It was exactly two weeks ago today that Mitch Albom touched down in Port-au-Prince — and came face-to-face with the power of faith in the midst of utter devastation.
Standing outside the badly damaged, but miraculously still-standing Sharing and Caring Mission/Orphanage in the shattered city, he met the 70 or so kids who live there, and who to this day are still afraid to spend any time indoors. He noticed that the children whose dorm rooms and bathrooms were destroyed in the earthquake, who were surrounded by completely crumbled buildings on all sides, who had lost everything and were struggling on two meals a day — ramen every morning, rice and beans each night — were still making time to pray.
“I said to them, ‘What are you praying for? It’s so terrible,’” Albom recalls, “and they said, ‘We thank God for sparing us, for letting us live when everybody else didn’t.’”
“I’m not of their faith. It’s a Christian mission — but so what?” he tells Tonic. “So what? These kids are starving. And I love the fact that they still pray and still believe in things and thank God for being alive.”
Albom, the best-selling author of Tuesdays with Morrie and last fall’s Have a Little Faith, had already done much to help. After all, against impossible odds, he had made it to Haiti with a small plane full of supplies, food, and even tennis and soccer balls for these kids who had lost everything. But after meeting and talking to and sleeping on the ground with the kids from that orphanage himself, he returned to the US with a personal mission to do something more.
For just $70,000, he learned — a fraction of what it would cost to rebuild and repair a facility in the United States — his charity, A Hole in the Roof Foundation, can rebuild the Sharing and Caring Mission even better than it was before. And that, he hopes, can return some sense of stability and hope to this one group of kids who were so shaken by the devastating earthquake.
Last Thursday, Albom began the quest to raise that $70,000 through his website — in 30 days. “I’m hopeful we can get people to do it,” he tells Tonic. “It’s not that much money. We’re Tweeting it, we’re Facebooking — whatever we can do to get the word out.” (Click here to donate online.)
He wrote about the cause in his column in The Detroit Free Press. He taped an appearance on Craig Ferguson’s late-night TV show. And just before he left for a European book tour on Tuesday, he spoke to Tonic about how his passion to accomplish this one goal amidst the vast devastation in Haiti came to light.
“What I saw there would break anybody’s heart,” he says. “You can’t not do something if you have the means.”
The Journey
Albom could never have predicted it himself, but his latest book, Have a Little Faith, actually set the stage for his trip to Haiti and the effort to rebuild this Christian mission and orphanage in Port-au-Prince.
“One of the big themes of the book had to do with seeing beyond your particular faith, and recognizing that there’s a value in it whether it’s yours or anybody else’s — that [faith] is sort of a beautiful thing in and of itself.”
As the book was released, Albom started his A Hole in the Roof Foundation quite literally as a way to fix a roof. Specifically, the hole in the roof of the I Am My Brother’s Keeper church in inner-city Detroit, through which rain and snow had been falling on the faithful for nearly 10 years.
Within two months of his book’s release, the Foundation raised $20,000 — and the hole was patched in December of last year. “It was completed and there’s a beautiful plaque now in the roof with the names of everybody who gave to it. So if you look up now in the church, instead of seeing rain and snow coming down on top of you, you see this plaque with all these names of people from around the world,” Albom explains. ”We saw the good that could happen with that, and I said, ‘I’d like to continue the tradition of that for the future.’”
The mission would be, simply, to help: “Anyplace of faith that helps the homeless that needs some kind of repairs. It doesn’t matter what kind of place, doesn’t matter where — just as long as they help the homeless and they have some kind of connection to faith.”
“Then Haiti happened,” he says. And he heard the story of a mission in Port-au-Prince that was started by a pastor right in his own city of Detroit.
At first, the Mission was believed to have been destroyed.
“Once I got down there and saw it, I don’t know how [it] was spared because pretty much everything around it was leveled,” Albom says.
Within a couple of days, though, the good news came that the Sharing and Caring Mission was still standing, and that its 70-plus young residents had survived. But then he learned that its pastor, John Hearn, had been unable to get back to Haiti to assess the situation for himself. All he knew is that the Mission was being flooded by other kids — and none of them had food.
Albom invited Hearn onto his local radio show, and used that interview to raise $16,000 in two hours — enough to send a cargo plane full of food to Port-au-Prince.
But Albom still didn’t feel that he’d done enough. ”He and his father who started the mission 30 years earlier were frustrated because they couldn’t get to Haiti to see what was going on. And the woman who was the school teacher and who’s been the life force of that place for 30 years was also here, she’s in her 80s, and she couldn’t get down there.”
It didn’t take long for him to realize that this fit the profile of A Hole in the Roof Foundation cause: “It’s a place of faith, and everybody’s homeless in Haiti, so I thought, ‘Maybe we can do some good.’”
Albom decided to hire a plane and fly himself, along with Pastor Hearn, the pastor’s father, and the Mission’s schoolteacher — Florence Moffett — to Haiti.
There were no commercial flights allowed. And the night before they were scheduled to leave, with a plane stuffed full of food, Tylenol, empty gas cans and other desperately needed supplies (plus all those balls for the kids), they realized they didn’t have the military clearance they would need to land in Port-au-Prince.
A call to his State Senator, Carl Levin, put wheels in motion, and within an hour Albom was on the phone with Haitian military getting a special four-digit code that would allow them to land within a specified 20-minute window at the airport in Haiti.
“If you can’t land [in the allotted time frame], you get sent home after traveling all this way,” Albom explains.
A strong snowstorm nearly derailed his plans entirely, but after a midnight phone call to the Senator’s office gained them a three hour reprieve, “we made it within two minutes of our 20-minute window,” Albom says.
The Children’s Voices
Of meeting the children of the Sharing and Caring Mission, Albom says, “They’re as nice and they’re as inspiring as kids could be.”
He was taken aback by how beautifully the kids spoke English — something Moffett had always insisted on teaching at the orphanage.
He was also struck by the sheer physical beauty of the children, he adds: “In America, these kids would be models!”
But all of that beauty came in stark contrast to the surroundings the children of Sharing and Caring now found themselves in. ”The bathrooms and the shower situation was so embarrassing,” he says. The walls had crumbled around the toilets, leaving teenage boys and girls no choice but to go to the bathroom within view of each other. “All exposed. No walls. Flies everywhere,” he notes.
“There’s no shower facilities for these kids. They shower with a bucket and a can of powdered milk that they put a little soap in it and pour it over their heads. They’re showering in front of one another, these little kids and teenagers. It’s just wrong, you know?”
The kitchen? “It’s basically a little charcoal grill outside and some bowls. And there’s always flies all over it. There is no indoor kitchen facility to speak of.”
So Albom started asking questions. What would it cost to put in four real toilets, actual showers, a kitchen with plumbing, and to add new beams to make the dorm rooms safe again so the kids could move inside?
Remember, all of the kids are still sleeping outside, every night. ”They refuse to go inside. They would stand outside the door and talk to us, like, ‘We’re not going in there.’ I’ve never seen anything like it —and I’ve seen some things. I’ve traveled around the world, I’ve seen poverty, I was there after Katrina, after hurricane Mitch in Honduras. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Albom says. “In Port-au-Prince, nobody is inside. I never saw a person inside a building. Everybody is sleeping outside in the street.”
After doing his research, and assessing the low cost of labor in Haiti, he found his answer: $70,000. That’s all it would take. Only now, he realized, there was no time to waste.
Time is of the Essence
“Our goal is to get down there quickly, because the rainy season is coming,” Albom says. ”It’s going to get so dangerous down there I’m afraid they won’t even let people go.”
Diseases such as malaria, even tuberculosis could rear their heads once the rains begin. In all the water, with no bathrooms — with the issue of people defecating in alleys, combined with the piles of trash in the streets, and children walking barefoot in the mud — “It’s going to become a sanitation disaster area,” Albom says. “So we want to get all this work finished before that.”
He’ll bring craftsmen from Detroit to get the job done quickly. ”We’ve got a lot of good people who are great at construction,” he says. “And if I can’t raise money for a plane, I’ll take the money out of my own pocket — that’s what I did last time, and hopefully this will be the second thing we can do with the Hole in The Roof Foundation.”
Thinking about those kids praying amidst the devastation, he says, he realizes just how closely this new mission mirrors the message in his own book.
“I might be white, they’re black; I’m American, they’re Haitian; I might speak English, they speak French; or Christian and Jewish, or Hindu or Muslim — what’s the difference? When you see people in need, then you gotta do something. So that’s basically it,” Albom says.
Yearning to Help
A Hole in the Roof Foundation has already collected $25,000 toward the $70,000 goal — a clear indication that people want to help, Albom says.
“If there’s reticence [to giving to any cause], it’s people aren’t sure that what they’re doing is making a difference. That’s why I’m doing it this way,” he says of staying focused on this single mission. In Haiti, “I saw a lot of stuff sitting at the airport. A lot of stuff. God knows what good it could have done, and it just sat at the airport, and it was still there when we came back to leave.”
“I talked to everybody I saw [in Haiti], saying, ‘Are you getting [help]?, and everybody said, ‘We’re not getting anything.’ There were signs on doorways, ‘We need food. We need help.’ So I know if I’m going to do anything, I want to see it through from beginning to end. If I’m going to ask people to give up hard-earned dollars, I want to be able to show them photos of where it went.”
With his reach and his audience, “I could have said, ‘Let’s raise a lot of money and give it to the Red Cross.’ But I don’t know where the Red Cross’ money is going. I do know that in any charity that I oversee, there is not a dime of administrative cost. Nobody gets paid. We don’t buy supplies, paperclips, mailings — any supplies come out of my pocket. If people give us $10,000, we’ll spend $10,000 on what needs to be done.
“If we raise $70,000, I’ll show, ‘Here’s the showers, here’s the bathrooms,’ that way [the donors] can feel good about it: ‘If I’m going to give, at least I know it’s getting to where it’s supposed to go,’” Albom says. “And that’s what I want to assure them.”
Click Here to donate to the Albom’s rebuilding of the Sharing and Caring Mission/Orphanage in Haiti.
Read more of Tonic’s ongoing Haiti coverage.
Photos by Mark Mendelsohn/courtesy Mitch Albom
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