I was 17 years old and living in Haiti, helping my mom and step-dad start an orphanage there. The 6 of us had moved into a 4 room house in the village of Dessalines at the edge of the Artibonite valley just 100 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Living among the Haitian people, learning the language and customs seemed a good way to introduce ourselves into the community.
While dad bought supplies and worked with some of the Haitian men to build our first building on the land we had purchased, mom recruited us into opening a clinic and educating the women and children on basic hygiene. We had never seen such poverty, and though we had always been considered poor in our own country, we looked extremely wealthy here. It seemed a good place to start at least.
My mom has always had a huge heart when it came to helping people out. If she saw someone naked, she would clothe them, hungry, she would feed them. You get the picture. Although she was only a nurses aid, when she saw the large need around her, she simply decided to do something. We rented a small house just up the street from where we were living, got our interpreter, Snowball, and spread the word that clinic would be open the next morning. Nothing could have prepared us for what we saw waiting for us. I don’t know that anyone counted, but the line seemed to go on forever. We were totally exhausted at the end of the day from dressing wounds, checking vitals and educating.
I can still see mom sitting with old medical books looking at pictures of rashes, trying to make a diagnosis so she could treat them. Treating third degree burns because there were no other clinics or hospitals within 50 miles and most of the people were too poor to go. If she could do something, anything, she would. It became normal to see her cry over the needs she saw before her every day, hoping to somehow make a difference. She had seen so many babies come in with end stages of tetanus or lockjaw, telling the mother that it was because the person who cut the cord did it with a dirty knife that her baby was dying.
Late one evening someone arrived at our door frantically knocking and yelling for us to come and follow. We arrived at a thatch roofed shack with dirt floors. The house was closed up tight with no airflow and the stench was horrible. Mom told us to breath through our mouth but it didn’t help much. We arrived into the 2nd room of the house to find a woman having close contractions, ready to deliver. Mom looked at us and said, “Well, I’ve never delivered a baby, but I’ve had 3 so I have that experience.”
There is just no way I can tell you half of what I witnessed that day, but the message had been received in the village, no one but Mom could cut the umbilical cord. She would always be known as “Mom” and over the next 40 years, would make a profound difference in the lives of generations of children.
She was 40 years old when she went to Haiti. She left everything familiar, gave up her home, comforts and conveniences to make a difference. She wasn’t qualified, didn’t have a medical degree, didn’t understand the language at first, but she saw the need and went. Today she is 86 and the spark of compassion still lights the room up.
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