We Moved…Part 1

We are going to take the next  few days to update everyone about how we haved ended up moving our children to a new place, the Hope Rising Campus.  The past 2 weeks have been crazy (even for Haiti), but we are now in a new place where our kids are safe.  There are still a lot of things to do and a lot of things to figure out, so we do not yet know the end of the story.  But we do know that for now we are safe and the children that we love are being taken care of.  Before we get into the story, I want everyone to know how great Hope Rising has been to us.  They have allowed us to use their guest house over the past 2 weeks knowing how difficult it would be to have 19 children live there.  Their facilities are beautiful and our kids love being here.  Also, we are in the process of changing some of the information on the website as new information becomes available, so please be patient with some of the pages that have been taken down or altered, they will be updated as soon as we know what the future holds.  Anyway, onto the story…

The latest story really starts when we arrived back in Haiti after our Silent Auction Fundraiser.  Things at the orphanage seemed a little different when we got there, but we had 3 teams in a row that came down that took a good deal of our time and energy.  After the third team left, we realized that something had happened while we were gone.  Without going into any detail, it became evident that we needed to move one of our children off campus to another place because she was no longer safe at the orphanage.  When we realized she was not safe, we did not wait to talk things through with Audancin (the Haitian who helped start the orphanage) or Rosie (his wife) because we knew she was not safe and that we needed to get her to a new place.  

When we arrived at the orphanage we told her to pack her things and that we would find her a new place to live.  We told her we were not mad at her but that we wanted her to be safe and so we brought her to our house and one of the wonderful Haitian women who lives on Christianville’s campus, Dr. Rose, invited her to stay with her for a couple of days until we found a new place.  When Audancin arrived back at the orphanage, he was very angry that we had taken one of the children.  We explained to him that we did it to keep her safe, but this did not change his mind.  He actually came onto campus and took all of her belongings out of our truck and took them back to the orphanage.  As I am telling this story, it is important for you to know that we believe Audancin to be one of the reasons that our child was not safe at the orphanage, so we made sure to cut off contact with him as well.  This made him furious.

While we still had the girl staying at the Christianville campus, Audancin continually came up with different reasons to bring her back to the orphanage.  He kept saying that her family would not be ok with this, so we told him that we would like to talk to her family and explain the reasons that we removed her from the old campus.  Audancin and Rosie kept telling us that they could not find her family (this is one of our girls whose parents were no longer in the picture, so she had only a cousin that we could contact) so we told them until we found them she would be staying with us.  Because of this, we finally heard that the cousin and her husband were on the way to Christianville to meet with us so that we could explain everything that was happening.  As we waited, there were many heated phone calls with Audancin and even a meeting with some of the other people in the area close to the orphanage.  The bottom line, however, was we were waiting to meet the girl’s family so we could explain to them what was going on.

Stay tuned to our next blog post where I will explain a little more of the story…