For the Unheard

After around a month of living at the orphanage, I could finally manage to have conversations in Creole. I was sitting in the yard with one of the workers, watching the kids run around the broken pool. I watched as a little girl named Lolli ran crazily from one end to the other. She was a kid that had bounds of energy, and could go without stopping the entire day. She had noticeable scars on her knees that looked like thick patches of mud, and I had often wondered about them. I motioned towards Lolli, and asked my friend what had happened to give her those scars.

    She looked at me grimly and explained that a few years ago, Lolli got into trouble with some of the past workers at the orphanage and as a punishment, she was made to kneel down on her knees, kind of like a time-out, which is pretty common in Haiti.
    Except it became uncommon when Lolli was made to kneel on the cement sidewalk in the hot sun for hours on end. 

    When Lolli was finally allowed to stand, her knees were bleeding so badly that she was taken to the hospital where they had to surgically work on her bones.

    She was only four years old.

    I remember going up to Lolli one evening and I placed my hand on one of her knees, where her skin had been melted off all those years ago. "Sometimes they still hurt," She said. I had nothing I could say.

November 2013

    When I came to Haiti in 2013, I thought I was moving to spend the rest of my life in an orphanage where I would care for and love orphaned children. This was my dream, and made perfect sense to me. I loved kids, in fact, I was great with kids. I took the command to care for orphans and widows very seriously, and wanted to spend my life making unwanted and abandoned children feel loved and wanted and important. 

    But after just three months of living in an orphanage, I returned home reeling from my experience. 

    Those three months were some of the hardest months I have ever faced still. And it wasn’t because I suddenly had given up pretty much everything. It wasn’t the constant hunger and sickness I faced. It wasn’t the fact that I was very much alone, that I was constantly enveloped by darkness, that I was covered in human fecies and urine every day, or even that I slept on a rat-infested mattress. 

    All of that was hard. Very hard.

    But that’s not what had me reeling, not what had sent me home.

    In those few months I had begun to uncover a truth, a truth that I continued to unravel for the next three years of my life. Something that would utterly wreck me, that would change all my plans, would cause me to lose friends and supporters, and bring a warfare into my life that I was unprepared for.

    Lindia was my diva, my dancer girl who was full of sass. I first met Lindia while I lived in the orphanage with her in 2013. I grew extremely close to her, this 11 year old who could hold her own. We would throw dance parties for all the kids in the broken pool in the backyard, and she would show me wild routines that she thought I was somehow capable of doing with her. 

    Often when the younger kids were asleep, I would have these deep conversations with Lindia and some of the other older kids. It would be pitch black and we would be huddled together, constantly swatting the mosquitos on each other’s legs. I sometimes asked about their families, about what had happened to their parents, and Lindia would always shrug quiety, looking at the ground, saying that she didn’t know.

    After one of those conversations I decided to ask the director, and when I inquired that day in 2013, I was told that her parents had abandoned her and her brother. 

    In 2014, I decided to inquire again. This time, I was told that her mother was actually dead, and that it was her father who had abandoned them. 

    In 2015, I came to the orphanage after a trip to the U.S. This time I didn’t find Lindia or her brother. They were gone, and I was told that a parent came and took them away. I spent that week crying uncontrollably. Here was this girl I had come to love like my own child, and now I had no idea if she was okay, if she was being taken care of. What kind of care would she receive from a parent that had abandoned her for five years? 

    A week later, Lindia, having memorized my phone number, called me and we arranged to meet up. She probably thought I was crazy for the way I ran towards her when I seen her, and glared at her father the entire way back to his house. When we arrived, there was a woman who looked so much like Lindia I didn’t even have to ask who she was. Her supposingly dead mother was very much alive. We all sat together and she began to tell me the story of how after the earthquake, the director had tricked her into giving up her children, telling her that they would be sent to the United States to study and get a quality education in their program. Only the director severed all contact with Lindia’s parents once they took the children away. Lindia’s mom searched for years, and not only did she miss them and worry about her kids, her community reviled her and said that she sold her children to foreigners in exchange for food. She finally found a source that connected her to the director and after threatening to get the police involved, she found the orphanage. She was appalled at how dirty and skinny and mistreated her kids looked and took them home.

    Many people contact me and ask about the orphanage work that I do, and rightly so, as I have gone rather quiet about what it is exactly that I’m doing here in Haiti.

    But the truth is, I am not doing orphanage work, in fact, I am trying to combat the orphanage system and prevent children from living in them at all.

    I have uncovered two great truths in my experiences. The first is this. Children suffer greatly in orphanages. They go hungry, they stay dirty, and they become so malnourished that they sometimes die. They lie next to their feces and sleep on metal bars frames. I have seen children denied education or begin going to school but never get to finish out the year. I have seen kids get kicked out of orphanages at 18 without even finishing their elementary education. I have experienced directors deny children needed surgeries, watch as children are left by themselves for days on end. I have seen children made to sit in chairs without moving for days and days. I know children who were lied to about their parents being dead, and I also know children who are manipulated to lie about their parents being alive.

    The second great truth is this. There are around 750 orphanages in Haiti, and around 80% of children living in these orphanages have at least one living parent, and almost all have other living family members. The truth is, children living in orphanages aren’t actually orphans. In the three years that I spent working with kids in orphanages, almost all of the children I have met have parents. But I have discovered these parents are often tricked into giving up their children or think that they are giving their child more opportunities by sending them to live in an orphanage, which in most cases, is not a reality.    The sad thing is, I know so many Americans and other foreigners that support the orphanages I served with or ones like them, who are aware of both the suffering these children are facing and also the fact that these children could be reunited with their families.

    It has been really hard for me to talk about the truth about orphanages. In the past, I have tried talking to people who support orphanages financially or help run them, and these conversations have been met with some pretty serious lash backs. After being threatened many times, being accused of lying, and being blown-off because I am young, I had become very discouraged and frankly scared to share about the truths I have learned here.

    I recently attended a meeting where Non-Profit workers, missionaries, and professionals from all over Haiti gathered together to discuss the orphanage crisis and the importance of family preservation. This meeting was important for me to attend for so many reasons, but most importantly, it made me realize that I was not alone in my experiences. So many people, both foreign and Haitian are becoming aware of the great neglect and abuse occurring in orphanages, and are coming together to combat it.

    In Proverbs 31, it says

                                              “Open your mouth for the mute,
                                           for the rights of all who are destitute.
                                           Open your mouth, judge righteously,
                                        defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

    I have been afraid to speak up because of what I have faced in the past, but I cannot remain quiet out of fear. I have seen too much suffering to keep my mouth closed, and have also seen so much goodness in family preservation to not open it.
    Earlier this year, my husband and I decided it was finally time for us to create a Non-Profit. We chose the name Ansanm which means together in Haitian Creole, as our vision is to empower families to stay together, and to prevent children from living in orphanages or other similar situations. We try to be strategic in how we come alongside of families, in targeting the issues that we have learned of why parents feel it is necessary to send their children to live in orphanages.
We are currently working with around 20 families in various parts of Haiti. Some of them have been reconciled with their children like Lindia’s family, some were in the process of searching for an orphanage to take their child, and others were simply vulnerable to being separated based on poverty and other situations.
   
      Every time I visit Lindia and her family, I find myself just staring at her. The change in her quality of life is amazing. She wears clean clothes and has put on healthy weight. She smiles. She has a real life now- where no longer is she confined to an orphanage building, but attends a school regularly, goes to church, participates in a dance class and performs in a group. Lindia does chores and gets to interact with her community. What is most beautiful for me to see is that she is a part of her family, where she respects her mother, where she takes care of her younger siblings and gets annoyed at her brothers. In January, Lindia’s mom will begin taking literacy courses in one of our programs to learn to read, write, and do basic math, and after that, we hope to give her some business training to start her own business.

  
    Lindia’s family has some dysfunction and things to work through. In fact, most every family we work with has a lot going on and have issues they need to deal with and things that they need to change.
    But my family also has a lot of dysfunction and stuff that we are trying to work through, and I am sure that yours does too. Families are messy, and they are hard- but families are what God designed and created for us. They are WORTH preserving and reconciling and restoring. Working with families is hard, honestly it’s pretty trying some days when you are trying to work through a family’s mess.
    But it’s so, so worthwhile and important.

    Lolli and Lindia’s lives used to look the same, day in and day out. But now? They lead completely different lives. Lolli is still in that orphanage. You might wonder why I even shared her story in the first place. I want people to know about her pain, grasp that she is a little girl, and realize that our voice can prevent and stop her suffering. I want people to fight for her and for children like her all over the world.
    Ask questions. Do some digging. Have those conversations. Pray for them. Speak up. Open your mouth- for those who are muted, for those who want to be heard but aren’t. 

* We are currently in need of people to come alongside of us and support what we are doing monthly, as we are hoping to hire some Haitian staff to work with us in January. This will be incredibly helpful and important for our ministry! If you feel interested in supporting our ministry, please reach out to me, I would love to chat with you!
    Please feel free to check out our website to learn more about what we are doing in Haiti!

https://ansanmhaiti.org
courtney@ansanmhaiti.org