Blessed Be Your Name

This is a story about the third (out of four) orphanage that we visited last Friday on the rice run (more about the rice run and what it was here).

We arrived at this orphanage as the sun was beginning to set. This one, if you can possibly believe it, was even worse than the first and the second. It was an odd conglomeration of tents and cement bricks. One tent looked actually pretty nice, and inside was a desk with a bunch of books – an odd sight to see in the middle of a tent orphanage. The yard was surrounded by torn US AID tarps and bits of barbed wire. When we arrived, a somewhat rotund Haitian man was lounging on a mattress outside of one of the dilapidated brick structures. There were two brick structures. The brick structure without a rotund Haitian man lounging outside of it had no roof. It barely had walls, and the walls that it did have were covered in bright green mildew.

The kids looked awful. Few had pants or any kind of diaper or underwear on. The clothes they were wearing didn't fit, weren't clean, and were falling apart. Many had bright orange highlights in their hair and bloated bellies. Fleas and gnats and bugs clung on their faces, and they didn't do anything to brush them off. It confused me that they should appear such when the man who ran it (the man who was lounging on the ground) should look so clean and full. He didn't come over for the singing and preaching that my friends from OEBC did because he was apparently feeling sick. He must be a great actor, because I went to talk to him after the singing and preaching, and he was quite chipper. He was excited because I spoke French, and so did he. He actually was apparently very educated, and those books in that tent were his books. He spoke French, Creole, and English, and he said that he is a professor by trade. He teaches sociology, mathematics, and French at the university level. He said that he teaches at a University here in Haiti. It was quite confusing. I don't know how he ended up there, or how he ended up taking in all those kids, but hopefully it was out of the goodness of his heart and hopefully the boxes of food we delivered don't all end up in his fat stomach.

One of the songs that we sang at this orphanage caught me off guard. Usually, the kids from OEBC led the worship, but it was quite disorganized, and the songs stopped, the preaching stopped, and there was a temporary silence punctuated only by the sounds children are wont to make. All of a sudden – it seemed spontaneous – these children were singing, “Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name. Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your glorious name.” In English. The same song that we sing in church so often. The tune floated through the twilight air, here at the epicenter of that devastating earthquake. It was an eerie and hollow sound. They were just getting to the bridge – you give and take away, you give and take away – when they stopped just as abruptly as they had begun. The notes lingered in the air and then were gone as quickly as they had come.