Usually, in this space, I write about the children of our orphanage. Today I want to write about an adult.
His name is Yonel Ismael. He is also, technically, a child of the orphanage. But that was a long time ago.
The oldest boy in a family of 10 children, Yonel was brought to Port-au-Prince in 1989 from the coastal town of Mirogoâne. An aunt had heard about an orphanage there that would take him.
Yonel was five years old.
“My parents didn’t have any money,” he recalls. “They didn’t have food for me to eat. They didn’t have a way for me to go to school.”
Scared and by himself, Yonel searched for his place amongst the other kids. He could have been withdrawn or resentful. But that was never Yonel’s nature. Instead he followed the rules, he went to school, and eventually, while never leaving the orphanage, he graduated from an English language high school. He then decided he wanted to be a preacher and enrolled in a theology college.
Yonel, 2000s
On January 12, 2010, Yonel was headed for classes there when someone called about a car for sale. It was available. Could he come and look at it? Yonel, not usually one to play hooky, said to himself, “Well, it’s just one day…”
So he skipped school.
A few hours later, the ground began shaking. It was a massive 7.2 scale earthquake that would kill nearly three percent of Haiti’s population. Yonel’s theology school collapsed and was destroyed.
“Thirty of my classmates were killed,” he recalls, still stunned at the memory. “They were the ones sitting in the back, which is where I always sat. If I had gone to school that day, I would be a dead man right now.
“I knew right then that God had a plan for me.”
He just didn’t know that plan would take him back to where he started.
Yonel with two of our youngest // Photo credit: Halie Chambers
All that he does
This is where we came in. Shortly after the earthquake, I began visiting the orphanage, and took over its operations later that year. At the time, I knew Yonel from the Sunday church services. He was a thoughtful preacher who always came well-prepared for his sermons. He was also a gentle soul with a love for children that was as obvious as the Haitian sun.
In time, we began to give Yonel more responsibility. Then more and more. When the previous director departed, Yonel elevated to the job.
He is now our top person on site. Our Haitian director. Let me tell you what that means.
It means, on a daily basis, Yonel has to deal with every aspect of 55 children and 35 employees. It means decisions, directions, sacrifices and choices.
Yonel helping line up students on the first day of school, September 2019
It means teaching classes and listening to teachers’ concerns. It means overseeing the nannies and listening to the nannies’ concerns. It means guiding the teenagers, protecting school kids, getting diapers for babies.
It means scooping up a wandering two-year-old and comforting a crying eight-year-old. It means shopping for enough groceries to feed 100 people per meal. It means regular visits to the bank where he runs a risk, every time, of robbery or kidnapping. It means waking up in the middle of the night and rushing a child to the hospital.
It means making sure the security guards are vigilant. It means assuring the maintenance men are trimming the trees. It means pulling out a wad of money to pay the water delivery guy, the produce delivery guy, the exterminator, the electrician, and the guy who comes to fix the generator which seems to always need fixing.
CPR class fun, 2019
It means finding passports for children who need medical treatment in America and navigating early morning traffic to get to the U.S. embassy when it opens.
It means going around the country with me, interviewing people with children who need a home.
It means translating constantly from English to Creole to French.
It means worrying about every little noise, every crying child, every groaning machine and every flat tire. It means you are the man to see when there is a man to see. It means when every problem arrives, big or small — tag, you’re it.
‘Why do you do this?’
So I asked Yonel the other day something I have never asked him
Why do you do this?
“Because I love it,” he said, without hesitation. “It’s my passion. Working with children. Helping people. That’s my purpose in life.”
It is not without a price. Yonel, a strapping, handsome 38-year-old, could easily be leading an active social life in the city. Instead, his bedroom is in the middle of 50-plus children. He almost never goes out at night, because nighttime is when we do devotions and after that, well, what if something happened?
He wants to be married and have children of his own, but he knows any future wife would have to accept a life amongst dozens of orphans. That eliminates a lot of people.
Yonel and Chika
Still, Yonel is undeterred. He is honorable, honest, humble and devout. He still leads our Sunday services, despite all his other responsibilities. From the day he decided to play hooky from studying God, he has given God credit for saving his life — and providing all the extra days he now has on this earth.
I have met many selfless people in my journey through the philanthropic world. They give money. They give advice. Yonel gives something else. He gives himself. Here’s to a life that was turned over to others, that narrowly escaped death, and that found its purpose in the smallest and neediest of children, just as he once was. Yonel Ismael has not left the orphanage in 33 years. We are all the better for it.
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PORT-AU-PRINCE — The kids saw her at the bottom of a ravine. She was sitting still. Not moving. She had been there for a while and looked weak. One of our volunteer staff, a gentle giant named Bob Thibodeau, walked down and studied her, and when he determined she needed help, he picked her up and she made a plaintive, bleating noise.
“Byyyahhhh.”
Thus began the saga of The Struggling Goat. It is a mark of our kids’ innate sense of compassion that any animal which finds its way into the orphanage is quickly adopted, cared for, and overseen every waking hour.
The Struggling Goat was no exception.
“We thought it was maybe dehydrated, or constipated or something,” said Amy Thibodeau, Bob’s wife. So they set out a bowl of water and eventually got — not making this up — a small suppository, which they put, well, you know where suppositories go.
And for the next few days, the goat seemed to improve. So much so that the kids gave her a name — “Boberta’’ — and took turns fussing over her. One of our teenaged girls, Junie-Anna, who hopes one day to be a veterinarian, took particular interest. She sat with the goat, studied it, cooed at it, changed its water and its food.
“How is the goat doing today?” I’d ask each morning.
“Better,” she’d say.
Goats are friends, and food
Most kids love pets. So a goat’s warm welcome should not be a surprise. But in the shadow of the immense poverty that plagues this country, watching orphaned children care for an animal is particularly inspiring.
Not that animals are rare here. There are creatures all around the orphanage. Small lizards and geckos are omnipresent. Stray cats appear on the walls. Roosters crow. Chickens squawk. The occasional bat or rat flashes across the property.
Goats are commonplace in Haiti. You’ll see them walking trash piles around Port-au-Prince. In rural households it’s not uncommon to have two or three at a time. Yes, goats are easy upkeep as they will eat almost anything. And their milk is valuable.
But the true value of goats is as a source of food. Goat is a common dish here, and a beloved one by many Haitians. So you might think children would avoid bonding with a creature who might soon become dinner.
But kids will be kids
With (baby goat) kids.
And we have no edible designs on that animal. We only want to see it get better.
A welcoming crowd
The Struggling Goat has continued to battle. Recently it seemed quite weak and the kids worried it might not make it. But this morning, Boberta seemed to respond to its food, including celery and mango, as well as some sugar water.
Meanwhile the kids root, observe and, most importantly, nurture. And here is the point I want to make in this entry. It would be easy for kids who have been abandoned or sent away to exhibit those same tendencies to others. Why be kind when kindness wasn’t shown to you? Why extend when extending leaves you hurt? Do unto others as has been done unto you, right?
Instead it appears quite the opposite. Our kids are the most welcoming children I have ever been around. Whether it is group of adult visitors, a new young arrival, or children from the outside who come in with their parents, our kids swarm, ask questions, take hands, invite them in.
And with innocent animals, their warmth brings tears to the eyes.
Boberta gets a bath.
To be kind to all creatures — human and otherwise — is a noble thing to teach children. But honestly, we don’t have to teach it. Maybe because our kids know what it’s like to feel alone, to be left behind, to battle to survive — maybe that’s why they almost ooze empathy and compassion.
Tomorrow it might be a wounded bird. Or a three-legged dog. Today it’s Boberta in a makeshift pen, beside bowls of food and water, with countless petting hands to give it comfort. Say what you will about goats. Watching that “kid” being cared for by our kids is one of the finest pleasures an adult can ask to witness.
The graduates formed a long line in the convention center, and the reading of their names began. One by one, they walked across the stage, shaking hands with the university dignitaries, receiving their diploma, waving to cheers.
We sat in a small section of seats near the front, a hodgepodge of family and friends.
“Do you see him?” someone asked.
“Not yet,” someone answered.
“Is that him?”
“Where?”
We craned our necks. We scanned through endless mortar boards. We were trying to spot a certain young man. Not just any young man. Not to us, anyhow.
His name is Emmanuel Gedeon.
He was about to become our first college graduate.
They say there are certain moments parents never forget. A child’s first steps. The first day of school. Taking prom photos on the front porch.
Well, we weren’t there for Emmanuel’s first steps. There weren’t any proms in Haiti. And we are not his parents. But watching him graduate college last Saturday brought out something in my wife and me that I can only liken to a supernova burst of joy and satisfaction.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
We call him “Manno”
Emmanuel — who everyone calls Manno — was already 11 when I came to Haiti and took over the orphanage. He was gentle, polite, and quiet. He read whatever he could get his hands on. We were told his father had died when Manno was young, and his mother had brought him to the orphanage along with his younger brother, Kervens. After a few years, the mother passed away as well. Manno was truly an orphan.
But he was not alone.
Without a secondary school of our own at that point, we paid for Manno to go to a French speaking grade school, and eventually a high school. Every morning he would trudge off in his school uniform, and every afternoon he’d come back to the orphanage. At night he would study outside, under a single light bulb. He often wrote papers in his lap, because there was no desk or tabletop for him to use. I remember reading a report of his once and thinking his penmanship was pretty good if only the pencil didn’t wobble against his thigh.
Manno’s first day of high school in 2017. He had to take two tap taps to get there. Tap taps are small, privately-owned buses or pick up trucks that serve as shared taxis, and the closest thing you can get to public transportation.
Year after year, we noticed Manno’s grades were excellent. No matter what the hardship — the heat, the protests, the school’s erratic openings and closings — his academics remained top shelf. As he rounded through adolescence, the idea of college became realistic. Not just a Haitian college. Why not an American one?
Manno took the TOEFL test. He passed his very first try. He filled out an application to Madonna University in Livonia, Michigan and wrote an essay about his life in Haiti, the struggles he overcame, the desire he had to come back and make his country better.
Left: a cake to celebrate Manno’s TOEFL score in March 2018; right: his high school graduation in June of the same year.
He was accepted and even awarded a scholarship. Some might think that, given his background, Manno was lucky to be attending Madonna.
But I knew it was the other way around.
The road to commencement
The first day we brought Manno to campus, the people there greeted us with a huge rolling storage unit. They figured Manno would have many possessions, given how far he had come, and he’d need help transporting the crates to his room.
But everything Manno owned fit into a gym bag. So he put that gym bag in the giant basket, and we rolled up to his dorm.
Manno (left) and Siem (right) at orientation / new student welcome to Madonna University in the fall of 2018.
His room was standard issue: tile floor, two beds, a window in between. But when Manno saw the plain, wooden desk, he put his hands on it and his eyes lit up.
“I get my own desk?” he marveled.
When we told him yes, tears formed in his eyes. I have never seen a young man more grateful for anything.
He took that attitude into every class he attended. Every lecture he attended. He was serious about his studies. Serious about his assignments. And while he’d never had regular access to a computer before, he navigated life in the digital environment, and now knows how to do things that leave me dazed.
We visited with Manno throughout his four years, and since the school is close, he stayed at our house on weekends and on long school breaks. At night we’d invite him to watch TV or go someplace with us, but more often than not, he’d decline because “I have to study.”
Not surprisingly, his grades were exemplary. I would ask how he did at the end of each semester and he’d reply in his gentle voice, “I think I did OK.”
Then I’d get an email that read 4.0, 4.0, 4.0, 4.0.
Manno majored in psychology and has decided he wants to be a pediatrician, because “in my country, there is a great need for doctors to help children.” Medical school is his next stop, and he’s already preparing for the MCAT and getting applications together.
But first came the matter of his college graduation. And there we were Saturday as he reached the stage, my wife, myself, four of his Haitian “brothers” from the orphanage, his biological brother, and more than a dozen friends and admirers.
And when he started across the stage, I felt a chill zap from my arms to my head, and I tried to hold the camera steady. Then I heard these words:
“Emmanuel Gedeon, bachelor of science, with highest honors.”
And I welled up.
And meanwhile down in Haiti, all of Manno’s orphanage brothers and sisters were gathered around a TV set watching a stream of the event, and when they saw him, they exploded with glee, a joyful noise that I swear I could hear all the way up in Michigan.
They call it “commencement” because it kickstarts a new stage of life. But the stage that had just finished for Manno — for all of us — was the thing we wanted to celebrate Saturday. Only one percent of Haitians ever go to college. Less than half of those attend college in the U.S.
Manno, a boy without a desk, a boy without parents, a gentle, studious boy raised in a crowded concrete orphanage shared with 50 kids on a third of an acre, had become a man with a college degree of the highest order.
There must be a sentence that aptly describes that accomplishment, but I can’t come up with it. I can only recall what my mother used to say when I did something that made her and my Dad proud. I never understood it. I just thought it was her quirky way of talking.
She’d say, “Our cup runneth over.”
Now I know what she meant.
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The other night, the kids at the orphanage sang the final notes of the last song of devotion, and without missing a breath, immediately launched into:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Djuline
Happy birthday to you…
They continued with the “How old are you now?” verse and counted until 17, Djuline’s new age. A shy girl by nature, Djuline stood in the middle, wearing a long green t-shirt, absorbing the song with an embarrassed smile. Two boxes of cake were then opened, both with her name spelled out in the icing. And the kids lined up to get a slice and a napkin.
Djuline celebrates her birthday on May 4th
All birthdays are like this at the orphanage. They have to be. You can’t overplay one and underplay another. Everyone gets a song. Everyone gets a cake. The young ones get to spend the day wearing the “birthday crown,” a colorful felt coronet that signifies today is your special moment on the calendar.
I’ve been thinking about birthdays lately, perhaps because mine is later this month. And I realize that, in the life of an orphan, birthdays are both a highlight and a casualty.
And I can never really know which way a child is viewing them.
Moise enjoys his birthday cake, Danois, and Manno
Little-known beginnings
Djuline came to us when she was 6 or 7. The story was that her parents had been lost during the earthquake and she had been cared for by neighbors for several years. The man who brought her to us claimed to not know much more than that. He said he had been chosen to make the trip and deliver her. He barely knew her name.
This is not an uncommon tale. There are times when the children we take in don’t even have birth certificates, so knowing a factual birthday is an impossibility. In cases like that, we may have to invent a date for paperwork purposes. And from that year forward, that’s the day the child gets a cake and candles.
There is a bittersweet overtone to all of this. Think about the birthdays in your own life. Special trips that may have been made. Special fusses for a Sweet Sixteen, or a Bar Mitzvah. Maybe one year, they threw you a surprise party. Maybe one year you celebrated at a beach, or a ski resort, or Disneyland.
That’s a stark contrast to the cookie cutter way we have to mark birthdays at the orphanage. Don’t misunderstand. The kids love the fuss. They grin awkwardly when they’re being serenaded. They pose for the cake photos and immediately ask to see them on the screen. Certain kids will approach you and gush, “Guess how old I am?”, proud of their new number.
But it’s not the same as in other families. We can’t get out an album and look at baby pictures. We can’t sit back and remember the ride to the hospital, how many hours of labor, or some funny anecdote that happened along the way. My own father used to punctuate the story of my birth with a comment the doctor made as he was leaving the hospital. Upon spotting my father in the waiting room, he said, “I see where he gets his ears.”
OK, it’s a bit embarrassing, but it’s a story. It’s my story. Our kids, sadly, don’t have those. They are missing the personal touch. I sometimes wonder if birthdays aren’t a melancholy experience because of that. Perhaps they wonder every year where the family is that witnessed their birth. Where is the mother that brought them into the world? Where is the father that was supposed to watch over and protect them? Are they out there somewhere, remembering what this day means? Do they still care?
Marc holds his birthday cake as Gaelson leans on his shoulder; Jimmyna holds Jerry.
We speak to our kids about this often. We encourage them to share such feelings. Not to bottle them up. But you can’t crawl inside a heart and pull out what you wish. Many kids keep such thoughts to themselves. We have to respect that.
In the meanwhile, we make the fuss that we can. The cakes are really good (we now have a wonderful baker on our nanny staff named Miss Sabina) and the songs are sung with passion and love. We celebrate birthdays, but we are really celebrating lives, new lives, with new and incredible possibilities. That’s the icing, I suppose, sweet in its own right.
Before I went to grade school, I had backyard school. I sat in a semi-circle with other kids from the neighborhood and we listened to the teacher. If I was four, the teacher was six. If I was five, then she was seven.
My teacher was my older sister, Cara.
She’s still teaching.
Just not me.
Mitch and Cara, circa none of your business.
Today, Cara spends every waking minute (and no doubt some in her sleep) running the bilingual school for our orphanage. Her mornings start early. Her evenings run late. Every day, when she is not in Haiti, she faxes countless pages of lesson plans to our 15 teachers.
She designs the curriculum. She comes up with the resources. She tracks the progress of every single child. She hires the staff, a mix of Haitians, foreigners, and ex-pat volunteers, who teach everything from math, science and world history to Portuguese and woodworking.
Cara at the front of the classroom, 2011
She has been doing this, free of charge, for more than a decade, ever since we cut the ribbon to open our school. It was a compact, three-room schoolhouse back then. Space was at a premium. Sometimes we had to split each room in half, and ask the left-side class to keep their voices down so the right-side class could take a test.
It was hot. There were no computers. The fax machine was constantly breaking, leaving teachers without materials. And the kids — well, they came from every kind of background, almost none with any previous schooling or even the understanding of how to sit in a chair and listen. They were constantly getting up and walking around. We would put them back in the chair. They would smile. A minute later, they’d be up walking around again. Back in the chair. Smile. Get up again.
Cara often says we don’t have a lot of resources, “but we are very resourceful.”
That’s symbolic of the endless circle of challenges running an orphanage school, and we’re not even mentioning the electricity going out, desks falling apart, or the street protests that keep teachers from getting to the property.
So in preparing this post, I called my sister and asked her why on earth she said “Yes” when I asked her, 11 years ago, to come to Haiti with me and start a school.
“Does the fact that you’re my brother have any bearing on it?” she said.
No one gets left behind
Maybe it does. But I think Cara would have done it anyhow. She is a lifelong teacher, got her Masters degree in it, taught around the world as the wife of a Navy man who was constantly getting new station posts. She’s lived in Italy, France, Gibraltar. One of her two sons went to school in Africa. Upon a visit there, Cara heard a story.
“There was this man who was trying to teach about computers in his village. He didn’t have any computers, so he drew the image of a keyboard in the sand. And his students did the same. And they practiced as if it was a real keyboard.
“I remember thinking if that man can do that, then we can surely work with whatever limited resources we have.”
That has become our mantra in Haiti. Cara often says we don’t have a lot of resources, “but we are very resourceful.” How else could you teach 55 children in a school that borrows the Montessori teaching technique, runs half the day in English and half the day in French — yet needs to converse in Creole — and still aims to graduate children at age 18, ready to pass TOEFL exams and attend universities in the United States?
“We don’t try and fit the children into a model,” Cara said, “we model the school around the their needs. We individualize when we have to.”
And we often have to. Kids coming from traumatic backgrounds, extreme poverty, no parents, emotional issues, abandonment issues. Mixing them all into a single school is a huge challenge. It’s the reason why some of our classes only have three kids. They need that much individualized attention.
They get it.
Cara moderating the annual spelling bee.
Vocation, in the truest sense of the word
Cara’s married name is Nesser, so people don’t often know she is my sister. If they looked at us side by side, they would. We both share a strong resemblance to my father, who was the first generation in his family to go to college. My mother never got the chance. But they both made education a top priority in our lives.
Mitch and Cara and their parents, Rhoda and Ira Albom
Only Cara made education her vocation, however. I marvel at the 60-plus hours a week she puts into it. Whenever I see her, she is on her computer writing lesson plans. Whenever I call her, she is doing the same. When we bring kids to Michigan for medical treatment, she sends individualized teaching sheets so we can home school them and keep them current.
She has introduced geometry, calculus, biology, chemistry, philosophy, Haitian history, even sign language classes to our curriculum. She could be earning respectable money teaching anywhere in the world. Administering in a university.
Instead, she dedicates her days, weeks and months to orphans.
Here is the difference it makes. Before we built our school, we could only hope the challenged Haitian schools were teaching our kids. With Cara, we elevated to another level. Now, in addition to shelter, food and medical attention, we can insure every child gets proper educational attention. Every child has a chance at a career. Every child has a shot at joining the one percent of Haitians who ever get to attend college.
Our school, quite simply, is the jewel of our orphanage. Cara Nesser is its heartbeat.
I remember those childhood days, sitting in the semi-circle, listening to my sister pretend she was a teacher. I don’t remember why I did it. I guess I could have gotten up and walked away. But I didn’t. She commanded my attention then. She commands my respect now.
Here is the second part of her answer as to why she said yes to our orphanage 11 years ago:
“Because I believe a good education is the right of any child, anywhere on the planet. That’s really all.”
I was wrong when I said she wasn’t teaching me anymore. She still is.
_____________
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Photo credit: Danielle Cutillo Photography
A plaque on “The Jim and Jane McElya School of Hope” and quotes Proverbs, reading: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” It is the philosophy of the school and its many teachers. A premium subscription brings more resources to the bilingual school at Have Faith Haiti.
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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.
