An additional $10,000 came in by the end of the day, bringing our total to nearly $50,000. That night my mom slept with all the cash and checks at the foot of her bed. The next day we opened a bank account, still in disbelief at how God had worked this out. It far surpassed what Pastor Dennis or Mr. Pinson thought would happen.
When we made the deposit, I looked at Mom and said, “I guess I won’t have to keep using my savings to pay for the feeding program and the children’s school fees.” The whole experience was surreal. As I headed back to Haiti after my two weeks were up, I thought about how I’d been going home to Louisiana to plan how to raise funds, to plan how I might be able to get support. Little did I know this was the beginning of the Holy Spirit working through me on Bellevue Mountain. I was learning to close my eyes, open my hands, and let Him lead me.
During my trip to Louisiana, I had a hard time being present mentally. I kept thinking about the small group of kids in Gressier who had been meeting for school lessons in a dilapidated church with an even more dilapidated chalkboard. There were no benches, no books, and only a few teachers who struggled to be heard over the noise of the busy national highway, just yards away. The students had no schedule and seemed to come and go as they pleased. They also did not have uniforms—the sign that a Haitian school is legitimate.
I’d been bringing more and more children to the church for school, and I’d begun to realize that to be a real school we needed more teachers, more supplies, and more space. My heart was full at what God had done, and I was excited about the work still ahead.
On my first morning back in Haiti, I woke up early to the crowing of the neighborhood roosters, a sound I had not missed in the States. I splashed some freezing cold water on my face from the bucket I’d used to take a shower the night before and grabbed a granola bar on the way out the door. I crossed the dirt road and headed to the familiar path up to Bellevue Mountain.
The sun was hot on the back of my neck. I’d forgotten to put on sunscreen, so I quickened my pace and smiled as I climbed up the mountain, anxious to see everyone and everything I’d missed while I was gone. There was always so much activity all around the tamarind tree. I usually saw a mix of cows, horses, and goats along with the precious Haitian people, smiling children, and Micha, of course, although in the mornings she was usually busy fetching water or doing other chores around the tent.
But this morning, when I arrived at the flat top of the mountain, no one was there. I walked toward the tree and heard a squeaky voice cry out. I turned around, and there she was, smiling big with her toothless grin. “Micha!” I smiled back and hugged her as she ran into my arms.
Micha opened her mouth and I knew what was going to come out—crazy-fast Haitian Creole that confused me more than ever. Instead, I heard her clearly say, “I missed you. Where did you go?”
What? My eyes widened, and I tilted my head, trying to see if I’d heard her correctly or if it was just my imagination. Out of her mouth came, “Mwen te sonje ou! Kote ou te ale?” but somehow I had understood her words.
She must have thought I didn’t hear her, because I didn’t respond, so she said it again louder. “I missed you! Where did you go?”
My stomach churned as I listened to her sweet voice. Micha was speaking Haitian Creole; it was the only language she knew. But I had understood her as if she were speaking English. I opened my mouth and answered back. As the words came out, my eyes widened even more, and tears started spilling down my cheeks.
Micha smiled big as she heard me say in Creole how much I missed her too. She hugged me again, and as I hugged her back, I felt an explosion of excitement and energy deep in my spirit. It was as if the frustration, disappointment, and timidity of those first two months in Haiti had been launched out of my being. I felt a rush of energy, and I turned around and sprinted down the path.
I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on or where I was going. Up ahead I saw Pastor and Madame Charles sitting in broken chairs in front of their church. They smiled big and waved, welcoming me home. I had met Pastor and his wife a few weeks earlier in Gressier and occasionally attended their church. As I approached them, I addressed them in Creole. They both stood up and smiled, looking a little confused. Pastor jokingly said, “Did you go home and study Creole for two weeks?”
He could see the shock and surprise on my face as I understood him and shook my head no. Pastor and Madame Charles looked at me, then looked at each other, and without a trace of disbelief they both shot out of their chairs and walked back and forth, waving their hands in the air, praising God. “Glwa pou Bondye!” they exclaimed, again and again. “Thank You, Jesus!”
My mind could not grasp what was happening. I opened my mouth again to speak, and the smoothest Creole poured out. After months of struggling, even to ask a child her name, and being incredibly timid to speak, this was happening.
I called Bernard, asking him to come quickly to Gressier. When he arrived, I explained what had happened to me, and he broke out in a huge grin. This gift was unsettling to me, so his smile was such a comfort.
“I don’t need to translate for you anymore.” He laughed. And I laughed with him, starting to understand what God had done.
The gift of speaking, reading, and writing Haitian Creole is something I had prayed for almost in passing. Trying to work alone in Gressier was so frustrating, and not being able to speak to the very children God had called me to help was also very challenging.
“You should speak Creole,” was a comment I heard often. “Aren’t you from Louisiana? Don’t they speak French there? You should know this. This should be easy for you.” But I couldn’t. And I’d regretted, daily, that I hadn’t paid more attention to French in high school. I regretted even more that in college I’d chosen to study Spanish because now it was no help at all.
Haitian Creole is the native language spoken by everyone who grows up in Haiti. It’s a blend of eighteenth-century French and Portuguese, Spanish, Taino (a language from the original, indigenous people of Haiti), and West African languages. Haitian Creole has its own spelling, pronunciation, and accent. The wealthy upper class, a small percentage of the population, also speak French. Business and legal matters in the country are typically conducted in French, but most Haitians don’t get far enough in school to learn to speak French fluently, much less to read or write it.
Speaking Creole was going to help me connect with the people of Gressier. As my heartbeat and breathing finally began to slow, I felt the Lord’s comforting hand. He was directing this. He was in control, and He was making a way. I turned around to face the church. This one-room building was filling up with students—sixty sweaty, loud, rowdy children, and we needed more space. When I’d started Respire Haiti, I knew I wanted to work with children but honestly had no clue what form that would take. Even though I had been in Gressier for just a little more than two months, God was now making it very clear that He wanted Respire Haiti to focus on education.
And the more He revealed to me the problems in Gressier, the clearer the vision grew to include not only encouraging and empowering children but also, most importantly, fighting for the freedom of restaveks.
Fear of the future still plagued me, and I had no idea how to go about buying land or building a school, but I decided to take the plunge and use the donation money to build a small two-room school building behind Pastor Charles’s church so that more children could be served. Who knows how many more children I can enroll in school now that I can ask them questions myself in their own language?
EIGHT
The Boy in the Pink Shirt
Gabriel: from the Hebrew name (Gavri’el) meaning “strong man of God.” Gabriel was one of the seven archangels in Hebrew tradition.1
While the showdown with Pastor Joe over the little girl’s horrific burn had been awful, my heart yearned to see the children at Son of God Orphanage again. As often as I could, I took the forty-five-minute tap-tap ride to visit them. I began recognizing faces and names. I a
lso began to realize that cases such as the little girl with the infected burn were more the norm than the exception. And although I never brought any gifts or money with me as was expected, the director and his wife allowed me to continue to visit.
After several visits on my own, I was surprised one day when I stepped off the tap-tap from Gressier, only to see a huge tap-tap parked in front of the orphanage. The front gate was ajar, so I entered and heard a sound that shocked me and piqued my curiosity. English. I heard many voices speaking English!
I tiptoed down the hallway and saw white skin. A large group of Americans inhabited the back courtyard. Although I tried to enter unnoticed, someone spotted me at the top of the stairs and yelled out, “Hey there!”
“Hey,” I answered back, as more than a dozen white people stopped what they were doing and stared at me. Then, just as quickly as they’d stopped, they turned back to singing, blowing bubbles, and playing games with the children. I felt as though I’d somehow entered the Twilight Zone. I walked over to the nearest white person, who was sitting on the steps, and asked, “Where are you from?” She told me they were from a church in the States, and they had been in partnership with this orphanage for two years. I walked down into the courtyard and enjoyed seeing the children getting some much-needed attention. Before the group left for the evening, I got their contact information so I could keep in touch. Finally, I wasn’t alone.
But it turned out I never had been alone. Over the months of February and March, several more teams from several different states came to visit Son of God Orphanage. It was a consistent pattern that I had somehow missed during my first few visits to the orphanage, when I was always the only non-Haitian there.
From then on, each time a new team arrived, I would ask for contact information so I could keep the team updated about the orphanage. All the teams seemed to want to stay in touch, so they agreed to share their information with the strange, lone white girl who would randomly pop up at the orphanage. I also became friendly with the neighbors next door, and they would call me if they saw groups of foreigners enter the orphanage.
Then, less than a week later, I divinely connected with a wonderful woman from Colorado who would be leading a medical team on an upcoming visit. She explained in her e-mail that the doctors and nurses were coming to do medical evaluations of the children at the orphanage. On the day of their visit, I hopped in a tap-tap and arrived at the orphanage to jump in and start assisting the medical team, but immediately my inner antennae went up when I noticed something strange—dozens of children were being evaluated whom I had never seen in all my visits to the orphanage. I made a quick comment out loud, but one of the visiting team members shot back, quickly and decisively, “No. All of these kids live here.” So I closed my mouth and kept doing what I was doing as more unfamiliar kids streamed through the pop-up clinic.
After a few hours I decided to take a break. The team’s support members had set up a waiting area nearby where they played with children and kept them occupied until it was their turn to see the doctors. I sat on a step close to a pile of alphabet books, deep in thought, trying to make sense of all the confusion.
“Hi!” A woman with curly hair on the visiting team turned around and smiled at me. I smiled back. “I’m Rita. What’s your name?”
She peppered me with all sorts of questions: “Who are you? Where are you from? Where do you stay?”
As I answered, I could tell she was more and more intrigued. Finally she looked me square in the eyes and said, “You know, I get a really strange feeling here.”
My heart dropped at her words, and I felt my throat tighten.
She leaned in, asking quietly, “Do you?”
Unable to speak, I nodded my head slowly up and down.
She turned her head, looked to the side as if deep in thought, and said, “I just can’t figure it out yet.”
“Me either,” I mumbled, a little in shock at her words because they mirrored my own feelings.
I looked away from the curly-haired woman to the doctors as a tiny boy waddled up to the examination chair. He had a distinctive pout on his lips, and I knew the doctors had seen him earlier that morning. “I think you’ve seen this little boy already,” I said. No one seemed to be listening. I heard a halfhearted “Oh, really?” from someone, but nothing else happened. It wasn’t a big deal, but I thought the team would want to know, for efficiency’s sake. I was going to just let it go but then decided I had to try again.
I walked over, picked up the little pouting boy, and brought him to the curly-haired woman. “Excuse me,” I said.
She glanced up.
“Rita, I think . . . well, I’m actually pretty certain we’ve seen this little boy already.”
Rita listened; then we chatted for a second with some of the medical team, realizing that the orphanage director was sending the same children to the doctors but with different names in order for it to appear there were more children in the orphanage than there actually were. We sent the little boy off to play, and I let out a deep breath and returned to my work. While the rest of the afternoon was pretty routine, I still hadn’t been able to determine what was causing these warning bells to go off in my spirit. Nevertheless, it felt like an incredible moment of success to connect with this one woman named Rita who cared and believed me.
As the team prepared to leave the orphanage, I asked, as I usually did, for contact information. I wanted to stay in touch with the team. Rita specifically came up to me before she left the orphanage and gave me her e-mail address, asking if it would be possible to be updated about the children.
A few weeks later, when the next team arrived at the orphanage, they decided to take the kids to Gressier for a day to run around on top of Bellevue Mountain. The city where Son of God is located is known as a concrete jungle. The sweet children at the orphanage never get to run in grassy fields, and most haven’t even seen the beautiful Caribbean that is so close to them.
As this team loaded the children onto the rented tap-tap bus, I felt that familiar tug in my heart, the one I was becoming more and more accustomed to, so I decided to take one more look through the orphanage to see if we were missing anyone. As I stepped down from the bus, a few people called out, “We already checked” and “All the kids are here!”
“I’ll be quick,” I said. I ran back inside and hurriedly checked each room. When I stuck my head into the third room, I froze. There was a girl, in a pink T-shirt and no diaper, lying under a rusty bed frame and obviously not feeling well. I picked up the little, warm body and instantly realized I’d made a mistake. She was a he! As I rushed back onto the bus with the feverish little boy, I heard a few gasps.
“But I checked every room!”
“Me too. Where’d she find him?”
As I sat in my seat, someone handed me a diaper to put on the boy. Off we went to Gressier. Most of the kids were excited to be going somewhere, but Gabriel, the little boy in my arms, just lay there, warm, scratching, and coughing.
The kids ran around on Bellevue Mountain, playing, screaming, and laughing under the blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds. When they got hot and tired, they rested under the shady tree, but before long they were off again. While the visiting team played games with the kids, sang songs, and hung out, Gabriel lay in my arms that were now coated in his sweat. When we returned to the orphanage at the end of the day, I remembered the little burned girl and couldn’t imagine sending Gabriel back inside in his current condition, so I asked Pastor Joe if I could take Gabriel to stay with me for a few days back in Gressier.
Pastor Joe did the usual shoulder shrug and nodded his head, murmuring, “Yes, no problem.” His lack of care and indifference with the children had become increasingly evident to me, and it wasn’t until later I realized how unacceptable my request of taking a child out of an orphanage without paperwork or proper approval really was.
That night I was staying at a guesthouse in Port-au-Prince, and that evening, as God would have it,
an American doctor arrived. She came over and took a look at Gabriel for me.
“Bronchitis, scabies, and fungal infections, for starters,” she pronounced. “This two-year-old is fighting hard. Here’s some medication. Give it to him for seven days.”
Children in Haiti suffer from all kinds of medical problems that many of us have never heard of. Scabies is one of those, a very contagious skin infection caused by a tiny burrowing parasite. It is extremely difficult to get rid of and causes intense itching, which gets especially unbearable at night.
In addition, bronchitis, usually very treatable in America, is a major problem in Haiti where respiratory conditions can be deadly, especially when combined with other untreated infections and chronic health problems. These are part of the reasons why Haiti has the highest infant and child mortality rates in the Western hemisphere, with diarrhea, respiratory infections, and tuberculosis among the leading causes of death.2
Clearly Gabriel was very sick, and I was worried the orphanage wouldn’t remember to give him his medication on time, so I called Pastor Joe, told him the diagnosis, and asked if I could watch him for the whole seven days to make sure he would get better.
“Yes. No problem,” Pastor Joe said. I could picture the shrug.
Whew. Maybe with seven days of one-on-one care, Gabriel could get strong enough for his body to help fight off these infections. Bearing in mind Gabriel’s condition, along with my misgivings about the orphanage now confirmed by Rita, I contacted the medical team that had just visited the orphanage and asked them to send their medical records to me. They agreed, and I started collecting information on each of the children in the orphanage.
By this time I had tracked over a dozen organizations that were supporting the orphanage and regularly sending in aid and food, but I had little evidence of those resources ever making it to the children. I had only been collecting information for a few months, but I realized that most of the organizations were unaware of the others that were supporting Son of God Orphanage. I sent out an e-mail to the list of leaders I’d compiled and requested they participate in a conference call so I could give them a briefing of what I’d been observing. With the assistance of a few close acquaintances who helped me coordinate, they all dialed in on the appointed day from four different time zones.
Miracle on Voodoo Mountain Page 6
