Community in Chaos

September 22, 2013

It started off as a normal morning. A typical Sunday in which we slept in a little bit, ate cereal for breakfast and got ready for church. I headed over to church with Caitlin and intended to stay for worship and then head to church at the Miriam Center. After worship in the Miriam Center I worked on some of my blog and then headed down to help Autumn set up a movie or video for the kids. Autumn went back upstairs to find something and I went up with her to grab something, I headed back down and was greeting each of the children again when Gilbert kept pointing outside and told me to look.

I ran outside and looked up to the orphanage and saw people running. At first I thought that it must be a child hurt and began looking around and
then I saw smoke pummeling from upstairs. I began to get panicked… and started yelling for Justin. Not long after I saw him run down, he had already been upstairs where the fire had started. I quickly ran over to the church and got Caitlin, where we began grabbing buckets and filling some with dirt and some with water that they were taking up to the fire.

The stench of being upstairs from whatever was burning was awful. It burned your nostrils and made your eyes tear up. So we kept helping with buckets and we saw Justin going into the room again with no towel, just doing what he had to do. As the fire was put out and smoke just covered the room we began clearing things out of the side room of the main room that the fire had been in.

As we cleared what we could in the room out, we began getting the story of what had happen. There are two possible ways the fire started from what we could tell from the burn damage. One is that a backpack had been wedged behind an outlet and the outlet had been somewhat pulled off in order to hold the backpack. The second was that someone had plugged in a battery or phone charger that had exposed wires and had set it on a mattress when we went to church. It had sparked and set the fire… it burned one set up bunk beds (which thankfully are metal), four mattresses, and two girls suitcases of clothes, and a few other items. The good things is no one was in the room when it happen. The bad was that all the doors were locked and so it took longer to get into the room. The doors stay locked to prevent kids from skipping church and sneaking back into their rooms. The doors and windows being locked allowed the fire not to spread as it would have gained oxygen, the is that because of that the room filled with smoke staining all of the walls.

We settled down after everything was cleared out and we had lunch. Shortly after lunch we got to work- we began washing all the walls and ceiling. Justin began removing all of the wiring and electrical in the room. Our goal is to get the little girls back in the room as soon as possible. We moved some of the older girls into another room, not attached to the building. Not all of the rooms were at full capacity and then we had about ten girls stay in one of the American dorm rooms with Caitlin, Amber, and I.

It was so great to see in the midst of chaos- how the cooks and mamas ran to the rescue to help with the fire. How the kids jumped in to help clean the walls.

Typically we spend Sundays taking our Sabbath and resting after church. Instead we sacrificed our day to help the kids get a new room as soon as possible.

I’m praising God for the fact that no one was hurt. No children were in the building and for the ways the staff came together. I also think that Justin putting the fire out and helping to save the orphanage is changing people’s view of him. Most of the kids are slightly scared of him- yet they fail to realize is all of the work Justin does for the mission on a daily basis. I think it has caused the Haitian staff and children to have a new respect and appreciation for him.

I am also thankful we end the evening winding down by having our Sunday Staff Game Night.

We will commence painting once the walls have dried shortly after lunch.