Stolen from the "Haitian Families First" website:Once, a woman named Junia faced this devastating reality. Junia was raising two daughters on her own after leaving their father, who was abusive to her. A cook at one of Haiti’s few beach resorts, Junia was laid off one day when the company unexpectedly downsized. With no one to help her, she thought she would have to place one of her daughters in an orphanage while she looked for work to support her other daughter. She thought she had no other choice.
But thankfully, Jamie and Ali thought differently, and offered Junia a job working for their organization. Junia not only got to keep both daughters with her, she also got to fulfill a life-long dream: to work with children. Jamie and Ali also helped Junia raise the money she needed to send her daughters to school, something many women like Junia cannot afford to do.
Although she's a busy, working single mother, Junia recently took into her care another child, Jeremie, whose mother had died giving birth to him and whose father is unknown. Jeremie needed very special care—he weighed less than 2 pounds at birth—and Junia gave it to him. She plans to adopt Jeremie because, as she told Jamie and Ali, someone helped her, and now it’s her turn."
(http://www.haitianorphanrescue.org/our_story.html)
Here's MY two cents, whether it's worth a hill of beans . . . :
Damn, they're good! You see, a lot of children can and should stay right where they are -- with their birth families who want to raise and parent them. Too often families lose one another due to the singular factor of poverty. There are also some children who do actually need a chance to have a family through adoption; they legitimately need a forever family, and the causes can be any one or several of many. This is why a small (hands-on) operation like Jamie and Ali's Haitian Families First (HFF) makes the best sense -- they get to know personally the people to whom they extend a hand. A not-for-profit, low-overhead organization (the McMutries don't even earn a salary) is able to focus without distraction on their aim of individualized and appropriate service with dignity.
Did it stop anyone else in their tracks to read the last line of the HFF website excerpt above? "She plans to adopt Jeremie . . . " SHE plans to! How often do we, service-minded folks, offer to fulfill the best hopes of a parent who placed their child for adoption by joining our families and stepping in as the child's new, forever family? Or donate money to the orphanage that houses the kids until they move to their destinations overseas? After we've been fortunate enough to be taught, and humble enough to learn that the numbers of children left to orphanages could be reduced through serious family preservation efforts, we may channel our resources in that direction. How astounding it is, then, to see HFF empower a step beyond even that -- a hand-up to a fellow human who now stands so firmly on her own two feet that she is already paying it forward byhelping a tiny Haitian boy have his own new family within his native homeland, and a healthy future. Her choice. Her power. Her dignity.
THIS is why I am so passionate about supporting the work of Jamie and Ali McMutrie.
