Rapid fire gunshots echoed through the air, waking Have Faith Haiti’s 100 children and staff at 3 a.m. on the morning of Monday, April 24.
The lawlessness and gang violence that dominates Haiti’s capital city has reached its hilly suburbs. Haiti is in crisis, and the chaos is knocking on the door of the orphanage and school, run by author and philanthropist Mitch Albom since the devastating earthquake of 2010.
Following emergency instructions, we stayed low and away from the windows, and remained in lockdown for the rest of the day.
By 7, news of the escalation’s peak would make the rounds in WhatsApp threads and panicked texts: a crowd burned 13 suspected gangsters to death in a gruesome outburst of vigilante violence. Just half-a-mile from our grounds.
Haiti is in crisis.
Armed with machetes, bottles, and rocks, residents in the hilly suburbs of Haiti’s capital fought back against encroaching gangs throughout Tuesday, as the orphanage remained on lockdown. Sleep would not come again for 24 hours, but the bullets did. Thankfully, emergency procedures kept the children and staff who live, learn, play and work at Have Faith Haiti indoors safe — but only as safe as current conditions allow.
By Wednesday, a panicked phone call to Mitch Albom in the U.S. announced that a gang member had trespassed onto the property. The belief would prove to be unfounded, but the fear remains. What would happen if it were true?
Haiti is in crisis. And it’s in our neighborhood — the one we moved to last year for safety and growth. A neighborhood that has largely avoided the gang-fueled violence that has been consuming the capital and surrounding areas since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Change can happen in an instant, and it has. Our ability to continue investing in the lives of our Haitian children is at risk and our safety plans have accelerated.
We need to immediately build a “safe house” by converting the top floor of a building into a bulletproof space with stocked supplies. We need security cameras and floodlights to illuminate nearly 7 acres of property to alert us to armed trespassers. And we need to hire more trained and armed security guards.
These threats are not going away. We must find a way to better secure our grounds so we can keep our children and staff safe and continue to fulfill our mission and vision to bring hope, leadership, and generational change to Haiti through the children we serve.
