Struggle. We use that word all the time when talking about Haiti. The struggle to get water. The struggle to find work. The struggle to survive.
With the current gridlock of gangs, protests and government indifference, our orphanage, like the rest of the country, has to struggle for fuel, because the gangs are blockading it. We struggle for water, because the trucks can’t deliver it. We struggle with our school, which remains closed because teachers cannot navigate the dangerous streets.
Haiti today, for those living there or trying to operate there, is an impossible tug of war between desire and denial.
Last weekend, in search of something more positive, I got to witness a different tug of war.
J.J., Samanza, a new school friend, Esterline, a visiting Knox, and Kiki at Hope College
I went to visit our four newest college students, Kiki, J.J., Samanza and Esterline, who graduated from our school last June and are deep into their first semester at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. I chose last weekend to come up because Kiki told me that he’d signed up for “The Pull” and wanted me to watch.
“What is the Pull?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure. But they asked me to come out for it, so I did.”
The Pull it turns out, is a huge annual tradition at Hope — and one of the oldest college traditions in the country — going back 125 years. Essentially, first year students compete against second year students by yanking on a rope.
But this is not your Grandad’s Tug of War.
In the trenches
I arrived on the hot Saturday afternoon, and met up with J.J., Esterline and Samanza.
“So where is this Pull?” I asked.
“Over there,” J.J. said.
We walked to a grassy area on 11th street. From afar, I could see crowds of spectators already on site. To be honest, I expected two groups of college kids in shorts and t-shirts, standing on opposite side of a rope, goofing around until someone yelled “Go!”
What I witnessed instead was a military grade operation. There, on a stretch of turf at least half a football-field long, were two teams, in full uniform, separated by tarp curtains and a long lonely stretch of rope in the middle. Each team had 18 participants. And they weren’t lined up one behind the other. No, sir. These kids were in trenches!
Trenches?
Yes. Perfectly dug, with plywood wedged on the front wall. Each participant was positioned in his or her trench, and wrapped with padding and duct tape on one side, to protect, I suppose, against rope burn and injury.
Crouched alongside each puller was a “moraler,” someone to yell encouragement, wipe sweat, and guide a water bottle into mouths.
Just after 3 o’clock, both sides looked to a signaler and….
Bang! Off they went! Pull! Pull!
Kiki was in the third trench from the front. He had a red shirt that read Lion, a nod to his team nickname “Lionheart.” I thought back to when he first came to our orphanage, with his younger brother, so poor he didn’t even have underwear.They had no idea how appropriate “Lionheart” was.
Battle tension
The Pull went on for hours. Crowds of students, friends and families cheered and whooped and hollered. There is no shortage of school sprit at Hope College. Every time the team did a coordinated yank — gaining maybe a fraction of an inch of rope — the supporters roared.
Poor Kiki — like the others — was trapped in that yanking position all that time. When I looked at his face, it was taut, exhausted, sweaty. He grimaced in pain. But he never gave up. Other participants were taken out when they fainted from the heat.
Not Kiki. He held that rope all afternoon long, his back burning, his muscles twitching, with no idea if he was winning or losing.
Kiki holds on.
Maybe it’s the writer in me. Maybe Haiti is just forever on my mind. But I could not watch Kiki, trapped in that hole, gaining less than an inch for every growling effort, and not think of how much this reflected daily life in Haiti and at the orphanage.
Every little thing is a struggle. Every hour of electricity is like gaining an inch on the rope. Every road closure or gang threat is like losing the same. Everyone feels stuck in a hole, pulling for their survival, with no idea what the final result will be.
“The Pull.” It could be the caption under endless Haitian photographs.
Sometime after 6 o’clock, the competition ended. And stunningly, the first-year students had won. That doesn’t happen often. Kiki celebrated with his new college friends, and told me “I’m really tired” when he got home.
I’m glad his team tasted victory. I’m glad he got to feel that all that pulling on a rope was, in the end, rewarded.
I only hope we can say the same, that everyone in Haiti can say the same when the current crisis is over. Right now it just feels like a dark trench, an endless effort, and a really long rope.
Kiki, Knox, Esterline, J.J. and Samanza in and around the “The Joy of Music” bronze statues by artist George Lundeen. Aplenrose Park, Holland, Michigan.
This is a tale of two cities – and two babies. And, as in the famous Dickens book, it depicts the best of times and the worst of times.
The worst of times seems to always be right now in Haiti. And right now the streets are emptied by fear. Gangs control the traffic, the economy, even the flow of critical goods like fuel.
With disillusion aimed at the current minimal (and totally ineffective) government, the populace has revolted. They protest, knock down telephone poles, burn tires, throw rocks. Life comes to a standstill. People can’t work. Can’t travel. Can’t go to school.
But children are always born, and children must be cared for. An orphanage like ours lacks the ability to shut down, close shop, tell everyone “we will contact you when things get better.”
The same goes for two very young children who have come into our care. The first is an infant named Nadie, whom I have written about before. The second is a one-year-old boy named Marvens, who was brought to us just recently, about a month after Nadie arrived.
Both of them are battling against physical challenges directly related to the poverty in Haiti.
One is luckier than the other.
The spring of hope
The lucky one, Nadie, didn’t start out so lucky. Nadie was brought to us at six months of age barely weighing seven pounds. “She has had nothing to eat but sugar water,” the mother told us, explaining she was not capable of breast feeding due to a chest injury.
Alarmed and shocked at the sight of this emaciated child, we quickly took her to the hospital, where it was confirmed that she was severely malnourished, anemic, and suffering from conjunctivitis. Her life hung in the balance.
Nadie when she first arrived, left; As her health began to improve, right
But thanks to quick help from the U.S. embassy, we were able to get her a passport to come to the U.S. to get healthy. Since her arrival, the word “thrive” is too small for Nadie. She has gained weight rapidly, currently at 13 pounds, twice was she weighed when she arrived just two months ago. The anemia is gone. The conjunctivitis is gone. Her blood test numbers have been fantastic.
She has been seen, thanks to the kindness of physicians in Michigan, by a neurologist, an ENT specialist, two childhood development experts, and a pediatrician who dotes on her care and has arranged vaccines and tests of all different kinds.
Nadie, before and after
Thanks to our friends, family and staff, Nadie never goes a minute without attention. She is the bright light of the household, and has gone from an inert infant to bouncing, flipping, sitting on her own and holding her own bottle. She is flush with clean clothes, warmed bottles, a pack and play, and lots of shaky, rattling toys to stimulate her attention.
She will remain here, in the soothing nest of growth, for a few more months.
Now let’s consider Marvens. He is from Croix-des-Bouquets, one of the most violent, gang infested areas in all of Haiti. Already, at one year of age, Marvens has paid the price for his geography. His father was shot and killed by a stray bullet while lying in bed.
Soon Marvens and his mother were homeless. She had no food or water. She wandered the streets with the baby and her older daughter, Pouchaline, who is 3.
When she came to us, we could tell Marvens was not well. He was fairly limp in her arms. He coughed. The pants he had been wearing slipped off his tiny waist. He had no underwear.
With the streets already nearly impassable, we somehow managed to get the two of them to a nearby hospital. They admitted Marvens immediately and kept him overnight.
The next day we were given the news: he has tuberculosis.
Now we are blessed to rarely hear those words in America. Modern medicine and vaccines have diminished TB down to around two cases for every 100,000 people. But in Haiti, it remains a real threat. And Marvens, it turns out, never got a TB vaccine.
Marvens when we first arrived
“So when do they start treating him?” I asked Yonel. “And how much will it cost us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They said they can’t treat him there, we have to take him to another hospital to get the medicine.”
“What? The hospital doesn’t have TB medicine?”
“No. Only the other one.”
As crazy as that sounds, what followed is worse. Because of the protests and gang violence, it quickly became impossible to get to the other hospital. Marvens and his mother remained cooped up in a room, with no treatment for his disease.
Then, days later, we received a call from the first hospital saying we needed to come and get Marvens and his mother, because they were closing down due to the violence.
“They say none of the staff can get there,” Yonel relayed. “We have to pick the baby up.”
“And what are we supposed to do with a baby with tuberculosis at an orphanage? It’s hugely contagious.”
“They don’t care. They just want us to pick him up.”
Had Marvens been in America, we could have this addressed promptly. Instead, he stayed in a hot, airless room in that hospital, crammed in with many others, for more than a week before we could get him. We eventually were able to bring his mother and him to our old property and put them in an isolated room. We needed to buy food, water, clothes just to sustain them minimally.
And still it took days and days before the hospital with the medicine for TB was actually open.
Marvens, at the old property
Little Marvens is taking that medicine now, and we are praying for a recovery. But we can’t get him to any doctors to find out. And of course he and his mother remain isolated from the population.
As for bringing Marvens to the US for treatment? Forget that. Once a baby has been exposed to tuberculosis, the immigration laws make it nearly impossible. Even if we could get the paperwork.
I look at little Marvens’ situation, and I look at Nadie’s, and I wonder, how can this be? Simply by dint of geography, two babies from the same country must battle different poverty outcomes with such different success.
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. And so much of it depends on where you are. It doesn’t seem fair.
“You know our kids.” He smiled. “They’re just smart. They’ve been watching us. They’ve seen us going into those buildings. They’re expecting something.”
I thought for a moment.
“We’ve come this far,” I whispered, conspiratorially. “We’re not blowing the surprise now.”
It had been a miraculous day, the day we took our 53 children from their old orphanage to see their new orphanage. Only they didn’t know it was their new orphanage. That was the surprise. We had a “reveal” planned for the end of the festivities, every step carefully planned, even a volunteer cameraman to film it all.
I was determined to make it every bit the astonishment we had crafted.
Poolside fun
We’d started the adventure mid-morning, getting all the kids dressed in bathing suits and packing every last soccer ball and inflatable toy we could find.
We hired two large buses, plus several police cars, to guide us through the streets. The spirit on the buses was infectious. It had been nearly a year since our children had been outside our third-of-an-acre facility. That was the day we’d taken our annual beach trip.
Since then, the streets had devolved into combat zones. Transportation anywhere was a dicey proposition. The delays caused by the chaos, protests, kidnappings and supply chain interruption had pushed our proposed move-in date from January to February to March to beyond.
We had to accept that certain things would not be ready in time for move-in. But the decaying security around our old place made the move to the new place a necessity.
So we drove the kids 20 minutes up the winding hills of Port-au-Prince, down a narrow street (I thought for sure the bus would get stuck) and finally through the gates of the new property.
I studied their eyes as we entered. Suddenly, there were trees, endless trees, and a big hill (our current place is totally flat) and paths and a short road and a couple of three story buildings and yes, a swimming pool.
That brought out the squeals.
So did the sight of so many of our old friends, former directors, volunteers, teachers. Nancy Giles from CBS Sunday Morning came down. So did Jim and Jane McElya, who donated the funds for our school. Verena and Jean Marc DeMatteis, the couple who sold us the new property, arranged for the bounce houses, the shaved ice machine, the popcorn, and the pizza.
Clockwise from top left: Janine and Cara Nesser; Mr. Delva and Nancy Giles; Jim and Jane McElya, Mitch, Cara, Janine; Mitch, Jean Marc DeMatteis, Janine, Verena DeMatteis
The kids chowed, swam, chowed some more, bounced a million times. It was loud and hectic. But there’s something to be said for the cacophony of 50 happy children. Make a joyful noise, the Psalm says.
Following the script
Finally, it was time for the revelation. The “building” Yonel referred to was to be the kids’ new dormitory, and our amazing staff had been at work for days assembling bunk beds, lining up mattresses, putting on sheets and pillowcases, and marking each new bed with a child’s name.
The plan was to take the kids into the building on the premise that we were just going to “look around.” And then they would see their beds and their names and the balloons and, well, we’d break the news.
But now the kids were suspicious. They looked around, whispering, as if trying to guess the surprise.
I turned to Yonel. “Follow my lead.”
He nodded OK.
“OK EVERYBODY, WE GOTTA GO. IT’S GOING TO RAIN. WE NEED TO GET ON THE BUSES RIGHT NOW! LET’S GO!”
The drew confused looks. We’re going? There’s nothing else?
“COME ON! HURRY UP!”
The young kids began running to the buses. The older ones dragged, fighting their disappointment.
I pull Yonel in close. “Just before they board, come up to me and whisper something as if you’re mad.”
And that’s what happened.
An instant before the kids got into the buses, their heads down, Yonel said, “Mr. Mitch! Wait!” He mumbled something in my ear. I slapped the side of my head.
“You’re kidding,” I said loudly. I turned to the kids. “We have to go back. Someone made a mess in that building there and we have to clean it up before we go! Hurry, before it starts raining!”
A new home
What followed was ten minutes of absolute joy, astonishment, confusion, and high-pitched noises. The girls went in first. We told them to go upstairs, and before we got the word “stairs” out, they were running. They reached the third floor and burst through the doors.
There, inside, were clean tile floors, freshly painted walls, and brand-new bunk beds with balloons attached and name tags on each one. The kids screamed as they found their places.
“Who is this for?” they asked.
“YOU!” they were told. “We’re going to live here!”
A loud cheer echoed off the walls.
Downstairs, the boys were barreling through their own new bedrooms, bouncing on the beds, staring at their names, slack-jawed.
“We’re going to live here!” they were told.
“Tonight?” one of them asked.
It went on like that for a while, shrieking, laughing, running up and down the stairs, the kids showing each other their new digs, while the adults looked on, beaming.
There are moments you plan for, and moments you hope for. Sometimes, once in a great while, you get moments when those two things come together in harmony.
Three years of planning, drawing, worrying, looking for money, praying, hoping, enduring setbacks and wondering if this dream was reasonable, rational or even possible, three years all leading to one cloudy afternoon where you get to tell the children you love: “Life can be better. And life is going to be better.”
And it will be. No matter what we have to endure, change, adjust or fundraise, it will be. One look at those kids faces makes it a certainty.
A new home.
Are there any three words more comforting than those?
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Doctors read about doctors. Musicians read about musicians. Journalists read about other journalists.
I usually use this space to tell you stories from our orphanage, from Haiti, from amazing children who overcome the odds to thrive and grow and love and learn.
But as a journalist, when I read about two Haitian reporters who tried to do their job, to tell the story of afflicted people, and instead were murdered and set on fire in the streets, I need to pause the normal storytelling and relay to you the true, constant and unnerving sensation of being in Haiti these days:
Fear.
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI – SEPTEMBER 13: Demonstrators set fire during a protest against the rising gasoline prices. (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Haiti is descending into a hellish place for its citizens. The crumbling of the government, the assassination of the previous president, and the total paralysis of the current leader, Ariel Henry, has allowed gangs to swallow up chunks of this country. Some estimates have them controlling nearly three quarters of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, where our orphanage — and nearly half the country’s population — is located.
Haitian citizens calculate danger by simpler metrics: is the street clear? Are the stores open? Is it possible to go to the market? The bank? The hospital?
Increasingly, the answer is no. Our orphanage is part of a security group that updates hourly on the situation in the streets. The reports are stunning. This street closed by violence. That street closed by gunfire. Burning tires everywhere. Human blockades. People throwing rocks. People being shot at, even killed.
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI – SEPTEMBER 07: Demonstrators from different cities, holding banners and placards, gather to protest with demanding the removal of Prime Minister Ariel Henry as he mishandled the various socio-economic crises the country is currently going through. Demonstrators also blame banks and embassies for the misery of the Haitian people. (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The citizens have had it. They are in the streets now, protesting, screaming, rallying, but to whom? Who is listening? The gangs work both sides, they are hired by political leaders to squash resistance, even as they create resistance to the political leaders’ control.
The police are overwhelmed. They surge to show the gangs their presence, and are driven back in storms of gunfire. They are killed. They are intimidated. They are demoralized. Sometimes they join the other side.
The result is a dizzying chaos which leaves you unsure of who is who, what is what, which side is being protected and which is being attacked. You are frozen in place, unable to live even the basics of what most people on this planet would call a normal human life.
Fear does that.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI – SEPTEMBER 14: Protesters continue demonstration on the second day of general mobilization as they barricade all major roads and protest rising gas prices and demand the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The high cost of feeling secure
When we ask for help with our orphanage these days, it is increasingly for protection. Money for security guards. Money to build higher walls and taller gates with barbed wire. Money for armored vehicles. Travel around the streets of Port-au-Prince has become a roulette wheel, you pray you don’t encounter a sudden angry mob, or a blockade that locks you in place, or kidnappers who box you in and descend on your vehicle. After food and water, bulletproof cars may be the highest demand item in Haiti.
[A quick view of the security booth at our first campus]
Try and imagine a world where sending your kids off to school in the morning is a calculated risk. Where a trip to the bank has to be done with the stealth of a secret agent. Where merely trying to cover a story, to talk to the poor people who are suffering under this terror, gets you shot, killed and burned to a crisp, which is what happened to Tayson Latigue and Frantsen Charles, who were part of a group of seven journalists who this week went into Cité Soleil, a gang-controlled slum area. They were just trying to chronicle the living hell that neighborhood has become. They reportedly came under attack from warring gangs. Five of the journalists escaped. Latigue and Charles were not as fortunate.
When you cannot even relay the news of violence, then violence has won. Imagine the chilling effect this will have on any other journalists who simply want to tell the world what is going on.
Fear does that, too.
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI – SEPTEMBER 13: Clashes erupt in a protest against the rising gasoline prices. (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Stability comes in many forms, still out of reach
I am often shaken when I visit the poor villages in the Haitian provinces, where many of our children come from. I constantly see things that, as a journalist, I feel the world should know about. The subhuman conditions. The lack of medical care. The challenges of finding basic staples of human survival. I write a small fraction of what I actually witness. The rest goes unreported.
And this is the looming danger in Haiti now. As bad as the stories you read may be, they don’t begin to truly tell the tale. The level of suffering is immeasurable. And there are increasingly few people there — or willing to go there — to tell it.
We have a child right now, a one year-old boy, who, in the process of taking him in, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His father had been shot to death by a gang member. His mother could not get him vaccinated.
PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI – SEPTEMBER 13: A man removes a tire for an ambulance as people protest against the rising gasoline prices. (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The hospital where we took him just called to tell us they are clearing out, because doctors and nurses cannot get to work due to the violent streets, Therefore, we should come and pick up the child immediately. When we asked “What are we to do with a child with tuberculosis at an orphanage?” we get no answer. It’s not their problem. It can’t be their problem. They are trying to survive like everyone else.
Take that one incident and multiply it a hundred thousand times, and you start to understand all the stories that are NOT being written in Haiti. And thanks to the murder of those two brave reporters, those stories have an even less likely chance of reaching the world. The expression in our business is democracy dies in darkness. I pray that humanity does not dies there as well.
Otherwise, fear will have won for good.
Top image: Port-au-Prince, Haiti – September 7, 2022. (Photo by Georges Harry Rouzier/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The day had been chosen. The buses had been ordered. We’d rid our sheets of bed bugs and packed them away in plastic containers.
Most of the details for our big move from the old orphanage to the new one had been addressed. But there remained one critical element.
What do we tell the kids?
Our children love surprises. And this was to be the biggest surprise of all – a new place to live. We decided on a cover story, one that would raise the excitement level without revealing the secret:
A pool party.
It was perfect. Our kids love to swim, but rarely get to do so. The last time we hit the water was a year ago, when we took a bus trip to the beach. It was a glorious day. We drove home happy and exhausted. That night, in the wee hours, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated.
We hadn’t gone out since.
It wasn’t safe. It still isn’t. The roads are wildly dangerous, filled with demonstrations, confrontations, rock throwing and kidnappings. Even the 20-minute ride from the old place to the new one is fraught with risk. We need to arrange security, trusted drivers, police escorts.
But the payoff? A day the kids would always remember? Who could resist? We’d sat around concocting the scenario. Here is what we came up with.
Planning a surprise
We would take the kids to the new property and let them swim in the pool, telling them this was a school grounds that we’d rented for the day. They could run around the new yard. They could play soccer, dance, lie in the grass. Then, at the end of the day, just before boarding the busses, we would somehow get them into the dormitory building where they would discover dozens of beds – each of which had one child’s name on it.
We loved this plan. Everyone we shared it with got goose bumps. We decided to invite down former volunteers who had been a big part of our story and who would surprise the kids upon arrival. We wanted them to share in the moment, too.
So we had the cast. We had the story. All we needed was the property to be ready.
Except….
As the day got closer, the workload seemed to increase. Tractors and bulldozers were running constantly, even through the night, but the task of finishing the yard in time for the event – given all the difficulties with transportation, security, etc – suddenly wasn’t possible.
We couldn’t change the date, not with all the invited guests, the busses, etc.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Verena, who was spearheading the construction effort. “We have all these mounds of dirt right where the kids were supposed to play.”
“I have an idea,” she said.
To her credit, she quickly organized a giant inflatable bounce house, a giant slide, a shaved ice machine and a cotton candy operator. All this arrived the day before the planned event, and people worked feverishly to get it all ready.
Bounce houses
Party people
The result was perfect camouflage. The swimming pool was decorated with balloons, there were tables for pizza, cake, drinks. And the “wall” of bounces houses and concessions helped hide the construction project on the other side.
The cast of former staffers and personal VIPS included Gina, Patty, Jeremiah and Jennifer, all of whom had served as American directors at different times, Bob and Amy, our extraordinary volunteers from Canada, Mark Mendelsohn, our CFO, Dennis Tini, our brilliant music director, and Jim and Jane McElya, who’d donated funds to create our school. They and others lined the path where the busses would arrive.
Mr. Bob clowns around as we pull in
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the children emerged from their rooms with their bathing suits under their clothes. They were pulsing with anticipation. Our kids are really good at picking up on different vibes, and I got the feeling they knew something special was happening, they just weren’t sure what.
We pulled two busses up to our gate, and the kids stuffed inside. On the way, I hollered, “Where are we going?” and they yelled “Pool party!” But I was thinking to myself, it’s a lot bigger than that.
We entered the gates of our new property. The bus tucked along a cobblestone path, roofed by thick trees and overgrowth. The kids stared out the windows, almost reverent in their silence.
When we reached the area near the pool, one of the kids yelled out “There’s Miss Gina!” Then “There’s Mr. Bob!” Then the doors swung open and the day was off and running.
The pool party in full swing
As I watched the kids fill every inch of the pool, surrounded by balloons, inflatable houses, pizza, and more unencumbered fun than they’d had in a year, I felt a strange sensation, like exhaling and inhaling at the same time.
I looked up towards the school building, still a secret, and the dormitory where their beds had been constructed by our volunteers – also still a secret – and I said to myself, “This is it. Once we tell them, there’s no turning back.”
A view of the pool and yard just days before the festivities
It’s a feeling I’ve had many times here in Haiti. No turning back. We sense it whenever we commit to a new child, whenever we hear some bad medical news, whenever we encounter a problem in the streets, or distressing political news, or the climate of danger and violence that would normally be reason to leave.
No turning back. This is who we are, what we’ve chosen, and where we live.
Or, should I say, where we are about to live.
All we had to do was let the kids in on the secret…
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.
