Overcoming poverty in Haiti, one fragile child at a time

Second-year MSW student Ann Bush did a summer internship in Haiti that her professor, Mat Despard, helped set up. This is an essay she wrote upon her return.
 

Ann holds Peterson, a 3-year-old boy who lives in the orphanage. Peterson is currently waiting for his paperwork to go through, so he and his little brother Naderson can move to Montana with their adoptive parents.

Watson is his name. Sweet, helpless, little Watson was born in Lamardelle, Haiti two and a half years ago, though he cannot sit up and is the size of a large infant. He lives in a small mud hut with his parents and eight brothers and sisters, half of whom are orphans that his kind, uneducated and severely poor parents have taken in. Theirs is truly a story of human kindness and decency, as they can barely feed their own children. In fact, not long ago, the littlest among them was dying.

I was in Haiti for my third time, working as a student intern for Fondation Enfant Jesus (FEJ).  I lived and worked in the small remote village of Lamardelle, walking house to house and talking with everyone I could find about their needs, perceptions of the community and ideas concerning new programs.

Every day I would see the half-naked children with distended bellies from under-nutrition, the unattended babies eating dirt off the ground with flies in their faces, the hordes of individuals gathering around the village’s only clean water pump in the evenings, the stoic and hard-faced adults watching my every move, both of us having the knowledge that I have more blessings in my life than they could ever imagine. I was not, however, prepared for meeting Watson.

I instantly knew that he was dying. He had the classic signs of advanced malnutrition—whitish hair, lifeless limp body, irritable and hardly larger than an infant with a mouth full of teeth. I asked his mother if he eats, and she replied that she has been breastfeeding him but he stopped eating weeks ago.

I thought, “I can save this baby. I have power and privilege. Now that I have seen him he is not going to die.” Knowing full well that the crèche [orphanage] has a surplus of formula and medicines, I couldn’t imagine why we wouldn’t be able to give some to Watson. But the second I saw the look on the crèche supervisor’s face, I knew we could not, and my heart sank below the dry land.

And then one day, Gina Duncan, executive director and patron saint of FEJ, came to Lamardelle and I had to tell her about Watson. Without any hesitation, she replied, “Where is he?”

Gina knew that we didn’t have allocated resources for Watson, but she told me to sneak a box of food from the crèche to his house anyway. She doesn’t know how it will be paid for, but she instantly put Watson on a nutrition program and as soon as he can walk, she’s putting him in our preschool. Not only that, she has enrolled all eight of his brothers and sisters in FEJ’s school so they can receive two meals a day and an education. They will need sponsors, like countless other children, and she knows we will find them.

If I could with words, I would express to you the joy of seeing little Watson in the nurse’s office, his brown eyes dancing around the room at the many new sights. I would express the sadness I felt when his mother, after being told by the nurse that he would have died in a month had nothing been done, look at me with shame and say, “I didn’t know he was so sick.” I would convey my joy when I visited Watson at his home on my last day in Haiti, and after three weeks of treatment I found him sitting up on a blanket all by himself. I can still feel his soft warm body against my chest when I held him last.

I have been back in the states for a few months now, and the question is: How do I reconcile Watson’s world and my own? At present, I am sponsoring Watson, helping to pay for his food and medicine, and later school, as Gina would have undoubtedly done with her own money. I am also, along with a few other FEJ devotes, helping to write a grant to open the health clinic. Once that goal is accomplished, we will train community health workers to go out into the village and identify children in various stages of malnutrition and then put them on a program similar to Watson’s. It will work, and will have a profound impact on this struggling community.

I am hopeful for and thankful to Haiti, and all the profound and beautiful experiences I was given there. I know it must be difficult to truly understand the experience of meeting a dying child and taking part in his recovery if one has not. I can hardly remember what my inner life was like before I witnessed life in a place like Haiti. My hope, among many, is that everyone will be able to have this kind of experience. Because then, everyone would do something to stop the 10 million children from dying of preventable causes each year.

Because when you see them, meet them, hold them, there is no question in your mind what to do. None at all.