It consumes so much of our lives, you’d think it’s the one thing we all can relate to.
But here at the orphanage, what constitutes work is a different animal than what we often witness back home. It’s not zoom meetings in shorts and T-shirts, telecommuting, high finance, or fretting over a screenplay. The orphanage requires a unique level – and quantity – of commitment.
So, with Labor Day nearly upon us, and our big move to the new facility nearly here, I wanted to spend this week’s chapter focusing on the work it takes to run an orphanage every day for nearly 60 children. The behind-the-kids faces. And the intensity of labor that our Haitian staff – and so many Haitians around the country – put in on a daily basis, at salaries for which Americans would not even get out of bed. (Haitian workers minimum wage is less than five dollars a day.)
Ms. Nerlande / Ms. Jarline / Mr. Ademar
Let’s start with what it takes to keep the orphanage operating. We have two men, Adima and Petit Papa (translates to Little Daddy) who are our “go-to” operations men.
What does this mean? Well. They do everything: unloading the water truck, checking the pipes, finding brooms, carrying storage boxes, stocking the cleaning supplies, fueling the generators. Their list of tasks is as endless as their days, which start early and end late.
Mr. Elira / Mr. Sonson / Mr. James
We also have a trio of groundskeepers, who maintain the earth and the trees and sweep the grounds constantly with brooms whose scattered bristles are held together by rope. They will climb trees to machete branches, clear fallen leaves to make paths, chop rocks and boulders that are dangerous to our kids, and wheelbarrow trash whenever it builds up.
Our cleaning staff consists of four women over seven days, who keep classrooms, bedrooms, staff rooms and bathrooms spotless. They broom. They mop. They wash, wipe, dry, and do it all over again. With dozens of children constantly racing across the floors, often with rainwater and mud on their shoes and feet, you can imagine.
Mr. Rodrigue / Mr. Leon / Ms. Rachel
If that seems like a pretty good support staff, well, we ‘re just getting started. How about the food? That is overseen by our kitchen crew, led by our proud and accomplished cook, “Chef” Harry, who used to prepare meals for hundreds of government workers at a time and now delights in feeding dozens of children. He is busy from morning until night, overseeing the produce, the fruits, the rice and beans, cooking constantly in a tiny kitchen over three propane burners, and making due with whatever he has. We have seen Chef Harry stretch corn flakes and peanut butter into Biblical portions.
And when the food comes out, the kids are guided to their seats by our staff of nannies, which currently number 14. These women work day shifts and night shifts. They sleep with the kids, rise with the kids, dress the kids, take the little ones to the bathroom, change diapers, supervise games, soothe the criers, scold the teasers, teach songs, prayers, games, lessons. They are the eyes and ears, the gentle caress and the wagging finger. In the absence of mothers, they are the love, warmth and supervision that all children crave.
Ms. Sarah / Ms. Ziana / Ms. Néphtalie
But the labor force doesn’t end there. We have two nurses, Ms. LaRose and Ms. Nydie, who rotate and regularly administer vitamins, medications and medical guidance.
We have a driver, Anthony, who braves the traffic and the streets – an increasingly dangerous task these days in Haiti – to pick up supplies, shop for food and deliver guests.
We have a supervisor, Mr. Sonson, who oversees various staff, files reports, keeps charts and is generally is the eyes and ears of the facility.
Ms. Cathy / Ms. Magalie, Chef Harry
And we’re not even counting our teachers, administrators or volunteers.
Every one of these folks is part of our family. The kids know them, joke with them, play with them, hug them. Many of them lived with us during Covid, locked-down inside the orphanage for nearly two years. They only got to see their own families occasionally and had to isolate afterwards.
They did it because they believe in our kids. They did it because they believe in our orphanage. But largely they did it because these are their jobs, and they take their work seriously, approach it seriously, and attack it despite the hardships.
Mr. Anthony / Ms. Elanèse / Ms. Rachel
Most of the indefatigable folks have to walk long distances or take tap-taps or motorcycles just to get to our place. None of them drive their own car. The extreme heat, the torrential rainstorms and the endless dangers of the streets are all things they have to confront every work day just to reach our front door. They do it tirelessly, and without complaint.
I’ve learned an incredible amount about Haitian children during these 12 years at the orphanage. But I’ve learned a lot about Haitian workers, too. I’ll be spending the American Labor Day with them at the orphanage this year. Which means all day long, I’ll be watching them work. As always, they command my admiration and appreciation.
Moving to a new home. Is there anything more exciting — or more nerve wracking? Does any human shift bring about more sleepless nights, more anticipation, more self-examination, or more back pain?
Our orphanage is in physical upheaval. We are moving to a new property, 20 minutes and a world away from where we have always been.
Meanwhile, our oldest kids, last week, moved into their new home at an American college, some 1,854 miles and a universe away from where they grew up.
I remember, as a kid, a night where my parents, siblings and even my grandmother all left the house, while I, stuck with a cold, had to remain there. The sentence that echoed in my head as the door closed behind them was this: “Where’s everybody going?”
I felt that sensation last week when we began emptying a big black van and carrying boxes, blankets, towels, sheets, trash cans, toiletries and notebooks into a dormitory at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Samanza and Esterline at the door to their new dorm room
It was a hot August morning, and the campus fairly burst with sunlit colors. The green lawns. The white pavements. The purple and red flowers. The reddish brick of the academic and residential buildings.
And here came our kids, their arms full, J.J., Kiki, Samanza, and Esterline — two boys, two girls — all of whom had been at our orphanage at least 11 years. Someone opened the door to the dorms and they entered quickly. I lagged behind, watching them disappear up a stairwell.
Where’s everybody going?
A place to learn
I remember the first time we brought any of our kids to college. It was four years ago, and we moved Emmanuel and Siem into a dorm room at Madonna University. Emmanuel looked around and saw a desk. Tears came to his eyes.
“This desk is for me?” he asked. When we said yes, of course, why was that so emotional, he said, “All my life, I wanted my own desk.”
It reminded me of how much further this journey is than just the physical miles it takes to get here. Emmanuel and Siem, Edney and Jhonas last year, and now our four new arrivals at Hope College weren’t just dealing with a new place to plug in their computers.
They were dealing with having a computer in the first place. Having a phone. Being in a bed that isn’t surrounded by nine others. Sleeping without the cacophony of little children at night and waking up without nannies and teachers accompanying them to a massive group breakfast.
[VIDEO: Conquering the first of many collegiate challenges]
They were dealing with a country that never even heard of the language they speak, and a bombardment of new influences from television to professors to TikTok. New friends. New food. Completely new environment, where it gets cold and actually snows. All this while being expected to excel in classes.
Thanks to numerous shopping stops — and the kindness of friends Stan and Tanya Brooks, who underwrote and organized an excursion through Bed, Bath and Beyond — the four kids had more possessions now that the sum of all they’d ever owned at the orphanage.
But as they began to unload things in their rooms, one thing caught their eye. It was something Janine and I had made up for them: a large photo of all the orphanage kids and staff assembled together under a tree, smiling.
J.J. and Kiki placed it on the wall with two-sided tape, the first piece of decorating they had even done in their lives. JJ smiled.
“That’s our family,” he said.
Kiki and J.J. point to a picture of their family
A place to sleep
Meanwhile, back in Haiti, that family needed to get out of the third-of-an-acre facility that had been home forever and off to the new property, which was, above all things, in a safer neighborhood. Haiti’s streets have grown unimaginably dangerous. Shootings. Fires. Kidnappings. There is a sense of urgency now to get someplace and lock down hard.
But while our kids still didn’t know about the move (the big “reveal” party was in full planning mode) there were two issues that needed immediate attention before they could be transported.
One involved bed bugs, which we discovered in two of the dorm rooms. Bed bugs in Haiti is a little like snow in Alaska. Pretty hard to avoid. But once they have infested a room, they are damn hard to get rid of. They find their way into sheets, clothing, books.
And so a process began, led by Mr. Bob and Ms. Amy, our Canadian volunteers, to boll every single piece of clothing in scalding hot water (that kills the bugs) then quickly dry it and pack it away in sealed containers to take to the new place.
The great boiling
Meanwhile all our books were taken outside and opened in the sunshine, left there all day, then also packed away tightly.
The plan was to work our way down to the final night, when the kids would leave behind whatever they were wearing, along with their beds and sheets. Everything had to be new in the new place. That was the only way to insure we weren’t moving the bed bugs with us.
Packing it all away
A place to play
But before we could do that, a sudden issue arose at the new place. There was a lovely building to serve as our school. And another to serve as the dormitory. But because there were tenants still occupying half of the property, there was no real yard in which the kids could run around. No place for them to release their energy, to play the games like soccer, street hockey, or makeshift tennis that they had grown used to.
“How could I have overlooked this?” I berated myself. “Where are they going to run?”
There didn’t seem to be an answer, until, on a visit to the property with Jean Marc and Verena DeMateis, the builders who were selling us the property, we walked around lamenting the absence of a playing space. Finally, my wife Janine stood between the two buildings, gazed at the large slope that dropped a good 30 feet down into a ravine and said, “What if you built a yard right here?”
“Come on,’’ I said. “You can’t just build a yard.” I turned to Jean Marc and Verena. “Right?”
They looked at each other.
“Actually,” Jean Marc said, “That’s an amazing idea…”
Esterline, Kiki, Hope College President Matt Scoggin, Janine, Samanza, Mitch
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Everything needs a center. A cell. A circle. A family.
An orphanage.
For all the years I’ve been operating the Have Faith Haiti Mission, that center was always “the gazebo,” a fancy sounding word for, well, a gazebo, but not the frilly kind you associate with a manicured park overlooking a lake where couples take their wedding photos.
No, our gazebo is large and functional, with concrete on the bottom, welded iron bars around the edges, grated benches for seating within and a tin roof up above that makes a loud drumming sound when it rains.
But, oh, the memories that gazebo holds. It is our escape from the heat, our shelter from the storm, our gathering place for announcements, celebrations, and, most importantly, our nightly devotions.
It is honestly where I first fell in love with the orphanage, watching the kids in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake collect nightly inside the gazebo and sing hymns, prayers and worship songs, holding hands or banging drums and singing, singing, loudly and boldly against the still-settling dust of a ruined nation.
I was looking at the gazebo as I contemplated our upcoming move to a new location.
And I realized we couldn’t go anywhere without one.
Full of memories
After all, the gazebo was where it was announced that I was taking over the orphanage operations back in 2010. The gazebo was where I first set up a laptop computer and the kids crowded on the floor to watch a cartoon movie.
Watching a movie on a laptop
The gazebo was where our kids were handed their birthday cakes, and, wearing the “birthday crown”, smiled through their embarrassment, as the others sang, “How old are you now? How old are you NOW?…”
The gazebo was where I sat each month distributing small toys to our little kids, and watched their glee at receiving them.
The gazebo was where our children danced and listened to music and did their familiar hand-clapping game, patting palms in a large group and chanting “Cola…Cola-Orange…”
The gazebo was where new volunteers stood up and said a few words to the kids and staff. And where teenagers took turns making speeches about what they learned at church.
The gazebo was where our smallest children lay on blankets for naps, away from the brutal Haitian sun.
The gazebo was where we gathered for all the holidays, and where I once sang “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” to my wife, Janine, and kissed her as the kids squealed with mock horror.
The gazebo was where soccer balls were kicked and balloons were hung and small stones were scooped up in a local game. Where thank-you cards were written and board games were spread out and heart-to-heart talks were held between staff members and kids.
Chika reads get well cards and letters from the other kids on a return visit from Michigan, in 2016.
The gazebo was so constantly used that we had three different floor surfaces during the last 12 years – concrete, then indoor-outdoor carpet tiles, then vinyl, which is now peeling away dramatically, leaving large empty patches on the floor.
Still, as with an old friend, the wrinkles mean nothing. It’s the constant comforting presence that you love. The heartbeat of the operation. The center of all things.
I looked at it one night, empty, quiet, sturdy, old.
And I knew what I had to do.
At the center
I contacted the people we were buying the new property from and told them we needed to build a new structure before we could move in. A gazebo. When they asked “What design do you want?” the answer was easy. “Just look at what we have now and recreate it.”
Simple enough. The only remaining question was where to put it. I went to the new property and wandered around. I looked to the right, where the new school would be, to the left, where the new dormitory would be, and straight ahead, where the new yard would be. I almost smiled.
“Put it there,” I pointed.
In the center of everything.
And that is what happened. Construction began, first with a concrete pad, then with wrought iron bars, eventually with a tin roof. As it rises, it looks more and more like the old gazebo. And I start to feel more relaxed.
When the kids arrive at their new home, I want them to feel as if they transplanted their old one. I want them to know where to go when they don’t know where to go.
I want them to gather for devotions every night in the same four cornered square that they always have, and sing their gratitude to the night sky.
Everything needs a center. When the new gazebo is complete, our earth will find its axis, our gyroscope will be oriented, we’ll have a place to put our feet that is new and old at the same time.
It may take a village to raise a child, but sometimes it takes many villages to save one.
As you know from reading these entries, we are in the midst of moving to a new location. Construction is underway. Plans are afoot. We’re even planning how to break the news to the kids with an elaborate field trip.
But meanwhile, every day, the orphanage must go on. Three meals. Summer school. Play time. Devotions. Bedtime.
Yes. A baby. The youngest child we have ever had. Her name is Nadie and her backstory is complicated, but suffice it to say, she had been living in a village outside of Mirogoâne and was severely malnourished when she came to us a few weeks ago.
She was six months old and weighed seven pounds. That’s a normal weight for a newborn, but not a child halfway through her first year on earth. Her little legs were bony. Even her neck seemed thin. Her eyes were thick with goo.
We immediately took her to the hospital.
The limited tests there confirmed what we thought. Malnourished. Anemic. Suffering from conjunctivitis.
“All right,” I said to our team. “What do we do?”
Nadie, when she first arrived
Asking for help
Now, weird as it sounds, that’s not a sentence I use often these days. After 12 years of running the orphanage, I thought I’d seen most scenarios. Our typical approach is to use existing resources, do what we’ve done before, modify slightly if necessary.
But this was wholly different. Our previous youngest child was a year and a half old. Already walking. Eating. Responding to verbal communication.
Here was a six-month-old who, developmentally, was near newborn status.
“What do we do?” seemed the logical question.
Nadie, with conjunctivitis
But this is where the multiple village thing comes in. We immediately hired a full-time nanny with experience nursing infants. We had someone come in from America who was able to secure a few bottles of baby formula, the kind designed specifically for kids in Nadie’s situation. We were told that she had been surviving on sugar water. No breast milk. No formula. Just sugar water.
Sugar water?
The nanny, Miss Genevieve, promptly began feeding Nadie with a bottle, which Nadie took to like a thirsty man takes to drinking fountain. We called in our Haitian doctor, who brought a pediatrician with her. And I contacted a physician in Michigan named Martin Levinson, who has been kind enough to see our kids when they come to the States. He responded immediately.
Nadie at the doctor
Within 24 hours, little Nadie had five different people nursing, examining or analyzing her. Not to mention the 50 plus kids outside the room who were begging to see her. There are many beautiful moments at an orphanage, but few are more tender than seeing sweaty kids stop their games to fuss over infant and ask if they can hold her.
Nadie the Newcomer was already capturing our hearts.
And receiving it
Meanwhile, her own body was in great need. When we submitted the blood work to Dr. Levinson, he shared it with colleagues and suggested, if possible, we should get her to the U.S. Things were dicey. More tests were required. What about her cognitive development? Her neurological development? How much had the malnourishment stolen away?
So the villages kept expanding. With help from incredible people at the U.S. embassy, we were able to get paperwork needed for an emergency medical trip. And less than two weeks after coming to us, Nadie was en route to Michigan.
Once here, Dr. Levinson’s team got her examined and prescribed ointment for her eye issues, iron drops for her anemia, and a feeding schedule to bring up her nutrition. Another village was recruited – the folks at Children’s Hospital in Detroit, where Dr. Justin Klein, who has operated on one our kids in the past, was able to arrange a team of nurses who could successfully draw blood from little Nadie, whose veins were barely accessible due to her size and malnourishment.
Meanwhile, as Janine (my wife) made a home for her, Nadie’s support team was blossoming in our house, from the Haitian kids who had come to start college later this month, to relatives, to friends, to an incredible family named the Chambers, whose daughter, Halie, runs our volunteer program at the orphanage and whose mother, Ann Marie, and sister, Bria, have been doting on Nadie days, nights and weekends.
You take all these villages, the one she came from, the one at our orphanage, the medical community in Port Au Prince, the folks at the embassy, the doctors here in the U.S., our family, our college kids and the expanding group of volunteers in our home, and collectively, what happens? Nadie gets fed. Nadie gets loved. Nadie gets changed, cleaned, bounced, held, stimulated with tiny mobiles and toys.
And, with God’s help, Nadie gets healthy.
A smiling Nadie, just this week
That’s the plan, anyhow. Her weight has increased to over well over nine pounds. Her head has actually grown dramatically in two weeks from the nutrition. Her eyes have cleared up. And her exhausted, vacant look has been replaced by an infectious smile that is as wide as the line of people willing to help her.
When she is out of danger, she will return to Haiti. And as she grows, she will never know how many villages came together to lift her up and put her on her way. She doesn’t have to know. It’s enough that it happens. Watching Nadie grow will be its own reward.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The sun rose hot, like most mornings here in Haiti. But it wasn’t just another day. Four of our kids, two of whom had almost never set foot outside of Port-au-Prince, were leaving us, leaving their home, leaving their country. College was calling, and while they were happy to be starting a new chapter, you could feel a heaviness in the air.
You say goodbye, and I say hello. At a time when we were making maneuvers to a new home, during a week when we took in five new small children, our oldest kids were moving on. Kiki, 20, Samanza, 19, J.J., 18 and Esterline, about to turn 18, were due in America to begin their freshmen years at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Each of them were each given a gift they never needed before — a piece of luggage; a roller with wheels and an elongated handle.
“Fill it up with the things you really want to take from here,” I told them. “The rest we can get in America.”
They dutifully returned to their rooms and began a strange and unfamiliar exercise: packing.
Nearly 50 years ago, Gail Sheehy wrote a book called “Passages.” It became hugely popular, because it spoke about the turning points in various decades of our lives. I remember reading it as a teenager and wondering if all these passages would ever apply to me, or were they just for, you know, grown-ups.
Then, very quickly, I starting growing up. And I realized the concept of passages was true. Some we all go through.
Here, on a hot, summer Haitian morning, a familiar passage was being foisted on a quartet of our precious kids.
Hello, goodbye.
The foursome says goodbye to the orphanage
What we’ll miss
Now, never let it be said that the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage is short on ceremony. We mark our milestones. So the night before the four kids’ departure, we gathered the entire orphanage together, and one by one, each child stood and said something they were going to miss about the departing seniors.
“Kiki, I’m going to miss your lame jokes,” someone said.
“Samanza, I’m going to miss the way you took care of me when I had problems.”
“Esterline, you’re my best friend.”
“J.J., I’m going to miss arguing with you over everything.”
J.J.
There were laughs and sighs. And when it came time for the graduates themselves to speak, they choked up. No surprise. It was their first farewell speech. Who prepares for that?
Kiki spoke about how he’d miss the soccer games and J.J. spoke about missing the verbal sparring, but they all spoke about how they would never forget the orphanage, and how wherever they went, as Kiki put it, “you will be with me.”
Finally, we got to the fun part. I put together a montage of photos and videos from their youngest days to the present, and we showed it on a screen. The kids howled with laughter at the early shots of J.J. with a shaved head and a huge smile, or young Kiki with a squeaky voice telling the camera who he was, or Esterline dancing, or Samanza, small enough to be held in my arms. (She now has to lean over to hug me goodnight.)
When the presentation ended, we put the little kids to sleep and we let the teenagers watch a movie off a computer. I suggested to them something I never suggest: stay up late, talk, laugh, remember your good times, don’t go to sleep until you absolutely have to. Cement your friendships forever. Make this last night count.
Hello, goodbye.
Esterline
Look to the skies
One of my all-time favorite movies is American Graffiti, which takes place in a single night in Modesto, California, between a group of kids, some of whom are set to leave for college in the morning. As the hours pass, they try to do various things they never did before to make the night count.
There are few such options in a Haitian orphanage, so our kids just stayed up and talked. And the next morning, when the cars arrived to take them to the airport, all their orphanage brothers and sisters encircled them. They hugged for a long time. Some cried. Then the quarter rolled their new pieces of luggage across the pavement and lifted them into the vehicles. The gate opened, the cars pulled out, and the place they had called home since they were small was suddenly disappearing in the rearview mirror.
Kiki
As I travelled with the graduates, I wasn’t there to see the reaction of the other kids when the cars left. But I was told a funk fell over the population, as if they couldn’t believe what just happened. Samanza, Kiki, J.J. and Esterline represent the largest exodus we have ever experienced from our precious little group. And those four were the leaders of the boys and girls, the ones who set the tone, the ones the others looked up to.
I have written about a sense of abandonment that haunts every orphan, how it lays behind all their greatest fears. But that is usually about adults leaving. Now, in a new passage for our orphanage, it was about other kids, kids who are learning that there is a conclusion to this process, that life awaits outside the orphanage gate.
The final scene of American Graffiti has Richard Dreyfus, looking out the airplane window and seeing a white Thunderbird, a car (and its female driver) that he had been pursuing all night but never caught up with. He smiles to himself, realizing, at that moment, that some dreams you just have to leave behind.
You say goodbye, I say hello. We are surely going through our passages right now at the orphanage. We look to the sky to see what comes next.
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.
