Monday, July 25, 2016 - Day Three - Missionaries of
Charity Orphanage, Papillon Enterprise, Visit with Lavarice Gaudin of the What
If? Foundation
De La Salle High School student Ari Eckhaus
reports:
To begin our day we checked out of the
Eucalyptus guest house. This was difficult for us all because of the
relationships we had formed especially most of us kids who had a very
informative conversation with one of the house worker named Caleb.
After leaving Eucalyptus we traveled to
the Missionaries of Charity Orphanage located in Port-au-Prince. We were
greeted at the orphanage by mothers who were begging for us to take their
children into the establishment. My understanding is that some Haitians use
this orphanage as a daycare where their kids can be taken care of. Others leave
their kids in the orphanage more permanently but the parents visit the kids
quite frequently. When we walked into the orphanage we found about 20 children
varying from newborn to 4 years old, and all in varying states of mind and
health. Some children were up and about walking around with smiles on their
faces and seemed relatively healthy. While others were so malnourished that
they were confined to their cribs and unable to walk. Many of us interacted with
the children who looked more sickly until the sadness and guilt forced us to
move on and enjoy the cheerful presence of the other children. We played, held,
and even helped feed the children for about an hour. When that time had passed
we were faced with the difficult task of leaving the kids back in their cribs.
Most children cried, screamed, and even crawled and walked after us as we left
the room their cribs were in.
Following the heavy mental baggage of the
orphanage we tried to lighten our spirits by eating a traditional US-American
lunch of pizza and burgers at an organization called Papillon Enterprise. Papillon is an
NGO that works on giving jobs to Haitian parents to keep their children out of
orphanages (perhaps the very same one we had visited earlier in the morning) by
providing them with the means for a livelihood. We toured the workspace at
Papillon seeing the way that the Haitian artisans worked like a well oiled
machine to produce clay, paper, and glass beads for jewelry as well as pottery
pieces.
Following the tour of Papillon and a quick
shopping spree we returned to Shalom (the (Megachurch whose service we had
attended the day before) to meet a man named Lavarice Gaudin who with much help
from Saint Mary’s donations runs a program to feed hungry citizens in the poor
neighborhood surrounding the megachurch (he is not affiliated with the
megachurch). Lavarice, along with the US based What If? Foundation also has created a
beautiful school called the Father Jeri school. We were given a tour of
Lavarice’s school and listened to him share his political views about what
Haiti must do to improve its living conditions for its people. Lavarice also
shared his thoughts on Shalom. Rather surprisingly after 8 years of working
within 50 feet of each other Shalom and Lavarice’s organization don't get along
particularly well.
When we had said our goodbyes to Lavarice,
we loaded back into the van and headed back to our new guest house the Wall's Guest House (the name is
after the people who run the house). After a large dinner. We had a group
discussion on the day. Many of us agreed that the hardest part was leaving the
wailing kids at the orphanage. We concurred that we had abandoned them in a
similar way that their parents had, making many of us feel guilty, and sad. We
continue to reflect on the questions are we doing more harm than good and why
are we in Haiti. We also talked about the pros and cons of Papillon and the
ways that we feel it is more tourist oriented then it should be. Finally,
we discussed our thoughts on Lavarice and his school with many of us
brainstorming ways that we can continue to help his school grow. All in all we
agreed that today was the most emotionally complex day in Haiti thus far.
