Stories & Testimonies

Not many things are for certain in Haiti, but most can count on poverty and death. So how do children, most of whom are orphans, survive such depressing realities while also living in an orphanage? I discovered the answer when I visited Haiti earlier this month with my wife, Kayla, and Orphan's Tear director Elisabeth Walter.

"I really don't know how they survive," Pastor Geordany, the director of Mt. Carmel Orphanage, replied when I asked him how Haitians could pay the high food prices in Haiti. The average cost of a gallon of milk is over $9, and a pound of oranges costs about $5!

We've seen all kinds of poverty this week in Haiti: economic, political and spiritual. It's not hidden, like in much of the US, but as if intentionally exposed for all to see.

Fight the French! Kayla (my wife) could not believe her ears. She had just returned from a much-needed restroom visit midway through a 3-1/2-hour Sunday church service—which I learned was pretty standard in Haiti—feeling very confused.

"I was sad that I had to bring him here, but I knew he would have a better life." With those words Thessoit Belony, translated through Pastor Wildelson, the director of Mount Zion Orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, told me her story. Mount Zion is a small orphanage crammed into a crowded sea of colorless, half-crumbling cement-block-and-rusty-tin homes on the southwest side of the city. You can see poverty everywhere. You can smell it.