Canada Day celebration: lessons from an orphanage

Happy Canada Day, everyone! On this day I am proud of this country where I put down my roots. This vast, wild, beautiful, open country. The Coast mountains, the Pacific ocean, the rainforest that I call home. I am grateful for this space, this place, this nation.

This home.

Robin and I spent our first two days in Haiti at an orphanage. We were immersed in the life of two women- a mother and her daughter- who had dedicated their lives to caring for the timoun- children- who came to them for warmth, love, and education.

Mami Kikine opened the orphanage in 1996, with the help of her energetic daughter, Madame Annie. At first they housed ten children in the village, and eventually made their way to Port-au-Prince and rented the ground floor of a home. They serve as an orphanage as well as a school of sorts; children both live in the home and come for their daily school program.

Prior to the earthquake, they had over 100 children. After the earthquake, many families sent their children to the countryside, to the promise of something better. Port-au-Prince has the highest density of any city in Haiti, which meant that post-earthquake, everything was compromised. Is compromised. Remains compromised.

So many children- timoun- were sent out to various families. Insert here a little cultural tidbit: In many- but not all- situations where a Haitian child is sent to live elsewhere, it is done so with the assumption that the child will be provided with food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and education, in return for domestic services. A live-in maid, if you will. However, in many cases, the domestic services are the only part of the bargain that is fulfilled, and the child is abused physically, psychologically, and sexually. When treated as slaves, the term for the child is “restavec”, and they are usually young females. In a country of 8 million people and climbing, 300,000 are restavecs. Food for thought.

NPR on restavecs: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1779562

But I digress. The orphanage that we stayed at now had about 50 children during the day, and 20 at night. We spent two days with these children, and watched Mami Kikine and Madame Annie teach them their lessons through song and dance, through call and response, through dedicated sweat and love. The children crowded around the three tables- actually delaminating doors set onto table frames- and listened and learned. Shortage of chairs meant that in many situations, two chairs became seating for four with the addition of a wooden plank between the chairs. The children learned and rehearsed, sang and danced, and carefully copied their assignments into their notebooks. It was thrilling to be a part of this, to see them learning and listening, and to see them reflect our own encouraging emphasis on education with such motivation. The sweat poured off Madame Annie while she provided an entire hour of call-and-response French lessons.

The children get one MRE (military ration) per day. The MREs were previously donated, and they are running low. So when we were there, all the children got one. The next day, they confessed that they did not have enough to provide food for all the children, so they saved them for the live-in orphans, and hoped that the others were provided with enough food at home.

They sleep on the floor, girls on one side, boys on another. No mattresses, only a thin blanket between the hard concrete and their thin bodies.

The water cistern was near-empty the entire time, and yet they generously offered us daily bucket showers. Filling up one bucket took five minutes of work, and was promptly emptied again for drinking,cooking, and washing.

They are three months behind on their rent, and they have had to send other children away because they cannot afford to keep them. They have also let go of four other teachers due to a lack of funding.

But these incredible women push on, smiling the entire time, loving these children with such fierce compassion.

Robin and I brought donations from Canada. We did a tie-dye project with them and they laughed and smiled and concentrated and delighted in the results. The t-shirts were nothing like what we had expected, but they came out beautifully. We provided them with notebooks and pencils and art supplies and watched as they focused their energy into creating. We filled their water cistern and bought them new tables and chairs and clothing and food and toothbrushes and worm pills.

We gave them so much from all your donations. And yet- they gave us so much more. I wish that all of you who donated time, money, or even words to me could receive a piece of the gift that Robin and I received from the orphanage. We learned so much from the children. We learned that love is hope, and hope is our future. And children need hope to grow. We learned that life is harder there than anywhere our own children will grow up, and that the beauty comes in the children. We learned that children of all ages have something to teach you, and each other. We learned that children without parents can make you cry, but that if they are in a space of love and acceptance and learning and hope, it will be alright.

We learned so much more than we both even understand yet. I hope these photos show it, and share some of it with you. Thank you, everyone, for all your love, support, and encouragement.

Happy Canada Day, everyone. Love this place, this home, this space. We are all so lucky.

More photos from our orphanage work:

Haiti June 2010