade trouble. It is not only critical for our daily operations, it is directly the difference between kids like Marvin and Bradley getting the care and attention they need – or not.
Nadie had the blessing of safe passage. A safe passage to the orphanage. Safe passage to America. Safe passage to the doctors who helped heal her.
Safe passage happens in loving arms and in safe cars
Safe passage is what we seek for all our children – especially the youngest and most helpless.
We have taken a new turn at the orphanage. With the space afforded by the move to the new property, we have decided to create a program specifically for infants under three years of age. In the past, we avoided kids that young, due to the potential burden of diapers, feeding, inability to express their issues, and the need for one-on-one care. We simply were not equipped.
But we now realize — thanks in part to Nadie’s incredible improvement — that if we take children as young as her, we actually give them the best chance of developing their learning, attention, affection and social skills at the most impressionable age. In short, their chances at their best lives improve the earlier in life they get to us.
The baby brigade
So if you came to visit us these days, you’d do a lot of baby squeezing, from Nadie and Marvin to Mylove, Luxie, Dada and others. We’re getting younger by the day, but bouncier, too, with more squeals and pacifiers and baby steps.
It’s a major turn to go from abject poverty, starvation, and lack of attention to a food-filled, needs-met, loving environment. But the changes are a sight to behold. Like the moment the doctor tells you the little girl is all right, she’s “normal,” she’s made it through the storm,
Safe passage. That’s all we wish for our new baby brigade. And what we wish for all of you as we careen towards the holidays and another new year.
A Year of Thanks & Giving Project 2: A Safety Car
StatusLuxury Safety
The road to an armored car can take many forms:
If we can raise enough to purchase a used armored vehicle, we’ll then manage import to Haiti and customs duties.
A gently used, not flashy vehicle — such as a minivan, or older model SUV — may be donated. If the vehicle fits strict parameters, we will use funds to upgrade to armored protection (cost to do so varies widely, but average estimate is $50,000 – $60,000). Let us know here if you think you have something that works here in this form.
A donated armored vehicle is ideal — spread the word to any organizations or companies that have access and can help.
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.
