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| Samuel meets new grandma. |
What do you do when you are a one-year-old
and you want to escape loving teasing from a dozen little hands? You run to the
visiting grandma volunteer that will be only too happy to cuddle you and shield
you so you can finally get a much needed nap! Resisting little Samuel’s
“Hey?” and pleading eyes is simply impossible.
After two weeks, leaving the
116 children is tough! Don’t get me wrong: they can be very annoying.
When forty little bodies fight and tug at your arms because they all want a
page to color or thread to make a beaded necklace and then pout because it
isn’t the right color, while I am profusely sweating in the
scorching summer heat of Haiti, I want to pull my hair out. But when evening
comes and it is a little cooler and two or three little ones settle on my lap,
their calm and loving touch melts my heart.
The children at the Foyer NDL
are regular children: they run, tease each other mercilessly, cry, laugh, watch too much TV, and the teenagers only seem to care about their phones and
whatever mysterious attractions they possess. They are basically OK.
Yet, I have several great
concerns: the food given by Food for the Poor and Hunger Relief International
is not quite sufficient and whoever in those administrations decided that
confetti frosting was a good spread for the tasteless white bread that is
breakfast is a criminal. How can one encourage sugar consumption in a place
where the water has no fluoride and there are no dentists around? And how can
one possibly qualify this as healthy food?
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| Napping 8 ft above ground |
For Maud Laurent, the Director
of the Foyer NDL, developing revenue-generating activities takes time and
energy outside of her regular job as one of the Directors of C.O.H.A.N., a
Dutch development agency. Hosting the volunteers with all their needs, keeping
up with the reports demanded by organizations that try to help, and putting
together requests for food and more food are daunting tasks that occupy Maud
from 5:30 a.m. to well after 11 p.m. As of now she has no operating budget and
has been relying on donations. Feeding three meals a day to roughly 124 people
not counting visitors, is a great accomplishment. Funds are also needed to enable the children to go to school, and get vocational training.
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| Maud with latest child: Samuel, 12 months |
So, how can the Foyer NDL
develop the resources to be sustainable? Friends are thinking of two
solutions:
1) Finding 100 sponsors who will pay US $40 per month. The
$4,000 revenue these sponsorships would generate would cover a lot of the costs
of salaries, supplies, medicines, tuitions and repairs. It would enable the
infrastructure to be more solid and without the constant need to look for
funds, Maud Laurent, could spend adequate time to promote a new venture: 2)
Developing a take-out counter, small restaurant and convenience store as a way not
only of instilling life skills and providing jobs for the teenagers, but also to
generate revenue by selling the products from the Foyer (cooked chicken meals,
peanut butter, and now homemade vinegar). RVH is funding this startup takeout
counter/restaurant and retail convenience store and looking for additional
funds to get it off to a good start. We are just in the first phase of
this pilot project (cleaning the building) and will begin setting up soon.
We’ll see how it goes and will reevaluate, adjust, and adapt in a few months.
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| Space for takeout /store. |
On the whole, the kids are
doing well and in fact benefit from a lot of attention: FENDLI and Kid4kid are
some of recent and regular visitors. The Foyer has attracted over thirty volunteers since
the opening of the guest rooms. A group of 12 Quebecois are running a
music, arts and crafts and sports camp this July. Most volunteers understand that even if
Maud and her staff are happy to host them and feed them three delicious meals
each day, it takes away from funds that would be used for the children’s needs
so the contribution between US $ 20 and $ 35 a day according to the length of
stay and the capacity to pay is gladly given.
My biggest concern is to have
a beautiful structure fall in disrepair as wear and tear of so many energetic
youngsters takes its toll on the plumbing, furniture and appliances. There
isn’t enough supervision and no salary for additional staff. No one stops the
six year old who hits the piano in passing with a large carving knife or tells
another that pornographic chalk drawings are not appropriate. The Foyer doesn’t
need to expand; it needs to do what it does better.
We can help by sponsoring a
child, volunteering to teach what we know for instance, English (a tool for the
children to eventually find jobs) and paying for our stay or writing a
tax-deductible check that will be used directly to cover costs of tuition, car
repair, propane for the stove, plumbing repairs and staff salary.
