Here we are, strapping Nadie into a car seat, pulling a little shade over top so the sun doesn’t make her squint and cry. I remember as a kid asking my parents how old you had to be to have kids, and they said they had theirs in their 20s.I defiantly proclaimed, “I’m going to wait until I’m 30!”īut here we are, well into that decade, buying Huggies, pack and plays, bottle warmers. Although we have overseen more than 70 kids through the doors of the Have Faith Haiti Mission & Orphanage since taking it over in 2010, we have never had a child so young.Īnd never at our ages. Those of you who have raised children no doubt recognize this behavior. We sound like dolls who have their “talk” button permanently pushed.
Like the sinking of our vocabulary into a series of repeated infantile sentences, like “You’re a hungry little girl, aren’t you? Yes! You’re a hungry little girl, aren’t you?.” Like the feeling my wife and I suddenly have when we wake up, where the first thought is “How’s the baby doing?” Like the sudden evaporation of time as we stare for hours at her incredibly expressive face. That explains how she ended up in Michigan, and our house. MORE FROM MITCH: Salman Rushdie attack, sudden violence, leads to new sense of vulnerability After conferring with doctors in the U.S., we decided the best thing would be to get her here for a few months and try and address her serious, potentially life-threatening issues. We immediately took her to the hospital, where blood work confirmed malnourishment and anemia. She weighed just 7 pounds, was lethargic, barely responsive, and had conjunctivitis that was swelling her eyelids and filling her eyes with fluid.
We were told she had been fed little beyond sugar water for the first six months of her life. Here is the how and why: Her name is Nadie, and she was brought to the orphanage we operate in Port Au Prince, Haiti, from a village outside Miragoane. This isn’t supposed to be happening, but it is, to my wife and myself, a baby girl, with all the squeals, shrieks, coos, hiccups, big eyes, soft breathing, and happily waving hands and feet of an infant, who has no idea how she got here and no idea why. An infant wailing, me lifting her over my shoulder, just above a small towel, and tapping her back until she - happily for her, not so great for me - burps out a glob of goo. A man my age, warming up baby formula, peeling back dirty diapers, holding my nose as I deposit them into a bag. Watch Video: Ex-hostages have left Haiti, doing well
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