Hello All,
We are going to start diversifying the updates a bit more. In addition to progress updates and stories, we are going to mix in a few updates a year about the four boys we have taken into our home and some updates about Haiti, its culture, current events and different systems.
For those of you who do not know, Catherine and I took five boys into our home about ten months ago when a mother at the JRF died from AIDS. One of the boys, Alexander, had moved to Jacmel without his parents last year. When Neri died of AIDS and we took the 4boys she took care of into our home Alexander started sleeping in our backyard until we let him sleep inside. In August, his mother arrived and told us that she was going to take him back to Esperanza to see his family, and would bring him back after a week or so. She and her husband then lied to, robbed and avoided us for four weeks before we finally learned through another source that Alexander was not coming back. We wish him and his siblings the best and hope the mother and father do a better job of taking care of their children than they did before.
We still have the other four boys in our house: Nelson, 3, Youbensly, 8, Williamson, 10, and Wilgens, 11. Nelson is a total rascal and a stereotypical little boy. He loves wrestling, throwing rocks, eating, making fake fart noises, grossing out Catherine, running all over the place and dancing. The kid brings some real funk when it’s dance time. We couldn’t attach a video to this email but hopefully will in the future. He also thoroughly enjoys moving stuff from one place to another, what and where are at his discretion, but once he decides a box of something needs to go from point A to point B my man cannot be interrupted until the job is done.
We are taking care of the boys divorced-parent style. They come to our house Monday morning before school and stay with us during the week. On Friday after school, they go to the JRF land where they stay with a family for the weekend. We think this is a great set up for several reasons.
Most importantly, we believe it will help them stay humble and stay in touch with who they are and where they come from. In 2010, I started feeding a few starving street boys in the hood I lived in. One thing led to another and before long they were living in my kitchen. They were 12-14 and it was a very different situation than our current situation, but I did learn a lot. The biggest lesson I learned was how easy it is to spoil impoverished children and how detrimental that can be. Spoiled is all about perspective and when you have lived the life of an impoverished Haitian child your perspective is worlds away from a standard American perspective. An American child who has clean clothes, eats meat every day, has a bike, and a videogame console in his house would not be considered spoiled or super rich. If any of ourchildren knew another kid who could check all of those boxes they would see them as insanely wealthy/spoiled. We have avoided buyingour boys bikes, too many clothes or letting them be wasteful, but they still get to eat as much as they want, live in a house with indoor plumbing, a cement roof, sleep two to a bed and have just generally moved on up in the world materially. We think it is extremely beneficial for them to still spend time at the JRF land where they use an outhouse, have a zinc roof, crowded living space, and generally live in an environment similar to what they have known for much of their lives, not including the hunger.
Selfishly, this set-up is also easier on us. The choice to take these boys in was easy as the alternatives to it were poor, to say the least. That being said, we were not trying to have/adopt children and going from 0-5 full time was a bit much. We still take the boys and one friend each to the beach on the weekends, but also get some time to relax and do as we will.
Sincerely,
David and Catherine
