Forty Two Kids

I've written so much this week and some nights I've even gone to bed with one more blog idea in my head.  Yet one thing has been strangely missing because I'm not really ready to process it yet.  So much has happened these two weeks, so much that words can't wrap themselves around, that only silence  can do it justice.  Its almost as if I attempt to explain it, the magic will dissipate into thin air. I want to protect it and keep it mine, partially because I don't want it to be really  real and partially because I'm not quite sure what to do with it.  So I've put it away for later.  Who knows when later will really be?  But I figure I better go ahead and start right now.

I visited an orphanage in Cap Haitien twice in the past two weeks.  I've never been to an orphanage and I'll be honest, I've got a bit of an Annie complex.  I've over sensationalized it to turn it into a horrible place with a mean nasty woman and every child just begging to be adopted.  I thought I'd be faced with sickly and pathetic children putting on their best in the hopes that they would be going  to a real home like mine.  Like I said, I didn't quite know what to expect then and I can't even say what I expect now.  So let me just share some thoughts, that's all.  

They are beautiful, each and everyone of them.  Possibly the healthiest looking Haitian children I've seen these past two weeks.  Forty two in all. 

Twenty one of them live on the tip top of a mountain covered with cinder block homes, one on top of another.  Literally. The neighbors laundry hangs precariously across the twisted barbed wire fence just feet from the children's bedroom windows.  There is no green grass and no place to ride a bike.  There is no city park or ice cream stand just down the road.  There's a three story crooked building and a small cement play yard with a simple and well loved basketball hoop.  There is a rude and primitive kitchen with three large burners on a wrought iron frame with no obvious source of fuel. There are four bedrooms, each with bunk-beds, some of them four to a room, sleeping eight children in a space smaller than my bathroom. There is a communal closet where clean clothes are kept and a sewing room off to the side where the girls are learning a trade. All of it clean and neat and impressive amidst the squalor of Cap Haitien.  Twenty one lucky kids, a paid "momma" on each floor and the sweetest dispositions imaginable.

The other twenty one are street kids.  I don't know what that means besides that they don't live in that crooked house on the tip top of the hill, they live somewhere else. I didn't ask because I don't think my heart could take the answer. I know that among those street kids are some as young as 8 and as old as 15. Do they open the heavy metal gate and have them file past the guards that carry guns in order to keep the other twenty one safe? I don't know.  How do they choose which twenty one sleep there and which twenty one sleep nowhere? I just don't know.  

  I do know that forty two kids were there in that cement play yard today.  I know that I saw forty two smiling and cherubic faces.  I know that forty two kids climbed on my back and arm wrestled Chris and shot hoops with Jesse.  I know that forty two kids got brand new dresses and fancy new shorts.  I know that forty two kids received forty two Chick-Fil-A cows and Elmer passed out forty two pieces of gum.  And I know that only twenty one children have beds.  

Like I said, I'm not quite sure how to process this, especially as my own children are without their momma tonight.  But I do know that there is hope in that orphanage, I know that the Harvey's are full of love and God's grace, because they are giving forty two kids a place to be, even if only for a few hours a day.  In that place I saw love. I saw happiness.  I saw friendships. I saw hope.  I saw family.  

The Harvey's live just down the road from me in Haymarket, VA.  I've broken bread  with them and shared stories and shed tears.  God willing, in the coming years, those forty two kids will live just down the road from Pere Bruno in a little town called  Limonade.  They have the land, they just need the money to build. They'll move all together, all forty two of them, into a bigger house with a bigger yard with better stoves and better rooms.  They won't need the armed guards or the big metal gate.  There won't be children sleeping nowhere or kids called street kids and kids called Kay Anj kids, they'll all be just that...the Harvey's kids.  

Some people ask "What makes a family?". It isn't so much blood and DNA as much as it is love.  Those twenty one kids and those twenty one kids, they make forty two, whichever way you shake it, forty two kids and a few mommas. Add in Father Eustache and Archibald, toss in an American twenty something named Lindsey and tie them all together with the Harvey's and their love... If I've learned one thing today, family isn't what I thought it once was, just as home isn't where the gps sends me at the end of the day.  Because today I found both in a place where I expected to find none.