Orphanage gives Haitian children a home and hope

To see and hear scenes from the orphanage, click here.

TABARRE, Haiti — Chedlin Justinvil runs an orphanage in a house that remained standing when January's earthquake turned the house next door to dust. Since then, at least 50 families have come to the gates.

One after another, the mothers ask, "Will you take my child?"

With a budget of less than $30,000 a year, most of which comes from Raleigh-area Presbyterian churches, Justinvil can't help all the mothers and fathers who cannot feed their children. More often than not, his answer is "no."

One house stands when the next one falls. One child is saved from poverty, hunger and ignorance, and a thousand others suffer.

Haiti was already the Western Hemisphere's poorest country before the earthquake, with an estimated 380,000 children classified as orphans, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund. There is no official estimate of how many more children were orphaned by the quake, but some relief groups say the number may have doubled.

Most of the children called orphans in Haiti actually have at least one living parent who, like the mothers at Justinvil's gate, give up their children. If no orphanage or relatives will take them, the children may be given to other families who feed and shelter them but treat them as indentured servants. Some are left to the streets, where they may get involved in drugs or the sex trade.

"It touches me, but I really can't take care of that," Justinvil says of the children who are lost. "It's over my head."

Dreams of success

Justinvil found Daphnee Desir in 2006, a skinny little girl with no hair, the youngest of seven children living with their parents in a one-room mud hut.

It's common in Croix des Bouquets, the community where the family lived, for parents in their 20s to have five, six, even nine children.

"There is no birth control," Justinvil said. "And in Haiti, your children are your retirement. This is why some people have so many."

Justinvil started the Yahve-Jire Children's Foundation in 2005 and opened the orphanage in 2006 in Croix des Bouquets with money from a Georgia land developer. He offered to take Daphnee in.

She is 16 now, shy, prone to look away when she answers a question, twirling the white ribbons in her hair. She is good in school, she says, though she admits she studies harder some days than others.

Through an interpreter, she says in Creole that she will be a good mother one day, better than her mother. "I will be an adult. Get a job, and not do nothing all day," she said.

She wants to be a doctor.

Daphnee occasionally sees some of her brothers and sisters. Some of the children who live in the orphanage never see their families.

"They keep asking for their parents to come and see them," said Justinvil, shaking his head. "But the parents don't do that. It's terrible."

Other children, he says, don't want their parents to come.

"They are afraid they will take them back, and they don't want to go."

Adoption corruption

The Haitian government temporarily halted international adoptions a few weeks after the earthquake, which killed more than 200,000 people and brought a flood of relief from around the world. The government, supported by major aid groups, worried that in the chaos children would be unnecessarily separated from family members or, worse, fall into the hands of child traffickers.

Now those restrictions are easing. Last week, the U.S. State Department reported that the Haitian Adoption Authority is now accepting new applications for children who were documented as orphans before Jan. 12 or have been relinquished by their birth parents since the quake.

Justinvil says he generally does not try to find adoptive homes for the children he cares for.

"The system is so corrupt," he said. Hopeful parents may pay thousands of dollars and work for two or three years to adopt a child, "and then the adoption is never allowed."

The would-be parents lose the money, Justinvil says. The child loses hope.

Instead, Justinvil does all he can to improve their lives here.

Three years ago, when the recession hit, the Georgia developer had to stop sending money to pay the orphanage's rent and other expenses. The web of personal connections that have long tied Haiti with North Carolina benefactors brought Justinvil to Western Boulevard Presbyterian Church. Member Kathy Johnson coordinates the church's work with Yahve-Jire, with financial help from Clayton, Davie Street, Westminster and Fieldstone Presbyterian churches.

Johnson, a UNC social worker, thought she had seen children in bad situations. "Nothing prepared me for Port-au-Prince," she said.

Some of the younger children have no clothes, no shoes. Throughout Haiti, most children have no access to public schools.

In 2008, Justinvil moved his children to Tabarre, to a place large enough that they could start their own school. The house, a two-story fortress of block and masonry, is perhaps 5,000 square feet

When the orphans moved in, they made a boys dorm out of half of the dining room. The girls sleep in the room next door. The two bathrooms work, when there is electricity to pump water from the well. Cooking is done over a fire in an outdoor shed.

In the unfinished space upstairs, the foundation established its school, which starts with the Yummy Kindergarten and runs through sixth grade. Teachers work with two grades at a time, with the children of the orphanage and more from the neighborhood, whose tuitions are paid mostly by the churches in Raleigh.

Instruction begins at 8 a.m. when Justinvil rings the hand bell on his desk and the uniformed children line up in the gravel yard to raise the flag and sing the national anthem.

When the earthquake hit, they were playing inside. Instinctively, they ran out. Dust was everywhere. The house next door had collapsed. Their own house had a few cracks in the walls, and sections of the security wall had fallen down.

Justinvil, who works as an architect to support his family and the orphanage, had a structural engineer examine the house. It's OK, the man said. The children will not sleep inside, preferring pallets in domed Coleman tents outside.

Because they sense the continuing aftershocks more keenly than adults, the children also won't venture back to the second floor where their classes were. So when school finally started back in April, the teachers moved the benches and the chalk boards outside, and class is now held under a tarp.

At first, says kindergarten teacher Valerie Boisrond-Chery, her students were distracted. One of them had lost a parent in the trembling of the earth, as they call it. Others had lost friends.

Singing again

It has gotten better, she says. It was quiet for months after the earthquake, but now, her students are singing again. She starts them in the morning with a boisterous chant in French, which she teaches them because it will serve them better than their native Creole. They shout, they laugh, they dance.

They have almost nothing - no library, no toys, and only the most basic school supplies - yet they complain about nothing. They get something here, Boisrond-Chery says, they would not get outside these walls.

"L'amour."