We Moved…Part 5

This is a continuation of a story we have been telling over the past few weeks, so if you have not been keeping up, please click here for Part 1, click here for Part 2, click here for Part 3, or click here for Part 4 so that the story will make sense.

At this point, we knew we needed to move our kids to a new location for many different reasons, but we were still struggling.  We were praying a lot, but we did not know exactly what to pray for.  Should we pray to find land soon, should we pray to find a rental property, or should we pray that another organization would open their property for us?  We did not know.  So we just prayed that GOD would lead us somewhere and that we would have a place to take our children away from the place they were currently living.  At this point, it could have been almost anywhere else, we just knew they needed to be safe.

This became even more apparent after we had the signatures from the children’s family that would allow them to come to Hope Rising and receive help from us there.  We knew that this would make Audancin angry, but we were not really sure what he could do and what he was capable of.  However, the Saturday after the Thursday that we began collecting signatures, we heard that Audancin had taken all of the children from the orphanage to another orphanage in Leogane to get “medical supplies.”  I am not sure how, but he found someone with a car who would come and pick him up and take him to a place with Americans where he could again tell his story and try to exploit the children for his own financial gain.  If he could do this, we were afraid that he would take it a step further and find an even more diabolical way of making money off of the children that we love since we were no longer supporting him.

At this point, Jess was very scared, and I became even more determined to figure out a plan.  The funny thing was, we had no idea what to do next.  We did not know how to find a place big enough to rent and we did not know of any other option at this point.  Christianville really wanted to help, but they just did not have a place to put the kids, so we were still scrambling as of Sunday.

In the midst of all of this we were still talking to our friends Matt and Cara at Hope Rising which is located halfway between Christianville and the orphanage.  I mentioned in a previous part of this story that they had been through something similar to what was happening to us but an even worse situation so they were very sympathetic and were good to talk with throughout the ordeal.  We had also spoken on numerous occasions about the possibility of our organizations working together in some way or another starting back in January before any of this really started.  In the midst of one of our conversations, Cara brought up to Jessica the possibility of us bringing the kids to their guesthouse as a temporary fix for our situation.  Jessica immediately loved the idea, I immediately thought it was too good to be true, and neither of us were sure if it was a serious proposal or if Cara was just giving us a little hope.  Jessica wrote Cara back to find out how serious she was, and her answer was exactly what we wanted to hear.  She still needed to talk to Matt and they still needed to present the idea to their board, but there was hope.  Actually, there was more than hope.  The place we were talking about had electricity, running water, beds for each of our children, and it provided a sense of security that none of our children had ever known before.  It was what we had always wanted for our children, so we began to pray that this idea would come to fruition.

On Wednesday, the dream seemed like it might become a reality.  The Hope Rising board was behind the idea along with Matt and Cara and I could not believe it.  They were willing to bring 20 children onto their campus and let them stay in their guesthouse, it was nothing less than a miracle that at the exact time that we needed it, we had an organization (really friends more than an organization) that opened up their beautiful facilities to our children.  There was still a lot of work to do (as you will see in the next part of the story), but the initial part of the plan was set.  We had a place for our children to live and we had a move-in date of Saturday April 25, 2015, now all we had to figure out was how to make this happen…

Stay tuned for part 6 of the story on Friday and Jessica’s perspective of part 5 tomorrow.