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.
The most frightening thing I ever experienced in Haiti took place in a vehicle. We were coming back from the airport, heading to the orphanage, and turned onto a street that intersected with a mob of angry protesters. They spotted our car and, for no apparent reason, charged it, throwing rocks and bricks. One rock hit the hood of the car and ricocheted up into the windshield. I was sitting in the front passenger side. Had that rock hit two inches higher, it would have shattered the glass into my face.
We escaped that incident, despite the protesters jumping on our car and banging on the windows, thanks to the quick thinking of our director, who was driving the vehicle. He popped out, hands up, and started shouting who we were, that we ran an orphanage, that they had no beef with us.
We finally drove away — with half a dozen protesters riding on the roof and sides — shaken and scared. But not surprised. You can’t be surprised at anything that happens in the streets of Port-au-Prince these days. Fires. Kidnappings. Shootings. You have to expect the worst.
Over the past year, we have been paying expensive fees to hire an armored car service to take our kids to the hospital, or our director to shop for food, or our volunteers to the airport. It costs around $200 per ride. That’s crazy expensive for an orphanage. But we keep asking ourselves “What choice do we have?”
With your help, we may have one.
The new kitchen should be completed before February 2023!
Thank you for the food security
Before I speak about our December goal in this Year of Thanks & Giving campaign, I want to thank you all so much for racing to the rescue on our November target. Our goal was to build a new kitchen at our new location, so that our children could continue to eat healthy meals. We put out the number we needed, and you got us there.
Thanks to your generosity, we hope to have that new kitchen completed by the end of January, a place where we can feed 100 people per meal, teach our kids about cooking, and safely store nutritious food to feed our children, in a nation where half the population can’t meet minimum daily calorie requirements. You have made a small miracle in record time.
Who stole the kòde from the kòde jar?
One goal down, next one up.
We’ve dealt with nutrition.
Now we must deal with safety.
We need to purchase a Safety Car. What that means is an armored vehicle that is impervious to gunshots. That may sound like something out of a “Mission: Impossible” movie, but I can assure you, such vehicles have become essential in Haiti. Foreign officials will not travel without one. Government workers. Businessmen. Well-to-do families.
What about children? What about orphanage directors who need to shop for food? What about nurses who need to take sick children for medical care?
We recently hired an armored car to take a child with tuberculosis to the hospital, only to find out that half the staff was not there because the streets were too dangerous for them to come into work.
A Safety Car is essentially an older vehicle — we do not need a new one — that has been fortified with bulletproof panels, windows and tires. The typical kidnapping methodology in Port-au-Prince is to surround an unsuspecting car with motorcycles, have the bandits jump off and wave guns, and force the passengers out of the car.
If you’re afraid of the bullets, you must acquiesce. If the bullets can’t hurt you, you drive away. I hate to be that blunt, but this is how it is. Nobody asked for the streets to devolve into a war zone. But we simply cannot function behind our gates all day. We need to get places. Our children need to get places. We need supplies, medicine, food.
A Safety Car can get us there.
It is difficult to describe the relief a strong gate like this can bring
Mission: Possible?
The cost of a vehicle like this — usually an old model SUV or minivan — is around $55,000. We are seeking to raise that money in the month of December, as well as $10,000 for a driver trained in evasive tactics, usually a former police officer.
I know it feels weird to be asking this in December. December should be about toy drives, stocking stuffers, something holiday-ish to bring out the spirit of the season.
But there are no holidays without security. We feel safe behind the gates of our new home, but not outside them. And we must go outside them.
Here is the reality: in the first six months of this year, nearly 680 people were kidnapped in Haiti and nearly 1,000 killed. This year alone, over 100,000 Haitians in Port-au-Prince have had to flee their homes due to gang violence.
Orphanages are not immune. Most of you recall the bus full of volunteers and kids from a Haitian orphanage that was commandeered by a gang, and all the passengers kidnapped and held for months.
We never want anything like that to happen to our precious children. So, weird as it may sound in December, all we want for Christmas is to be safe. A Safety Car and driver will help. It will let us function. And being able to function — to transport our sick children, to keep our teachers from harm, to protect the volunteers who travel all this way to help us — well, that would be the best gift of all.
Thank you for anything you can do to help us. And treat every safe minute you enjoy in America as a blessing. Because it is.
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.
