First of three part story
• Part 2: Amid devastation in Haiti, gratitude fills their hearts

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — They are just children. Some arrived as babies. Some lost their parents. Others were turned over because no one could afford to feed them. Together, over the years, they formed a cherished bond inside the walls of a Haitian mission, where they were taught to speak and pray in English by John Hearn, a Detroit pastor, and Florence Moffett, a devoted woman who had a midlife calling to be a missionary.

They never had much.

But there was love.

And then the ground shook.

This is a story about a small oasis of hope in Haiti, a little story amid the huge story of the worst earthquake in 250 years. We took a trip to the Caring and Sharing Mission, stayed there, slept on the floor, watched as 70 children battled something kids should never have to battle: their fears, their hunger, their flashbacks at the horror they witnessed as so many were killed.

What we saw might break your heart. Children sleeping on mattresses in the dirt, afraid to even step inside a building for fear that it will come down on them. Teens eating two meager meals a day, rice and beans every night, surrounded by flies, forced to shower with cans of water, often in front of one another, using bathrooms that are no more than holes in the ground.

And yet, they smile. They sing. They pray with a joyous spirit rarely seen in our comfortable lives. I hope we can help them. I hope, if you follow this three-day journey, you will want to help them.

“Everything has changed,” one of the youngsters told me. “No one seems to be normal.”

How could they be?

On a long journey back to normal
When it happened, what did you think?

“I think: This is the end.”

The end?

“I think: This is the armageddon.”

Why?

“This is the first time I see dead bodies — all these dead bodies at a time. Everybody covered up with blood, screaming, some of them have their brains coming out. It was very ugly to see.”

What has it been like since then?

“Everything has changed. No one seems to be normal. No one seems to know what they’re doing. They are just walking around in the street. They have no objective to where they are going. They’re walking. Just walking.”

– Michael, 22

First of three parts

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The dirty blue van, its side door slung open against the heat, bounces hard on a road of holes and stones. A dog watches, its head on its paws, too hot to leave the shade. The sky is cloudless, the air sticky and still. When the van reaches the mission, a teenage boy, his skin caked with dust that kicks up from the rubble, yanks open a metal gate.

We pull inside.

Suddenly, dozens of children swarm the vehicle, mostly shoeless, many topless, their faces between exuberant and fearful, as if even happy moments are also suspicious: What comes next, fire or rain, the hell or the heaven-sent? When we step out, a few take my hand. Some back away. Others look up shyly, smiling when our eyes meet, as if caught in the act. Two pastors who have flown down with us, a father and son, and two other colleagues help unload duffel bags, gas cans, cases of Tylenol.

Finally, from the van’s backseat, a small figure emerges, a woman in her 80s with her hair in bangs.

“Mommy! Mommy!” the children yell, even the ones tall enough to be adults.

Taking stock of the situation
We are not here to tell the big story of Haiti and last month’s massive earthquake that has devastated it, because you could be here for years and not be capable of that. How would you measure? How would you analyze? This is not a place of charts or statistics. They cannot even count their dead. Some say 240,000. Some say far more. Who knows? Bodies are still undiscovered, you can smell the rotting corpses in buildings flattened like stomped sand castles, and all of Port-au-Prince seems to be living in the street — “They’re walking. Just walking” — so things like addresses, home phones, knocking on doors, calling offices, finding schools open? Useless. All useless. Even getting lights to turn on is an iffy proposition.

Which means that at this hot moment in Haiti, the anecdotal can become the analytical. Someone sees a man shot for food, and suddenly everyone is shooting one another for food. Someone sees an empty medical tent, and suddenly no one is getting medical aid. Someone hears of babies disappearing, and one group says they’re being sold for adoption and another says they’re being sacrificed in voodoo ceremonies and everything, you sense, is a little false and a little true. Even the unimaginable.

Seeing the miraculous
So you give up on telling the big official story of this country — how official can you be when the airport has a huge crack in its outer wall and a sign for “Haitian Immigration” is a piece of paper duct-taped to a wall? — and instead, you find a corner of the wreckage to try to tell a smaller tale, go inside out, a glimpse at life after the worst earthquake to hit this troubled island in a quarter of a millennium.

What follows is such a glimpse: three days in a mission orphanage in Port-au-Prince off Delmas Street, tucked behind concrete walls, some of which tumbled when the earth moved.

The place is called the Caring and Sharing Mission, started in the early ’80s by a Detroit pastor, John Hearn, who came to Haiti and couldn’t turn away.

There are, when we arrive, around 70 kids staying here. No one really counts, because all counts are fluid these days. The numbers have swelled since the earthquake, because some from the outside who lost everything wandered back in, so did others who heard it was a safe place, a place with at least some food and water, although there is barbed wire atop the walls and a guard at the gate.

But most appealing, in a country bubbling with superstition, where voodoo thrives and natural disasters are whispered to be messages from God, there is something lucky, even miraculous, about this small, peaceful combine of a dormitory, school and chapel.

It is still standing.

And all of the children survived.

SNAPSHOTS OF HAITI: Goats. Orange rinds. Spray-painted messages on doorways: “We Find Nothing. Help Us.” A kid in the street, flying a kite made from a trash liner. The Palace of Justice, Haiti’s Supreme Court building, collapsed and crumbled, a mountain of small white stones. Stray dogs. A pile of sneakers. Women walking and holding plastic bags. The bags are filled with water.

Feeling joy and pain
“Mom-mee! Mam-mey!”

The old woman with the bangs is Florence Moffett, a onetime Detroit bank worker who, for 27 years, was the driving force of this mission, a stern, loving instructor who insisted the youths learn to speak and pray in English, not their native Creole or French, but English, and a schoolteacher’s English at that.

So here in this enclave of plaster, mud and cinderblock, you hear a delightful vocabulary from children, even children without shoes who have never known a shower (unless you count scooping water from a bowl and pouring it over their heads a shower) and whose toilets are exposed holes in the ground with no privacy and swarms of flies.

These children speak politely and intelligently, especially the older ones. In the States, they’d pass easily as foreign exchange students. But this is not the States. Instead, it is a place of survival and worry, which explains why all the kids’ mattresses, once inside on bed frames, are now outside in the dirt or inside tents pitched side by side.

Moffett sees this the moment she steps from the van. An entire yard full of children and teens who refuse to go indoors, because the indoors is cursed, they tell you, the indoors is where you die when the earth shakes.

“They fill our head up: Don’t go in halls, don’t stay in front of walls,” says a 17-year-old named Natalie. She has stepped inside the dormitory where she used to sleep just twice since the earthquake, racing in to retrieve something and racing out again.

“I am afraid,” she quickly admits.

Natalie learned her English from Moffett, as did a gangly 17-year-old named Sadrac, who came here when he was 1 year old, and a short, sweet-faced young man named Lewinsky, 20, who was left here as a boy when his parents couldn’t take care of him, same as Sam, 18, who has been here a decade, and Michael, 22, who has been here since he was 5.

All of them refer to Moffett as “Mommy,” and she absorbs their affection with the quiet dignity of a woman who has seen the worst and is unshaken. Moffett speaks softly, carries a Bible and refers often to the calling she received when she was in her 40s in Detroit. The Lord, she says, wanted her to do missionary work. She came to Haiti and stayed, educating and influencing one child after another — even a baby that was left outside the gate, a baby she had to name herself — until age and circumstances led her back to Michigan a few years ago, when she was in her late 70s.

This is her first visit since the earthquake. And it is clear, even as the children cling to her legs and all but break into song at her return, that her heart is split in two the joy at seeing these faces again, and the ache of the devastation that they’ve had to witness.

“No child should have to go through this,” she says.

Describe what happened, Michael.

“Well, I was in school. The ground was shaking. Then everybody start screaming. The door collapsed. It wouldn’t open. The only option we have is the windows. Everybody start jumping out.”

You jumped out a window?

“Yes.”

Your friends, too?

“Yes. Some of them got foot injuries. Arm injuries. Some of them don’t make it because they just fell on their heads.

“When we got out in the streets, we couldn’t see anything. Only dust. Everyone was very strange, screaming, blood all over them.

“You could not remember your own body if it was next to you.”

Doing what we must
It does not take long to settle in here. I put down my bag, blow up an air mattress and place it on the floor of the pastor’s quarters. That’s it. On other assignments, you might take out a computer and go online, or flick on the TV news or call for a taxi.

That would be laughable here. It is quiet, save for the rumble of a generator or the distant sound of traffic. And you realize that in addition to the death and destruction that has crippled Port-au-Prince, the earthquake also rendered much of this city depressingly idle. No work. No school. No electricity. The world for many here is as basic as it might have been 200 years ago: find food, find water, hide from the sun, sleep under cover.

When I step outside, the kids are waiting, circling aimlessly. What else is on their agenda? There are but two meals a day, and it is not time for the second. There are evening prayers, but the sun is still beating down.

And so they surround me in what feels like a protective circle, and after a few minutes, we do what everyone seems to be doing in this city of ruins.

We pull open the gate.

And we start walking.

Coming Friday: Death, hope and Oreo cookies.

Contact MITCH ALBOM: 313-223-4581

or malbom@freepress.com www.freep.com/mitch.

By Mitch Albom
Free Press Columnist

Last of three parts

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — His body jerks uncontrollably. His right arm pounds against his chest. His eyes are rolled back. His legs rise and fall.

“Unnnn!” he grunts, repeatedly, a horrible sound, a frightening sound, you can see the fright on the faces of the shoeless children who have quickly gathered around the blanket on which he lies.

“Unnnn … UNNNNH!!”

The young man, who lives at the mission orphanage started decades ago by a Detroiter, is suffering a powerful seizure. We lean over him, mopping a wet towel against his dripping sweat. His arm and chest muscles are so taut, I think he might snap. I ask for something to put between his teeth, realizing suddenly that we are the only “adults” nearby — two colleagues and myself — because the pastors left an hour ago with Mr. Herbert to hunt down supplies.

“UNNNH!”

We try to steer away the young children, and the older ones follow our lead and pull them to the tents. We hover over the young man, trying to hold him, comfort him. Normally, at least in American normal, you would call a doctor immediately, but no phones are working here, and who is there to call? One of his friends yells in Creole, telling him to focus, to think about God, to repeat God’s name, to be strong, be strong!

In time, his breathing slows, his chest drops, his eyes focus. He nods when we speak. We get more water. We prop him up. I glance at the schoolchildren who have regathered, scared silent, fingers to their lips, and I see the look that the young give the old in times of panic, the you-must-know-something-so-please-help-us look.

But what do we know? How can we help?

So much they don’t have
By our third day at the Caring and Sharing Mission (or, as some refer to it after the earthquake, The Mission That Did Not Fall Down), a familiarity has set in, a dulled, sweaty thump to the daylight hours. The kids recognize us, and call our names. We walk in lazy circles. The heat slows our thinking. We move as the children move, from here to there, from sitting point to sitting point, a vacant step, a couch with no cushions, a shady spot against a wall. Time passes. The emptiness swallows it.

What the residents of this mission don’t have is telling. After the worst earthquake in 250 years, they are without electricity, without power to run a fan, without light to read their schoolbooks at night. Without refrigeration, without hot water, without showers. Without privacy in their bathrooms, because a wall collapsed. Without a roof to shelter from the rain, because they all sleep outside. Without schooling because the schools are closed or destroyed, without an answer, a timetable or a reliable return to normal. Without a doctor to call when one of them goes into seizure.

What the children don’t have here tells their story far more than what they do.

What is the most money you ever had in your pocket? I ask Sadrac. He is 17, on the verge of manhood.

“Ten dollars.”

How did you get it?

“A man who visited the mission gave it to me.”

Did that feel like a lot of money?

“Oh, yes, because $10 is the same as 80 Haitian dollars. And with $80, I live for a month.”

A month?

“Uh-huh. Because I know how to save.”

Our third day in Haiti has been declared a national day of prayer by President René Préval, the first of three in a row. Citizens are told to pray for hours on end, then start over again.

Here in the mission, the kids comply, and by 7 a.m., as we groggily rise and count the evening’s mosquito bites, they already are gathered in folding chairs by the wall or sitting on the ground: the infants, the grade-schoolers, the teens, some with their heads in their hands. They sit in the mounting heat for hour after hour, singing, chanting, responding to whomever stands in front and leads them.

“We must pray,” a young man named Lewinsky tells me, “because a woman has warned the president that if we do not pray for three days, more bad things will happen.

“She told him this before the earthquake, but he did not listen. Now he listen.”

It is typical of how events unfold in Port-au-Prince. There is the official version — the president’s declared period of national mourning — and then there is the street version — a woman with a vision warning the president to repent, like a Moses to a Pharaoh, the president being too scared to refuse. In a superstitious country that still actively practices voodoo, visions and prophecies are not to be scoffed at. Besides, it is Friday and it is hot, and in a powered-down city of rubble, sitting and praying is hardly a farfetched activity.

There’s death all around
Later in the morning, we take a group of the teenagers and walk the city one more time. Sadrac wants to see his school. He misses going. (When was the last time your teenager said that?) He leads us past encampments of tents, some no more than sheet metal resting against poles, in which entire families sleep, sipping water, staring as we pass, the children holding out their hands in hopes of something, anything, you might place in them.

“The earthquake is the first time I see so much dead body,” Sadrac says. “I think it is a dream because it is so bad in the street. A lot of people dead. I see people in hospital, they lose hands, foots, some be crazy now, too, about the earthquake.

“In Port-au-Prince, we got 5 million people, and I can say it feel like 2 1/2 million are dead.”

In truth, a latest death count is 240,000, but that must be just an educated guess. As we walk past a collapsed shopping center, people pull their shirts up over their noses, because the stench of decaying bodies is overwhelming. So much death is yet to be accounted for. The president is saying three years just to clear the rubble of this earthquake. Three years? And until the rubble is cleared, who will really know the breadth of the catastrophe?

“After you see this,” Sadrac says, eyeing the countless little mountains of destroyed buildings, “all you can do is lift up your hand and thank God.”

For what?

“For living.”

Future is full of questions
The Detroit man who started this mission, the Rev. John Hearn Sr., and the Detroit woman who taught faith and English here for 27 years, Florence Moffett, are in their 80s now. This visit has brought them joy and grief. The joy speaks for itself, in the hugs of the children who follow their every step.

The grief lies in contemplating the future. How will their mission go on? How will they pay for repairs? How many more orphans, teenagers, kids whose parents truly have nothing, can they accept inside their walls?

“If we wanted, we could have 50 more children by this afternoon,” Hearn laments. He is afraid to tell people on the street about the mission for fear they will hand him their children right there on the spot. It already has happened.

Haiti. The future of this devastated country is as frightening as its immediate past. How long to clear the rubble? What will go up in its place? Who has money to build? What about all the destroyed businesses? Are any structures safe? What about the rainy season — which is about to commence? All these people living on the ground? They’ll be washed away. Living in mud and filthy water. Disease could grow rampant. Malaria, dysentery, maybe tuberculosis. We already have seen hogs eating fruit rinds in the market, just a short distance from children who walk barefoot. Who handles garbage, sewage, sanitation? What does “sanitary” even mean here anymore?

As we walk to Sadrac’s school, there are huge piles of trash, covered with flies. A one-time classroom now has become a bathroom — the smell of human waste is choking — and again, it is covered with flies. Small grills are lit here and there, a few hot dogs being cooked, or a rare helping of goat meat, again swarmed with insects. I don’t want to judge too much about Haiti, but I’m pretty sure the only truly happy creatures here are the bugs.

“My name is Sam. I have been at this mission since I am 7 years old. I am 18 now.

“I’m a simple person here. When they are gonna wash something down, I’ll get the water. I will sweep the yard. I’ll hold the gate key. Those are my jobs.”

You don’t sleep inside, either?

“No. I sleep in a tent in the yard.”

Why?

“Because everybody is scared. Every time they hear something — even if it’s a car passing by — if it goes fast and makes fhsoooo noise like that, the kids are scared. They think it’s the earthquake again.

“So we sleep outside. We are being careful.”

All they can do is wait
When we reach the school, the Greater Works Academy/College de L’excellence, Sadrac’s head lifts and his eyes dart around. The center section has collapsed. A water tank is leaning precariously atop rubble. A man is shoveling concrete into brick molds, alone, one worker, one brick at a time.

Sadrac hustles up into the rubble. A few minutes later, he returns with two women and some girls his age.

“My school also has an orphanage for girls,” he says. “But look it at.”

He points to a crumbled section of the building.

When we ask where the girls sleep now, he points to several mattresses out in the open, atop the ruins.

“There,” he says.

We ask when the school will reopen. We are told no one knows. Maybe April. Sadrac shrugs unhappily. He points to a basketball court and says he played many games there.

We hang around a few more minutes. It is a particular form of heartbreak to see a kid, on what should be a school day, lingering around his place of learning, as if hoping a class might start up. Nothing does. Nothing starts up. The man keeps making bricks, one at a time, and finally, Sadrac poses for a picture by the school sign, and the group turns and walks away, the girls on their mattresses waving good-bye.

It’s hard to forget
A few hours later, we zip our bags and bring them to the blue van. The bags weigh little. We leave everything. Every towel. Every candy bar. Every extension cord.

Earlier, Natalie, a soft-voiced teen who lost both her parents by age 5, wondered whether she could ask me a question. She seemed nervous. She looked at her feet. Finally, she finally blurted it out. “Do you have a battery?”

So we leave everything — every battery, every toothbrush, every pen — and we approach the van, and the kids mill about in mixed emotions. Some hug Florence; some cry, “Mommy, Mommy, good-bye, Mommy!” Rev. John Hearn Jr., the Detroiter who has inherited the wheel from his father and who drives fund-raising and operations and arranges for food to be flown in, shakes hands with the older boys and goes over details.

My colleagues and I make the rounds, picking up the smallest kids, giving them a farewell hoist, slapping and hugging the teens who, at first, hang back, perhaps protective of showing too much attachment, because what you attach to in Haiti can go away quickly.

The night before, the generator ran for a few hours, so I took out my computer and opened an iTunes program for four of the teenagers, who gathered around the screen. They were amazed at the idea of it, and quickly asked whether I had music from their favorite groups, which were mostly rappers, R&B artists, and, surprisingly, Enrique Iglesias.

I played a few songs for them from artists I liked. They mostly looked at one another and laughed, then shook their heads no. But when I played the first beats of the Motown song “I Can’t Help Myself” by the Four Tops, I noticed they just listened, reserving judgment, until finally, they began to nod their heads in rhythm.

“OK,” they said.

I think a lot about Haiti now. I think about the earth opening up, how scared those kids must have been. I think about the horror they have seen. I think about “Mommy” Moffett sitting in the open chapel room, dozens of quiet children at her feet as she reads them a Bible passage the way she used to do.

I think about Mr. Herbert, alias Herbert Studstill, who spent his life working in Ford plants in Michigan, trying to rebuild toilets that were disgracefully inadequate even before the quake. I think about giving out tennis balls on our second day, and how it almost changed the weather inside the mission, the balls flinging about, voices squealing, energy rising. Tennis balls?

I think about Sadrac, Michael, Natalie, Linda, Israel. I think about Lewinsky and Sam, as evening fell, singing a song to us with no instruments, just their young voices, a duet of “Shout to the Lord.”

Mountains bow down

and the seas will roar

at the sound of your name …

I think about families living under pieces of sheet metal, mountains of garbage, hospitals comprised of tents.

I think about rice and beans for dinner every night, about washing your body from a bowl of water, about barefoot infants and a young man having a seizure on a blanket in the dirt and how the older tend to the younger, except they are all so young in this place.

I think about the toothy smiles despite all that, I think about the nodding heads to the Motown music, I think about the last thing most of the teenagers said to us:

“When do you come back?”

There is an emptiness to The Mission That Did Not Fall Down, but there is an emptiness when you depart it, as well. And that’s the thing about Haiti and the earthquake. You can leave the rubble, the smells, the heat, the noise, the mosquitoes, the prayers, the pleading eyes and hopeful faces. You can leave it all, but it doesn’t leave you.

Contact MITCH ALBOM: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. www.freep.com/mitch.

Second of three in series

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — She is 16 and she comes from a large family, but the large family is gone now. All of them. Eleven died when the earth opened in Haiti.

Linda survived.

Children emerge like spirits from the rubble of disaster; they can hover outside the horror they endured. But where can they go? After the worst earthquake in 250 years, where can anyone in Haiti go? To a stuffy tent in a parking lot? To a mattress atop a pile of crushed concrete? To other family? But what if you lost …your family?

Linda came here, to a small, sand-colored orphanage that, at first, was believed to have been destroyed. It was not. Neither was she. Playing and praying among other children now, many younger than she is, Linda has moments where the demons are at bay, where she smiles and waves. The kids take care of their own at The Mission That Did Not Fall Down, the Caring and Sharing Mission founded by a Detroit pastor 30 years ago, when he was compelled by the poverty he witnessed here.

Now things are worse than ever. And for every Linda whom the mission can embrace, there are hundreds more it cannot. It is the bad math of this troubled nation, the human equation without a solution.

Orphans rise above their sorrows
Nighttime at the mission orphanage has a sound all its own. Wild dogs howl in the street. A siren whirs then disappears. In rare stretches of quiet, you hear the soft snoring of six dozen children and teenagers, sleeping outside in tents or on mattresses. They remain too afraid to move back indoors, their dreams darkened by an earthquake that changed their world.

My sleep that first night is sweat-soaked and lasts less than an hour. The air is a moist curtain; mosquitoes circle like trapeze artists. Light breaks in a groggy awakening, and almost instantly, the sound of spoons clanging is everywhere. Breakfast — ramen noodles in small bowls — is being doled out. I peer over the stairs. Although it is barely 7 a.m., the kids are lined up, waiting to eat.

Hunger will wake you quicker than anything.

Life on the streets
We’d gone walking the day before, several colleagues and a posse of the older teens from the Caring and Sharing Mission, celebrated as The Mission That Did Not Fall Down. The teens attached to us like bodyguards. There was Sadrac, whose mother cooks for the orphans, and Lewinsky, who took his name from a doctor who saved his life and has since passed away. There was Israel, whom the kids tease about having a large head, and Djonna, who wears a Jewish star because, he says, “Jesus was Jewish.”

At first, I wondered why we needed such a gaggle. But one block out, I quickly understood. All of Port-au-Prince seemed to be walking the streets, coming at you or surging behind you. The teens circled us protectively, waiting if we stopped to take photos. Watching out for one another — even strangers — is a pretty basic instinct for kids from the mission.

We entered the grounds of a school campus that is now a sprawling tent village, endless rows bumped together like planted crops, thousands and thousands of Haitians everywhere, sitting, lying down, wiping their brows, nursing babies. Some squeezed behind small tables of snacks or jars of orange juice, hoping to sell such delicacies to buy larger quantities of a cheaper food. Others mobbed around a young man with a generator who was offering to charge cell phones for $2 a pop.

“There’s one of the hospitals,” Sam said. He pointed to larger tents, guarded by a man sitting in a chair. “We went there when the earthquake happen. I see a lot of broken arms, a lot of people with eyes blind.”

He inhaled. “A lot of people die.”

We curled around a post and saw several large, bright lights. Three men were sitting at a table, beneath a giant tarp. A yellow trailer was parked behind them. There was rubble all around, so we climbed over jagged mounds to get a better look. Something large was pointed at the men.

I blinked.

A TV camera.

They were on the air.

Television and reality
“This used to be our television station, a four-story building,” Jean Borges said. A large man with a large voice, Borges is the director general of Radio Tele Ginen. He was on the first floor when the earthquake came. He heard a noise “like a bulldozer hitting a house” and ran out just before the building collapsed.

A self-proclaimed “broadcasting genius,” Borges found a microwave transmitter, some loose equipment and a trailer. A week later, he had somehow pieced together a working TV/radio station for anyone lucky enough to have the means to receive it.

“We are truly ‘reality TV,’ ” he said, laughing. “But Haitians, we are capable of things that you don’t even think about. We believe in ourselves. Things will get better.

“The first thing we broadcast when we started back up was a thank-you to God.”

As he showed us his truck, the mission teens hung back, watching, as if all of this were normal, or at least the new normal, which means strange but true. When we said good-bye to Jean, I promised to bring by a DVD movie of “Inglourious Basterds” that I had in my bag at the mission. He planned to show it to the nation. “I am happy for any programming,” he said.

We left the bright lights behind, the hue of evening now falling, and wandered back past the rubble and through the tents and the tens of thousands of hungry, tired faces. Somewhere, music played, wafting in the breeze. It was surreal, haunting, like something out of “Apocalypse Now.”

How old are you, Natalie?

“I am 17.”

Why did you come here?

“My mommy and daddy is passed away, my daddy since I was 5, my mommy since I was 6.”

What is your room like?

“My room — it’s good. We have seven of us in the room — eight now, because a new girl came in.”

What is your favorite possession?

“My favorite possession is to teach the little ones that are growing everything I knew.”

No, I mean, do you have a favorite thing you own — a radio or an iPod or clothes?

“No, nothing. No phone. No computer. No radio. Just some clothes. And my mattress.”

Do you know that kids your age in America have many things?

“Yes, I know.”

Does that make you sad or angry?

“No. I stay who I am. I just stay in my life. That’s how I am supposed to live. I don’t know. God knows.”

High noon. Our second day in Port-au-Prince. The blue van is stuffed with passengers, including the Rev. John Hearn Sr., the Detroit pastor who founded the mission, now in his 80s, and several kids who sit on bags in the back. The driver is Herbert Studstill, who at 61 looks much younger, with a dash of Denzel Washington in his profile. Studstill spent his working life in Ford plants in Michigan, mostly construction, he says. A few years ago, he came to Haiti in response to an inner calling to help others.

Today, Studstill (or “Mr. Herbert” as the kids call him) is the all-purpose man at the Caring and Sharing Mission, the guy who will fix a hole in the wall and soothe a crying child to sleep. On the day of the January quake, he was supposed to be getting a haircut. That morning, he canceled his appointment.

“You see that?”

He points to a building that looks like a club sandwich after an anvil fell on it. “That was my barbershop. That’s where I was supposed to be.”

He shakes his head. “When I think about that …”

Studstill navigates through a diesel-choked phalanx of trucks, cars and makeshift buses called “tap-taps.” Every block we pass has one constant: rubble. Endless rubble. Rubble of walls. Rubble of floors. Chunks of concrete, stones and sand everywhere, as if the Lord opened a giant bag of crushed buildings and poured it overtop of Port-au-Prince. Occasionally, you see a sneaker, a dress, a piece of a green chair, a Hefty bag, sticking out of the debris.

“In the first few days, you saw individuals trying to dig people out,” Studstill says. “People with mallet hammers, sledgehammers, picks, trying to get at loved ones inside. “What did it take, 30 seconds?”

Studstill’s voice lowers. “This much destruction? Thirty seconds?”

So poor, and hurting
We stop at the Haitian capitol, a sort of Caribbean cousin to the White House. Except it, too, is collapsed, as if a bomb exploded in the middle. Across the street, a once-beautiful park has been transformed into another sea of tents and the teeming homeless people who inhabit them.

Hearn steps out alongside me. He wears a bowler hat against the heat. When he first came to Haiti, in the ’70s, it was the poverty that compelled him to do more, poverty that made him buy a small piece of vacant land, poverty that urged him to solicit funds to build a mission, poverty that filled it with its first 50 children.

Now he looks over the waves of suffering and he knows it is even worse. “What we call poverty in the United States is luxury here,” he says. “People here do not have what we throw out.”

A heavyset mother in a sleeveless blouse rises from the ground, holding one of her babies. She approaches Hearn, and they speak softly for a good long while.

Later he will tell me she wanted to give him her child.

Thankful for all of it
Back at the mission, I go to my luggage and retrieve two bags of Oreo cookies. Within 30 seconds, the kids have found me and are lined up. They hold out their hands, small, unwashed hands, caked with rubble dust. I give one Oreo per set of fingers, cautious of what Hearn has warned me, that all must get the same. The older kids stand behind me, and if one of the young ones tries to take two cookies, they offer a swift reprimand.

This is how it works here, the older kids watch over the younger kids. No one objects. No one says, “You’re not my boss.” There is precious little that passes for parental scolding, and the kids sop up any drop they find.

Later, as the hours pass, we play basketball on a bent hoop between waterlogged potholes. We sit on a cushionless couch. We look at the sky, sweating, not talking.

“You don’t always have to speak here,” the Rev. John Hearn Jr., the founder’s son and current driving force of the mission, says to me. “They’re happy just to have company. They will never forget that you came.”

But it’s just a visit, I say.

“Doesn’t matter. They know what you left.”

What do you mean?

“You have a home, a car, comforts. And they know you left it to come see them.”

The sun goes down. The evening devotional begins. A young man thumps a plastic tub and another runs a spoon over a grater, creating a driving beat. The prayers. How can you describe these prayers? They are joyous, high-pitched, girls almost shouting, little boys unable to control their smiles. They sing of Jesus, of having a friend, of surrender to God, of being lifted.

“Mommy,” Detroiter Florence Moffett, who for 27 years led the mission, smiles, and the two reverends nod. The 20-year-olds lead the 15-year-olds, who lead the 10-year-olds, who hold the 4-year-olds. They have eaten less all day than many of us eat in a single helping. They will wash with a scooped can of water and sit exposed on cinder-block holes when they need a toilet.

But another night falls at The Mission That Did Not Fall Down, and the sounds of gratitude can be heard, gratitude that wafts toward the dark Haitian sky, dotted with stars.

And we start walking.

Coming Sunday: A prayer among the ruins.

Contact MITCH ALBOM: 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch “The Mitch Albom Show” 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760). Also catch “Monday Sports Albom” 7-8 p.m. Mondays on WJR. To read his recent columns, go to www.freep.com/mitch.

Garden City church group provides water, food to quake victims

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

Port-au-Prince, Haiti — With so many hungry for food and water, a missionary school backed by a Garden City church has become a lifeline for hundreds of Haitians who have nothing and no place to go.

The stone courtyard has become home to as many as 200 people from the Delmas 33 section of Port-au-Prince.

They were displaced by last week’s earthquake, their homes reduced to rubble or too damaged to inhabit.

Herbert Studstill, a volunteer from Romulus who flew to the mission before the earthquake, a bricklayer by trade, has become an expert in rationing. He said that the neighborhood has not seen much food from international relief missions.

He has been shaken by the immensity of it all.

“I’ve seen more people dead than I’ve seen on TV in my life,” he said. “I don’t think I can ever switch back to my normal.”

He’s among a small group of Michigan residents who are in Haiti helping this school, 1,700 miles from Metro Detroit. They are there helping to feed, clothe and comfort hundreds of people who now count on the school for their very existence.

As many as 200,000 are believed to have died in the massive earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan 12. Thousands more are in need of medical care, food and water.

A six-person mission led by the Rev. John Hearn of Christian Faith Ministries of Garden City arrived Wednesday with supplies and thousands of dollars, but it still is not enough.

On Thursday, Hearn managed to secure bottles of water and food from American aid agencies. That was gained with the help of a staffer from the office of U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Detroit, who is part of the mission. But that food and water is expected to only last a few days.

Nigel Snoad of the United Nations Disaster Assessment & Coordination team told the delegation on Thursday that relief aid would soon be distributed on a larger scale.

Meanwhile back in Michigan, Hearn’s church is organizing a drive to collect items for the Caring and Sharing Mission that they’ve supported for decades.

Soon, they hope to send back a cargo plane of supplies: rice and beans, baby formula, air mattresses, clothing and shoes for men, women and children.

“That’s imperative to get those items down,” Hearn said.

Nowhere else to go

Myriam Moise, 23, has slept two nights under a tent at the mission, along with her 2-month-old baby and nephews. She has nowhere else to go.

The quake left several rooms of her three-level home in Delmar 33 exposed. Her husband sleeps outside the door of the house to scare away thieves, she said.

“We don’t know where else to go,” Moise said about why she came to the mission.

Moise said she hasn’t thought about what they will do next week, or next month. She is concerned only with today.

“We’re waiting. We’re waiting on God to do something.”

Life inside the compound is a microcosm of life outside. Those who survived the devastating earthquake last week struggle to endure with very little.

On Thursday morning, shelves were nearly bare and some were empty. All that was left to feed the hundreds that flock to the mission were three bags of rice, and bags of pinto beans and burgher wheat.

With gas scarce, cooking on the stove is unwise. Families are fed from a large iron pot cooked over hot coals in the center of the courtyard.

Each morning, neighbors trickle into the compound to fetch water from the mission’s well.

Too many hands drawing up the bucket could contaminate the entire pool, said Yonel Ismael, the mission’s director. In recent days, he has assigned just a few of the boys from the school to do the task.

“If they want to eat, we feed them,” volunteer Studstill said.

Outside the compound and down the road is a grassy expanse. Once used for soccer games, its fenced grounds are now overrun with makeshift tents, made of rope, plastic sheeting and bed sheets stretched from trees.

It is home to thousands of displaced Haitians.

Monley Kevins is 5 years old. His naked body was pulled from the wreckage of his home Wednesday. He was alive. His mother and father, found earlier, were dead.

That night, Monley slept beside his grandfather on a dusty mattress, shielded from the nighttime chill by a blanket.

His uncle, Gary Elyssee, is the one who found the child after days of relentless digging. He was ecstatic to find the boy, Elyssee said, but now he must feed and care for him.

“I still don’t know what I’m going to do,” Elyssee said in French.

A family atmosphere

Perhaps one of the deepest comforts, some said, comes from the prayers and family atmosphere at the mission.

“They have done a lot for me,” said 19-year-old Donna Jusce, who was raised at the mission since the age of 9.

“I can’t be scared because if I die, I know where I am going,” he said, while emphasizing his faith and how it has grown at the mission. Jusce now is a volunteer.

“I like looking out for people,” he said.

After nightfall, Hearn gathered many in the courtyard for prayers: “Please know even in what you’ve been through, God has not forsaken you.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100122/NATION/1220377/1020/Mich.-mission-helps-Haitians-rebuild-lives#ixzz0e7hDUalQ

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

Garden City — It was the best text message the Rev. John Hearn Jr. has ever received.

On Thursday morning, a 25-year-old teacher at his missionary school in Port-au-Prince finally replied to the multiple text messages the Garden City minister had sent, trying to find out if she and others had survived the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday. The young teacher, Rolande Stlot, had grown up at the mission, and Hearn had sponsored her since she was 16, calling her his “adopted daughter.”

Some time after 6 a.m., his cell phone received her four typed words: “We are all ok.”

“That was my wake-up call this morning, and a beautiful one,” Hearn said.

Until then, Hearn, of Christian Faith Ministries of Garden City, had received no word on the fate of anyone at the church’s Haiti mission, called Friends of C&S Mission. Besides waiting for word from Stlot, he hadn’t heard from Herbert Studstill, a 61-year-old volunteer from Romulus. Nor had he heard whether the school’s 35 children were alive.

Across the United States, those with family members and friends in Haiti continue to worry, as communication networks remain disrupted, making phone calls difficult or impossible.

In Michigan, relief agencies are racing to prepare relief shipments to Haiti. The Coast Guard Air Station of Detroit is on the scene there, assisting with relief operations, said Lt. j.g. Alan Baker. Commercial flights to Haiti have been canceled.

Grand Rapids-based Haiti Foundation Against Poverty secured seats on a charter plane out of Palm Beach, Fla., for medical doctors to head to Haiti on Friday morning.

Also, the Caribbean Student Association at Michigan State University is planning a fundraiser Jan. 29.

“We want to do whatever possible to help save as many lives and rebuild the country,” said President Nicholas Kerr, who’s a Jamaica native.

The Garden City church has been collecting clothing, as well as toiletries and bandages.

Hearn said he is working with U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ office to try to fly to Haiti on a military plane.

Studstill had left for Haiti last week to help with the expansion of the mission’s school. But the building was the least of his concerns. He focused Thursday on the text messages.

In the messages from Stlot, Hearn learned that everyone was alive and safe, and they had all found refuge at another mission, Morning Star Christian Academy. The group was with Pastor Jay Threadgill, Stlot wrote. Then the messages stopped.

“I was grateful to get that much,” Hearn said. “Now we have to get food and water and supplies there.”

Leslie Studstill, 41, of Romulus was overjoyed to get confirmation her father was alive. She said she had tried to call him, sending text messages and leaving voicemails. She never got an answer. Nor did she ever successfully reach anyone at the State Department hotline established for Americans. That number is (888) 407-4747.

She received the news from Hearn on Thursday morning. “It’s been like a roller coaster,” she said. “Now I know he’s safe. It’s a good feeling.

But Roger Allen, pastor at the New Covenant Free Methodist Church in Clio, said church members Merle West of Mount Morris and Gene Dufour of Clio remain missing in Haiti, where their flight was scheuled to arrive an hour before the quake.

Staff Writer Kim Kozlowski and Associated Press contributed.

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100115/METRO01/1150397/Garden-City-church-relieved-to-hear-from-Haiti-mission-workers#ixzz0e7ic5N6O

GARDEN CITY, Mich. — A Garden City Church that operates a small school in Port-au-Prince Haiti said they got text message early Thursday that answered their prayers.

POSTED: Wednesday, January 13, 2010  in The Detroit News
UPDATED: 2:50 pm EST January 14, 2010
PHOTO CREDITS: Elisabeth Conely

“We are all Ok,” read a text message sent to John Hearn Jr. of The Friends of Caring & Sharing Mission. Christian Faith Ministries in Garden City has been operating The Friends of C&S Mission, which has built a small school in the capital and works to educate, feed and clothe Haitian children, for more than 20 years.

The Friends of C&S Mission members anxiously waited for word from someone that the 35 children at the school and volunteers from Michigan were OK.

“This came at 6:13 a.m. this morning and it said, “We are all OK.’ “That’s truly a blessing from God. It lets me know he truly had his arms around each and everyone of them,” said Hearn. Jr.

The message came from a 25-year-old woman who was a teacher at the school the mission built. Five children who were students at the school are now teachers there.

Nobody had heard from Herbert Studsteel, the last volunteer who left metro Detroit last week for Haiti, until he contacted his wife, Amy Thursday morning.

Studsteel was one of several volunteers who rotate in and out of the mission, and he went to the school to try to improve the cement infrastructure. “He’s a strong man so if he could pull out from under a brick wall he will, so I kept faith,” said Amy Studsteel.

The mission still has not heard whether the school they built withstood the magnitude-7.0 earthquake. “I really don’t know what we are going to find. If it did go down, it would be very difficult to rebuild there again,” said The Friends of Caring & Sharing founder John Hearn Sr.

No calls or text messages to people in Haiti are going through again said Hearn Sr.

Hearn Sr. said that it’s comforting to know that the building can be replaced, but people cannot and he will continue to pray for the people that have died. “Your heart aches for those who are not named, and will not even have a decent burial with all the devastation,” said Hearn Sr.

The group is waiting for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., to put together a delegation to fly to Haiti and help rebuild. If you would like to help the mission group, send money to:

The Friends of C&S Mission:
26300 Ford Road
Dearborn Heights, MI 48127-2854
For more information on The Friends of C&S Mission, call 734-525-0022.