the birds

The sun was sinking quickly behind us as Lily and I headed out the gate and down the road for Noel's.  Her family was expecting us, but due to hundreds of people gathering in the street for Mardi Gras, we'd been forced to wait...I hadn't wanted Lily and I to become part of the parade.  I left Sofie at home, knowing I'd have to carry Lily most of the way...Noel's isn't close.

I guess I had assumed Roselore lived on our road, but while I see her a few days a week andedan (inside) and every Sunday in church, I'd never seen her house.  As we were hustling past cactus fences and around mucky puddles, I caught a glimpse of Roselore's face out of the corner of my eye.


"Roselore!" I called, cutting off the road and climbing up the little hill to chat for a moment, pulling Lily along with me.  "How are you?"


She was in a tank top and shorts, bent over a small cooking fire, black with history, piled next to a tiny stick home.  Eyes red from the smoke, she grinned uneasily, seeming ashamed for me to see her in shorts and at her home.  

note: these are not Roselor's children, but some other friends from Saccanville.  I have no pictures of Roselore's kids.

Her four children were right around her, waiting for dinner, dirty, wearing torn clothing, light haired and all stick figures of the children they should be.  It was hard to stop staring at them.  They appeared that they should be unable to stand, and one of the twins still had remnant tears running down her face.

"What's wrong, chickie?" I asked her, trying to ignore the surroundings and make them all comfortable.  


The only thing I've ever heard Roselore say about the twins was that she doesn't know why God did that to her.  I always cringed to hear her say that, thinking of their two precious lives.  

But when I saw them at home, both at five years-old still remarkably smaller than Lily, I understood.  Their skin was sunk into their ribcages, their eyes appearing abnormally large in contrast with their shrunken faces, their hair, the color of dust from malnutrition.  


I see a lot of very poor children in Haiti, a lot of ringworm, a lot of rat nibbled toes, a lot of runny noses, a lot of skin and bones.

But Roselore's children are starving.  


It's not as if she has not told me so.  


Almost weekly, she asks for 50 gourdes ($1.25 USD) to buy food for her children.  I always give it to her, but mostly figuring that she just knows I'll say yes if she mentions kids and food.  


After chatting for a few more moments, we headed back down the road to Noel's.  But my mind was buzzing, and has been ever since.

How do I know Roselore, you ask?  She works at the Seminary. She cleans empty missionary homes.


There are three homes at the seminary, two of which have been empty between 9-10 months of the year. Once a week, Roselore comes in and cleans those.  (What is she DIDN'T have this job...like many others?)


I have been irritated at Roselore, because she keeps leaving the back doors open so that she can come back later and collect the bowls of rare and precious ice she has in the freezers.


Let me say that another way:  I have been mad that Roselore has been taking water.  Talk about humbling.


Week after week, she leaves her stick (and I mean sticks, split in half, woven into each other and hooked on four wood posts) house and her starving kids, and mops and dusts again huge, tiled, cream, clean houses that have been empty since she cleaned them last week.  


That five minutes in her dirt yard changed my perspective on everything.  Lily, hopping off the couch with her bag of fruit snacks to get the key from Roselore when she's done.  Roselore scrubbing toilets that have water in them...water that no one labored from the pump.  Roselore, cleaning houses that are infinitely nicer, safer and cleaner than her own, and leaving them empty to go home to her shack in the dirt, wondering what to feed the four mouths she is alone responsible for.  

My mind flies back to eight weeks ago.  The empty house next door had a tiny little bird stuck in it.  Just a pretty itty bitty thing, Uncle Don had been unable to get the bird out.  When Roselore brought me the key, she had a bag of ice in one hand and to my surprise she had that little bird tucked in her other hand, its eyes wild with fear.


"Oh, look!" I said, kind of confused.  "You caught the little bird!  He's a pretty little thing."


I wanted to ask her what she was doing with it.  Didn't know how.


"I'm taking it for my kids" she said, and I thought, "that's weird. Like, to play with, or...?"


Nope.  She took that tiny little bird home to feed her children.  

Her four are four of 100 in Saccanville.  Saccanville is one of 5000 in Haiti.  Haiti is one of 10,000 in the world.  


Our Father, who promises He sees every bird that falls, is intimately aware and involved in ALL of this?

NO thanks.  I can barely stand the brokenness intermingled with my daily life.