Hands and Feet

Scan the Haitian landscape on a trip through its lush mountains and you are struck by the dominance of nature here. Mountains recede endlessly into the horizon, lush with green under an ever-present haze; rivers wind purposefully to an expanse of ocean that seems a world away from this height, dotted with people washing cars or clothes or selves; beach surrounds and embraces the waters that arrive at its shore, at once welcoming and rebuking their struggle to reach land. Taken together, this island communicates solace and rest.

There is, however, another and more powerful message, communicated less by its landscape than by its people. It is expressed in the faces and voices of its merchants, its health workers, and most visibly for a group of eleven visitors, its orphans. It was at an orphanage, in fact, where this group began to understand that Haiti is as much a place of hope as it is a place of beauty. This “Hands and Feet” orphanage, a gated compound housing roughly seventy children in Jacmel, is charged with “raising a generation of orphaned children who will grow up to reach their God-given potential.” It was during our stay there, from June 1^st to June 9^th, amid the building, painting, organizing, and installing, when we saw this purpose play out in front of us.

Indeed, we found that its leaders had done much more than simply take in orphans. It had at times helped to save them. Before, during, and after our trip, we heard stories of children like Christela, abandoned down a twenty-eight foot latrine, only to be found later by a boy and rescued by a team of Hands and Feet workers, United Nations soldiers, and police; we learned of Mackenson, nourished back to health after suffering from stage four malnutrition and HIV; and we were told of Saintana, a child slave found working mere feet from the compound.

The peacefulness of this place, in fact, and the depth of concern we witnessed from its leaders for these children were to us a reminder of the changes God has wrought in our own lives, changes that heal through the comfort of familiar voices, that free through the shedding of unrestrained tears, and that spread through the gospel that Jesus spoke nearly two-thousand years ago. From moments like these, shared in the confidence we came to develop as a team, we found that this trip was just as much about our own healing as it was about the lives of the children and leaders we came to serve.

Perhaps this was appropriate, for in the end, we found that nothing we could have done, good or bad, would change the course this tiny compound had struck out merely eight years ago. It was, we found, already in the process of changing lives. Our job was simply to join in that effort, if only for a moment, to add comfort to a place whose purpose runs deeper than comfort. We were to these children a short page in their story, written not by human hands, but by a God who thought of them long before they were born.

The Hands and Feet Project is an orphanage in Jacmel, Haiti. Our team of eleven, led by Sandi Cornette and sent by Quail Lakes Baptist Church in Stockton, traveled to build and paint bunk beds, renovate a room, install ceiling fans, and simply spend time with the children. We arrived back home on Saturday night, June 9^th.