One wanted to brag about his grades. One wanted to talk about his soccer team. One, if we’re being honest, wanted to see what presents she would get. All of them wanted to lift up and hug their baby sisters and brothers and see how big they’ve grown.
None of them will get the chance.
Imagine if America was denied to you. The airports closed, the ports closed, the roads and borders all closed. If you tried a secret entry, you would likely be shot.
And none of your family could get out.
War zone? Gangland? The plot of a dystopian movie? Yes. All that. And in a land of freedom like America, the idea seems impossible.
But it is now daily life for Haitians, including the kids from our orphanage, the Have Faith Haiti Mission, many of whom, for the first time in their lives, will not be able to celebrate Christmas with their brothers and sisters. They are locked out.
“I’m really sad,” one of them, a 19-year-old girl, told me last week. “I miss everybody. We’re always together for Christmas. Can’t we find a way to get there?”
‘No Christmas for poor people’
The answer is no. Even though Christmas — and New Year’s — are holidays that in the 15 years I have been operating the orphanage our kids have never not spent together, this year, no less than 24 of them will be absent, college-age kids studying here in the U.S., sick kids we’ve brought up for medical care, and kids who are doing charity work to help others outside of Port-au-Prince.
This year, for the first time, they will all miss our Christmas play, our nativity re-creation, the singing, the dances, the beautiful prayer service, the special meal, the small presents Christmas morning that cause our littlest ones to squeal with delight, because it’s the only time all year they get anything of their own.
“There’s no Christmas for poor people.” That’s not a tragic sentiment. It’s a threat that a Haitian gang leader made recently. It means the misery, mayhem and murder will continue through the holidays.
And it is already unimaginable.
Population equal of Detroit
Haiti, in case you haven’t been keeping up, has fallen so completely into the hands of brutal gangs, that no airline will even fly there. American, Spirit and Jet Blue all discontinued their service after their airplanes were shot at, with one bullet piercing a plane’s exterior and injuring a flight attendant.
No one will ship anything to Port-au-Prince because the ports are controlled by the gangs.
You cannot drive on the roads throughout the country because the gangs will shake you down for money or simply kill you for no reason.
The bandits are literally running out of things to destroy. Last week, gangs threw Molotov cocktails and burned the only neurological trauma hospital in the country. Police stations have been torched. Prisons and government offices destroyed. Entire neighborhoods have been torched, their residents thrown into the streets. More than 700,000 citizens have been displaced, more than half of them children.
That’s the entire population of Detroit. Imagine if every Detroiter, man, woman and child, was literally chased out of his or her house, apartment, or condo and forced to live in the street.
And no one did anything about it.
That’s Haiti today.
Sense of belonging
And so, our kids — from a second-year medical student at Michigan State to a 5-year-old boy who suffers from numerous maladies after being denied food for years and weighing only 10 pounds when he was 3 years old — will all miss Christmas at the orphanage this year.
It breaks my heart. The universal fear of every child who winds up at an orphanage is abandonment, losing what is familiar again. It’s the reason we try so hard to keep traditions intact and make sure our kids, many of whom never knew their mothers or fathers, have a sense of home. Belonging. Being part of a family.
But how can you keep family traditions intact when you can’t get in or out? When the streets are too dangerous to consider shopping? When you take your life in your hands to make a deposit at a bank? When you can’t even land an airplane in your country?
Most of our 60-plus children have not been outside the orphanage gates in four years. Now the ones that have been lucky enough to earn college scholarships, or unfortunate enough to need medical care, can’t get back in.
One Christmas wish
If I could have one Christmas wish, it would be that our country and the rest of the world did something for this beleaguered nation that sits just 700 miles off our shores.
As one businessman who supported the recently destroyed hospital told the Miami Herald, “It’s as if you’re looking at a sinking ship with people on it, and you’re on the ship next to it, and you’re just looking at the people drowning. … You have a ton of life vests on your ship, and all you have to do is toss them out, and you’re not even doing that.”
The life vests my wife and I can offer is our home, where 19 of them will spend the holidays this year. If you would like to help the others in our orphanage, you can do so at havefaithhaiti.org. If you would like to help the country, you could put pressure on your Congressperson or Senator to support intervention in Haiti.
Or you could pray. Which is what our children do every day.
This time of year, I often hear that song by Band Aid recorded during the African food crisis 40 years ago, and the lyric:
“Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?”
When you can’t go home, when you can’t go out, when your hospitals and airports are no more and you feel like no one is coming to help you, how do you know it’s Christmas? Or is it just another day you’re trying to stay alive?
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.
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