the Laveaux chronicles…

I had just graduated from George Williams College. Our Air Florida flight had just landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I believe I brought up the rear for our team of 20 some students. As I approached the immigration desk I handed my passport to the Haitian agent. She looked me squarely in the eye…stamped my passport and with an unforgettable authority she said directly to me… “You will love our country.”

Game on.

We traveled to the north of Haiti to the small town of Milot. We worked with a ministry called Orphans, Inc. Later it would be known as Good Shepherd…or Mission Bon Bergér.

I’d been on three previous mission trips…to southern Mexico in the state of Oaxaca…to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico…and to a youth camp in Oregon. But to be honest, nothing to that point in my almost 22 years had prepared me for what I encountered in the Republic of Haiti.

The sights…smells…the abject poverty…and yet the joy and generosity of the people was overwhelming. I was far from the western suburbs of Chicago.

During our six week stay in the beautiful nation of Haiti we constructed a nutrition center that as far as I know continues to feed 500 children a day. Even at that point having just received my college diploma, this was the proudest achievement/contribution of my life.

Orphans, Inc. obviously ran an orphanage…and  school. We slept in the classrooms on the back of the property…the children lived in the main building in the front of the property. One of the boys who was about 11 years old would come out to the worksite each day as we worked on the nutrition center. He brought with him a styrofoam chest with essentially one ice cube and a dozen bottles of Coca-Cola which he sold for $.50 a bottle to benefit the orphanage. The lukewarm soda was a treat at lunchtime and as the days and weeks went by, the young lad became dear to me. His name was Christian LaVeaux. I wish I had the old profile photograph that I’d taken of him that summer, he looked like a young, handsome Patrick Ewing. He was a kind and gentle boy.

A month or so into our stay in Haiti we returned from the worksite one afternoon and Christian seemed very down. I tried to cheer him up which I thought I could do.…but I failed.

I found Eddie, one of our Haitian translators and explained to him that I was concerned about Christian. He was happy to take some time to reach out to the young boy. Afterward he came to me and simply explained…and I quote… “Sometimes the wind comes down from the mountain and you’re sad.” At the time the saying didn’t resonate as much with me as it does today.

I had just earned a bachelors of arts degree. I’m not an unintelligent person. But I write this today with the same raw emotion that I felt that day. That was the day that I learned what an orphan is.

Of course I could tell you what the definition of an orphan was. But that was the day that I realized that this young boy had no relatives that were in his corner. I had just finished 16 years in private schools because of the sacrifices of my mother and father. Who would be there for him when he was 21? Who would be there for him when it was time to get married? An orphanage only goes so far…

A couple of weeks later before the sun had risen our “cameo”…our transport vehicle arrived. It was crazy…and emotional as we hugged our Haitian friends goodbye in the early morning dark. We handed out clean socks and shirts…anything that we thought they could use. And then we loaded up and we headed over the mountains back to Port-au-Prince.

I was sitting up front and I had an experience I’ll never forget…seeing the sun rise over the Caribbean island of Hispaniola.  And I will always remember that the driver was listening to a Jethro Tull 8 track. The sights of that sunrise we’re like the creation of the world…sublime.

We would spend the day and that night in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The next day Air Florida would return us to Miami.

But this is only the beginning of the story of Christian…a young man who has profoundly changed my life.