The Worst Orphanage I Have Witnessed

As we walked down the muddy path, the steps cut out of the dirt ran with water and were covered in garbage, making them quite slippery. The house sat on a forty-foot ledge on the mountainside with a tiny dirt yard surrounding it. Two girls dressed in rags sat in the dirt, cutting up a chicken on the ground. They stared at us blankly as we walked by and said hello to them. Doris Chernik, Nina Chernik and I were at the worst orphanage I have visited in the world. We were in Haiti, halfway between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel.

Two nuns greeted us. They were old and tired, and seemed quite bitter. They welcomed us into the home, which had a porch wrapping around a central room. The porch was dark, dank, and full of rusty bunk beds with no mattresses. The nuns explained that the children wet the beds so frequently that the mattresses had rotted away. Or perhaps they had removed them. Now the urine from the children on the upper bunks could simply seep onto the children in the lower bunks. The nuns wanted to give us the full tour, so they escorted us through to the inner room.

With no ventilation, the odor of human waste mingled with sweat as everything simmered in the tropical heat. I began to gag, and left for air outside. Forty children lived there, they informed us, and could we fund them? However, I felt that these two women were not capable of using wisely any funding they might receive. The children needed to be removed immediately. All of them looked extremely lethargic and sickly from malnutrition and abominable conditions. We asked if the children chopping the chicken on the dirt of the front yard were preparing lunch and were told that they could not afford lunch, and that the single chicken was meant to feed the forty children at dinner. We parted, sickened and unable to help.