I sat and waited. For some reason there was an indescribable pressure building in my core, and a few times I thought about just standing up and leaving. I got anxious and looked at my watch after what seemed like an eternity, but it had barely been three minutes. Why am I here? Why am I waiting? Am I really supposed to be here?
I was already starting to doubt the impulse that had brought me there. Maybe the tug on my heart had meant something else. Before I could finish my thought, a round, bald Haitian man walked slowly into the room. Although he greeted me with a big smile on his face, my heart jumped. I felt as if I had been physically shoved back in my chair even though he was still a good ten feet away.
The man approached me, murmured something, and stuck out his hand. I shook it, and he sat down across the coffee table from me. He started talking so fast in Creole he didn’t seem to take a breath. I laughed nervously and said ineptly the only words I really knew in his language, besides hello and good-bye: “No pale Kreyòl.” I don’t speak Creole.
He laughed at that, his belly jiggling, and then looked to his right as if this was something that had been rehearsed a hundred times. Another hand stuck out in my direction, and I shook it. This time it was a boy in his late teens who could speak broken English. “This Pastor Joseph Roumain.* He is director for orphanage. He is called Pastor Joe.”
I smiled and nodded and explained that I had visited before and now lived nearby in Gressier and wanted to visit more frequently to spend time with the children. As the boy translated my words, Pastor Joe seemed to listen, but his shoulders shrugged, and his face didn’t show much emotion. I looked at him, waiting for any sort of cue and expecting a question or two. Instead, he snapped something at the boy, who turned his head to me and asked hesitantly, “Have you brought something?”
Was I supposed to bring gifts? Confused and a little embarrassed, I looked up at him and said I had not brought anything. Pastor Joe said something else in Creole, then abruptly stood up and walked out of the room. I watched him leave and heard the boy whisper to me quietly, “You can go visit the children.”
I walked back down the narrow, gloomy hallway to the courtyard. The stench was so bad, worse than I remembered, that I almost turned around and left. Suddenly a small child caught my eye. Walking toward her, I tried to ignore the smell of feces, urine, and sweat in the air. I picked up the sweet, frail child and held her in my arms. I could feel her breathing slowly. I sat down and looked around at the other children near me. Their hollow eyes stared blankly at me, and their thin bodies seemed to contain no energy. On this visit there was no laughing, no giggles, no playing with my hair or inspecting my painted toenails.
I had so many questions to ask but no words; the language barrier was drowning me. I spotted an older girl and greeted her in English, hoping she might know at least a few words. “What is wrong with the children?” I asked, but she shook her head as if she had no idea what my words meant. I repeated the question to a boy next to her. Nothing. Then from behind me I heard someone mutter in English with a strong Haitian accent, “No food.”
I turned around to see a rail-thin boy who looked to be in his teens. He looked at me with big, serious eyes and repeated himself, louder this time. “No food. Three days.”
What? No food? These kids haven’t eaten for three days?
I asked him again. “No food?”
“Three days,” he said again, nodding his head.
My jaw dropped, and I was flooded with emotion. I was so shocked and couldn’t believe this could happen in an orphanage with supposed American support, run by a pastor, and named “Son of God.” Instantaneously my naïveté began to dissolve, and I was rocked by the sadness and lethargy of the children. After a few more minutes inside, I had to get out. I felt selfish, but I couldn’t handle what I was seeing and what I had learned. I managed to make it outside the gate before the tears began to flow. What do I do, Lord?
I was upset and fuming and began muttering in outrage like a crazy person as I walked toward Bernard, who was waiting outside to take me back to Gressier. He didn’t say anything, just patted my shoulder awkwardly in an attempt to comfort me. We headed back home in a tap-tap, and I didn’t want to talk or make eye contact with anyone. I felt like a hermit crab, trying to scramble back deep into its shell, and Bernard and I rode back in complete silence. My raging emotions drowned out the shouts of “blan,” white, by children on the street, and the piercing stares of the other passengers in the truck didn’t even faze me. After the tap-tap let us off in Gressier, I tried to make sense of my feelings and confusion on the twenty-minute walk back to my house.
When I opened the front gate of my house, I was met with the amazing smell of our only meal of the day. My stomach was now used to granola bars in the morning along with one large afternoon meal. Say Say had just finished cooking rice and black bean sauce for dinner. I took one look at the food, thought of the starving children I had just left in the orphanage, and snapped back at Bernard, “You can eat it all or give it to the neighbors.” Then I grabbed my Bible and my flashlight from my room and headed for the roof. The only thing I knew to do, besides cry, was scour the pages of the Bible for some sort of instruction.
When I thought of Pastor Joe, I felt again the intense emotions that had rushed over me at the orphanage. I kept thinking, Maybe it’s that I’ve only been here a couple of weeks, and I’m just really homesick. Maybe I don’t understand the culture here, or how orphanages work. But no matter what excuse I came up with, I couldn’t label the emotions plaguing me when I thought of the pastor.
One thing was clear—I needed to go back and visit the orphanage again soon, so I began asking God for guidance, clarity, and courage. My flesh wanted to forget what I had seen and to stay put in Gressier. But over the next few days God continued to burden my heart with such unexplainable force that I returned to the orphanage in less than a week.
This time the gate opened before I could knock, and a young boy gave me a little grin and pulled me gently inside. I asked for Pastor Joe, but the boy shook his head. Is the pastor not here? I let out a breath of relief when I realized he was out, but I still felt heaviness in my chest as I walked into the dark corridor.
I headed toward the back courtyard because that was normally where the children gathered. On my way down the hallway, I stopped when I saw a little girl who looked about two years old sitting alone on the ground. Her top lip was swollen and oozing yellow. I threw my hands in the air and asked the kids gathered around me what was wrong with her. Silence. This place cannot get any worse, I thought.
The next second, it did. One of the teenagers picked up the little girl, turned her around, and flung the skirt of her soiled blue dress up before I could even blink. I gasped at the worst burn I have ever seen. It looked as though someone had taken a bite out of the back of her thigh. It was obvious by the yellow color and the stench that it had been there awhile.
Although I have a sister who is a veterinarian and a brother who is a paramedic, I have always closed my eyes at blood, burns, or surgeries on TV. I looked around wide-eyed and panicked, yelling for someone to help. Realizing there was no one other than a bunch of little children, I stopped yelling and grabbed one of the older boys who knew some English. “Soap? Water?” I asked slowly.
He nodded, without blinking, and tugged on my arm. I carefully picked up the little girl and followed the boy back down the dark hallway to a small room. The boy stopped in front of a closed door with a sign: “Dr. Roumain.” Okay, so he’s a pastor and a doctor. He must not know about this wound because he would have known how to treat her.
I looked back at the boy. “How long has she been like this?”
He squinted his eyes, and I could tell he didn’t understand. I tried again, pointing at the wound, saying, “How long?” He hesitated, then mumbled, “Twelve?”
I put her on her stomach, found some rubber gloves for my hands, and began to gently dab at the wound with soap, water, and gauze. To my shock,
the little girl whimpered a few times, then was quiet. As I cleaned her burn, my tears mixed into the soapy water, and I began singing. As I picked maggots from the wound, I sang louder and louder. A few times I could feel acid crawling up my throat, and I felt that I might vomit, but then I remembered the slew of children staring at me from the doorway. I thought about shutting the door to keep them out, but there was no electricity in the room, and I needed the light. Turning back around, I sang louder over her poor, burned thigh.
Just as I was almost finished cleaning her wound, Pastor Joe walked in. He looked at me and smiled arrogantly. If I had known Creole, he might have gotten punched in the face with some angry words. But I didn’t, so I did the next best thing—I handed him the wad of blood-and-pus–covered gauze. He shook his head firmly, refused to take it, and waved his hand back at me to continue.
I looked at the little boy, raised my eyebrows, and asked, “Doctor?” The little boy took one look up at Pastor Joe, turned, and ran away. I handed the gauze to Pastor Joe again, hoping he would take it. He shook his head again.
Hot tears burned my cheeks as I raised my voice and, not caring if he understood my English, I shouted, “I have never even watched a medical show. If you are a doctor, then you know what to do. So do it!” I swung around to face him one last time and again held the damp gauze out in front of me. He grabbed the box of gloves next to me, put on a pair, then reached over and snatched the gauze out of my hand to finish.
I watched Pastor Joe sprinkle some antibiotic powder on the wound, and I made a vow, just a few weeks into my Haitian journey, that I would learn wound care and I would not be afraid. It can’t get much worse.
As Pastor (Doctor?) Joe finished cleaning the wound, he turned the sweet girl over and held her away from him as if she were diseased. I took her back. Just as quickly as he arrived, he left, stomping away and mumbling something about the “blan.”
I gave the girl to one of the older children who was looking on, then sat in a chair, bent over, wanting so bad to lose it, to scream and sob and shake my fist at the heavens. But there were dozens of children looking on with fear in their eyes, so instead, I sucked it all in. I held my breath, turned around, forced a half smile, and waved good-bye as I walked out. It was all I could stand for one day, but I knew I would be back.
* Name has been changed.
SEVEN
Respire: Breathe
I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first, it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.
—Hudson Taylor
Here, you can use this table to set up your stuff,” said the young woman before she walked away.
My mom and I looked at each other. Stuff? What stuff?
I looked over at the adjacent tables covered with artfully arranged logo tablecloths, photo displays, and business cards. I looked back at our table with absolutely nothing on it except maybe a light coating of dust.
“It’s okay, Meg,” my mom said in her soothing and encouraging voice.
After living in Haiti by myself for almost two months, I needed to get back to the States to take care of some organizational business. I had established an official nonprofit so that I could raise funds to pay for the work I was doing. I’d tried hard to brainstorm ideas for the name, and I’d kept thinking of how easily I could breathe in Gressier compared to the concrete-covered polluted city of Port-au-Prince. God brought to mind the scripture in Job that exclaims, “The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life” (33:4, emphasis mine). I Googled the word breathe in Creole, and respire (ress-purr-ay) came up. Not knowing exactly what our mission would be, I’d briefly written that Respire Haiti was created “to help children in Haiti.”
Before I left Gressier for the trip to Louisiana, I received an e-mail from Bret Pinson, a man who had been instrumental in helping me get the job at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital—the job I’d quit when I moved to Haiti. I hesitated to respond at first, mostly because I wondered if he was going to ask why I quit such a great job. I had streams of negative thoughts flowing through my mind but decided to e-mail him back anyway. He responded with a brief, “Call me when you are stateside so we can meet.”
When I landed in Louisiana, I had only two weeks and knew I needed to make every day productive. I didn’t have a clear picture of what that meant yet, but I did call Mr. Pinson, and we set a time to meet.
That same afternoon, Dennis Eenigenburg, a friendly Louisiana pastor, joined us along with his wife. I told them my story, and after a thirty-minute conversation, Pastor Dennis asked if I’d be willing to give a ten-minute talk to his congregation. Seeing my anxiety level rise with the thought of speaking in front of a church, he quickly added that there would be two other nonprofits participating, so it would be low-key.
“Yes, I would love to do it,” my mouth said, while my brain was saying, No! What in the world am I going to talk about for ten whole minutes?
I showed up at his church the following Sunday, my only visual aid a jump drive containing a few pictures taken with my cell phone. After seeing the displays the other nonprofits set up, I felt very unprepared. As worship finished and Pastor Dennis invited the first organization up front, I watched nervously as a very well-composed man walked forward and began explaining his incredible project working with underprivileged children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My heart started beating so hard I could hear it vibrating in my ears.
The rest of what he said was a blur until I heard Pastor Dennis say, “And our next speaker is . . .” I let out my breath in a whoosh of relief when he didn’t call my name, but I still wanted to run out of the room. I watched a well-put-together video about the second group’s mission, and before I knew it, they were finishing up. And that left . . . me.
My heart was beating like crazy again, and my palms started sweating. My mind jumped around with everything I wanted to say. Then he called my name. “Please welcome Megan Boudreaux of Respire Haiti.” Numb, I stood up and took a few hesitant steps down the aisle. Pastor Dennis, whom I’d known for only three days, said a few words about what I was doing in Gressier. When I got up to the front, I swallowed hard, not entirely sure words would come out of my mouth. Pastor Dennis handed me the microphone and I said, “Hello. My name is Megan,” in a shaky voice. But no one seemed to be listening. Instead, their eyes looked beyond me, and I turned around to see what everyone was staring at.
I almost dropped the microphone as I saw Michaëlle’s picture, six feet tall, on the screen behind me. It was the picture from the mountain, in the ragged yellow tank top she wore as a dress, hanging off one shoulder. I turned back around, looked at the faces, and breathed out. This time when I began speaking, the words flowed easily out of me. I shared the story of Michaëlle and her battle for food, a safe place to sleep, education, and love. I explained what a restavek is and how Michaëlle was not actually free, even at seven years old. I saw jaws drop at the mention of child slavery. Then I clicked to the next picture, with hundreds of children eating at the Saturday feeding program. I looked out and saw shock and anger turn to empathy and hope.
Then I spoke about this incredible place called Bellevue Mountain. And with that it was over. Everyone clapped, and I smiled, feeling the sweating and rapid heartbeat begin again. I bee-lined it, head down, back to my seat next to my mom. As I snuggled next to her arm, wanting to hide from everyone looking at me, she held my hand and whispered, “You did well.”
After the service ended, Pastor Dennis made an announcement about the tables. “These folks will be at their tables to answer any questions you might have,” he said. I thought about our empty table, looked at my mom again, and almost laughed as we both raised our eyebrows and rolled our eyes just a tiny bit. Then we got up and headed back to the lobby to stand behind our table.
I felt awkward, but people immediately began coming up to us. As the first person walked up, he held a check out to me. I almost didn’t understand what he wanted me to do. Mon
ey? I almost said it out loud. You want to give us money? We’re a 501(c) (3), but we don’t even have a bank account yet!
I thanked him and took the check without looking at the amount. I gave it to my mom. Then it happened again, and again and again. People came with checks, cash, questions, and prayers. Mom started stacking the donations in a pile on the back corner of the table. I sensed the Spirit of God so strongly, and I kept looking over at my mom, who had been hesitant, as any mother would have been, to let her twenty-four-year-old daughter move to a foreign country alone.
We repeated the same schedule for a second service, and back at the table there were more checks, more cash, more people encouraging us and wanting to know more. When it was all over, Mr. Pinson came up, and with a huge smile and no hesitation, he asked, “How much money did you raise?”
I looked at him, confused. My mom and I were so overwhelmed with the questions and expressions of support that we hadn’t even thought to count the money. We moved over to a corner and began to look at the checks made out to Respire Haiti: $500, $150, $250, $50, $1,000. On and on it went. Tears began flowing down my mom’s face, and Mr. Pinson looked so happy and excited for us. Then we were done and wrote the total on a piece of paper: $39,525.
I had no words. I looked over at my mom. Her eyes were squeezed shut as if to say, I get it, Lord. I understand.
Miracle on Voodoo Mountain Page 5
