My very first trip to Haiti:
We pulled over to the side of the road to pray. I saw her coming. A thin, somber looking woman, perhaps in her mid-thirties, a baby cradled in her arms as she walked toward us. She approached the vehicle and waited patiently for us to look up. When we did my friend, Sherrie, in the driver’s seat, spoke.
Sherrie is the friend who founded the school in Port Au Prince where we intended to volunteer. Small, red-headed and feisty, she loved the people in her community deeply.
The woman with the baby approached us with a softly spoken - “Bonjou Madame.” And the conversation began.
For several minutes, while we sat still in the hot car, Sherrie and the woman chatted back and forth in a language I could not decode. And then the woman turned, her baby still in her arms, and walked away.
What was that about? I asked.
Sherrie explained.
She came to ask us if we would take her child. She explained to me that she had 3 more children at home and she was struggling to find enough food for them daily. She desperately wanted to see her kids well fed and cared for. She was asking if we would take her baby and raise it or put it in our orphanage.
We didn’t have an orphanage. But she didn’t know that. She assumed we did.
I sat there in the back seat of Sherrie’s old rusty Toyota 4Runner, sweat trickling down my neck, stunned. I had no grid for the event I had just witnessed.
And just then Sherrie turned around in her seat, looked straight back at me, and said the most important words.
You need to understand, she no more wants to give her child away than you do.
And that’s when it happened. My moment of PMC: Perfect Moral Clarity.
I thought about my youngest child, our daughter Rebecca, who was four at the time. I tried to imagine what I would have to be feeling inside to be able to hand her over to a perfect stranger, not knowing if I’d ever see her again. What kind of desperation would drive me, or any mother to do such a thing.
As a young mother with my own precious babies, I know I would have fought to the death if a stranger tried to take any of them from me. And yet, I would indeed hand my daughter to a stranger, just like this woman, if I thought that was her only hope for survival. What mother wouldn’t? What a tragic decision to have to make.
I thought for one minute about the woman’s dilemma. And I asked myself, What if she had another choice? If I was in the same situation, what I would really appreciate is a job. Which would mean a way to make my life work, a way to keep my children.
And I knew at that moment I was being drawn to this beautiful warm, dusty place. I was drawn to somehow “help” though I had little idea what that word even meant or the mistakes I would make along the way.
The above is Chapter 1, Perfect Moral Clarity, from our founders book Painfully Honest The Tale of a Recovering Helper.
