‘No Christmas for poor people’ – HFH founder Mitch Albom writes in Detroit Free Press

One wanted to brag about his grades. One wanted to talk about his soccer team. One, if we’re being honest, wanted to see what presents she would get. All of them wanted to lift up and hug their baby sisters and brothers and see how big they’ve grown.

None of them will get the chance.

Imagine if America was denied to you. The airports closed, the ports closed, the roads and borders all closed. If you tried a secret entry, you would likely be shot.

And none of your family could get out.

War zone? Gangland? The plot of a dystopian movie? Yes. All that. And in a land of freedom like America, the idea seems impossible.

But it is now daily life for Haitians, including the kids from our orphanage, the Have Faith Haiti Mission, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, will not be able to celebrate Christmas with their brothers and sisters. They are locked out.

“I’m really sad,” one of them, a 19-year-old girl, told me last week. “I miss everybody. We’re always together for Christmas. Can’t we find a way to get there?”

‘No Christmas for poor people’

The answer is no. Even though Christmas — and New Year’s — are holidays that in the 15 years I have been operating the orphanage our kids have never not spent together, this year, no less than 24 of them will be absent, college-age kids studying here in the U.S., sick kids we’ve brought up for medical care, and kids who are doing charity work to help others outside of Port-au-Prince.

This year, for the first time, they will all miss our Christmas play, our nativity re-creation, the singing, the dances, the beautiful prayer service, the special meal, the small presents Christmas morning that cause our littlest ones to squeal with delight, because it’s the only time all year they get anything of their own.

“There’s no Christmas for poor people.” That’s not a tragic sentiment. It’s a threat that a Haitian gang leader made recently. It means the misery, mayhem and murder will continue through the holidays.

And it is already unimaginable.

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