Goodness Gracious

There is nothing that can prepare you for a third-world orphanage.

The flies. The listless eyes. The snotty noses and chins. The swollen, vacant bellies.

And that’s just the adults.

OK, not all of them. Miss Eveline, the director at Notre Dame Orphanage in Carrefour was tired but appeared healthy. But, for most of the women sitting in the filth holding infants in their arms, the heaviness of another day sat upon their shoulders like the slabs of crushing mortar pinning cars across Port au Prince. They are carrying the weight of grief and responsibility and illness and despair.

Their eyes only lit briefly when lollipops left over from my church’s Valentines activity were pulled from the bag. In hopes of securing at least one, a few of the desperate shoved babies toward me, gesturing that each drooping, feeble child would love nothing better than sugar’s kiss upon its malnourished lips.

It was only a small sack of surplus candy and random Happy Meal toys stuffed as an afterthought into a backpack and it caused a churning mass of humanity that literally brought me to my knees.

The rest of our team quickly surged in, scooping up a few of the 60+ children that live out each day in the dust on sheets and a spartan playground. Just a few weeks ago, I’m told there was a heap of more than 50 tiny bodies stacked in the same space after the earthquake broke their world.

Several of our men climbed atop the old iron merry go round, swirling a couple of tykes into broad smiles and laughter.

Beverly went right to work, holding babies and checking their tiny bodies for fever and dysfunction. At least one, she said, has pneumonia.

My husband tossed a donated football with a couple of the boys. Our team’s pastor sat on a tarp on the ground, his lap overrun by a couple of children. Dana had two more. Brad two. Mark same. Debbie. JP. John.

Even with every member of our team cradling several kids at a time, there was no way to grow enough arms and laps to touch them all.

The boys clamored for the matchbox cars in the bottom of my bag and one sad-eyed son scored an unopened bag of tiny green soldiers. His eyes widened in amazement at his good fortune, but I saw one of the older boys pursue him around the corner. The younger of the two was back in line, his eyes swollen with tears, minutes later.

Two sleeves of hair ties were in my bag and, to satisfy so many, I doled them out, one by one, to extended hands. Sometimes there were so many tiny fingers reaching toward my face that I couldn’t see what I was holding.

Red. White. Black. Blue. Pink. Navy. Green.

When the women saw there were elastic ties being given away, they discarded all pretense and stepped forward with hands outstretched.

The older kids were quick learners. When one child who was already clutching a toy gestured that he’d like to deliver a treasure to someone across the yard and I relented, savvy copycats queued up, pointing to phantom recipients. When I busted them with a knowing laugh and scolding, their eyes would sparkle and lips quiver into mischievous grins.

In the space where our team had planned to build a shelter, a French team had already come and gone, leaving behind a sturdy building to house the kids. In the area vacant just this morning when our advance team had visited, there was now a beautiful Shelterbox tent.

There is work that still needs to be done and food is scarce, but the greatest need seemed to be one of companionship.

Goodness is what they seek. Kindness. A caring touch.

Many of these children likely have no way to comprehend why it has not been their mother’s arms or father’s shoulders that have held them these past few weeks. Their loss is still raw and new.

Too soon, it was time to leave. The sky was darkening and much of our team would be crammed into the rear bed of a pickup truck to ride for 30 minutes through the traffic- and people-choked streets back to our camp. To minimize risk, we needed to hurry.

As the driver was backing the truck from the orphanage, one lone child came staggering toward us with outstretched arms, sobbing to see us leave.

His tears matched ours – but especially those of John, my tall, quiet-natured teammate who had to return him to his plight.

Hoping to Better Connect with You

This has been a bit of a beta site for me and now I'm moving everything over to my permanent site at www.CherylLewis.com. I hope you will continue to hang out with me there. (I haven't figured out how to add a Follower section there, yet, but you can subscribe by RSS feed if you like. Be sure to say Hi.)

In eight days, I will be leaving with a 10-member team to head to Haiti. Expect God to work in His customary amazing fashion!

You Matter to Haiti

I feel overwhelmed and I’m not even there, yet.

Thanks to Twitter and the Internet, I can digest #Haiti news 24/7 and, because of my fierce interest and concern, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

My daughter says I’m obsessed.

Maybe she’s right. I just can’t seem to distance myself from the Haitians’ reality – even though it’s one I have not yet personally experienced. My husband and I leave in two weeks with our team of 10 from Eagle Pointe Church in Acworth, Georgia, and even the travel part sounds grueling:

Atlanta in the wee hours of Feb. 28 to Ft. Lauderdale through customs to Port-au-Prince (at least we don’t have to make our way into the Dominican Republic, as most earlier teams did, and wend our way through 10 hours of bad roads) to whatever part of that town we will call our home for six days in a tent. All I know is there’s an orphanage there - and lives that I desperately want to help change.

Preparing to go is already a flurry. They have so many, many needs and, before we can even get around to addressing them full time, we have to think about a few of our own.

Malaria tablets. Prevention against tuberculosis - it’s rampant in Haiti. Same with Hepatitis. I’m told there’s time to booster our systems against Hepatitis A, but B? Not so much. That’s the one where you don’t want spit or blood “contaminating” you. Tetanus. Even more potential illnesses that escape me at the moment. I keep hearing something about dengue fever. Sounds frightening.

And yet I feel selfish when I fret over the “what might happen’s” of trekking to Haiti to help.

Those people – by the hundreds of thousands (and I don’t just mean numbers – I mean BREATHING, ACHING INDIVIDUALS!) – are living in filth and facing the real fear that, in just a few weeks, a fierce storm season arrives and their pieced-together shelters will likely be swept away during flooding through debris-choked streets.

That is a big fear.

So the little things, like “Will one of those mosquitoes that is munching on my kids after dark - though I’m trying to huddle them beneath me under a sheet of government-issued plastic, if even that, for shelter - cause malaria or spread fatal disease?" just gets lost in their “How will we survive this night” despair. Never mind that some of them no longer have an arm or leg. Or husband or wife or mother or father or child or sister or brother or dearest friend.

And, no, that’s not even taking into account their incessant hunger.

Or their fear for safety. Women are being raped in the night and, with husbands and brothers no longer alive for protection, there are few who will risk intervening to help each other. Children, some too young to even identify the aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors who might rescue them, are being spirited away and sold for slavery and worse.

Yet God is there. Haitians are gathering by the sixty thousands to sing and praise and fiercely, desperately pray. They are thronging in the streets – it is their living room now.

God is the reason I’m willing to go. His plan is always better than my own and I trust Him.

But, yeah, I’m feeling a “little” overwhelmed. I’m not sleeping much.

Neither are they.

Because I know and they know that, no matter how many protein bars or toys or sacks of rice or even tents that I can distribute, it will be a drop in the bucket. There is no handy, “Delta is ready when you are” escape for those people and they couldn’t leave their country to grasp at a better life, even if they wanted to. There is no leaving – there is only coping, without a home and without protection and without food.

There is only one thing I can offer:

Now that I know about their need, they don’t have to do it without me.

It might not solve a country’s devastation but, in a mere 14 days, I will reach in my pocket and my fist will emerge with as many protein bars as I can hold and some mother who has had nothing for perhaps days will have something in her own hand to give to her starving child.

The baby formula you send with me will fill her baby’s yearning stomach.

The coloring books and crayons you contribute will put an afternoon’s glow back into a kid’s face.

The tent you provide will mean they get to watch the rain slide in sheets down around them, instead of through their clothes and belongings and into the mud pooling in their makeshift beds.

Can’t send one with me? Go to http://ahomeinhaiti.org. Forget giving a box of chocolates and ridiculous roses for Valentines Day. Show your family just how grateful you are for what and who you have by sharing with someone who may literally die without you! Trust me, love will fly at you from all corners!

I don’t know what you can give to me or others like me to send to Haiti and the people who are, yes, dying there – but, more importantly, fighting to LIVE there.

But I do know that, whatever it is, it matters.