He Cries Out Once More

Stop everything for just a minute and imagine little Oldo (pronounced All-doh) tugging at your arm, asking you if you’d sit with him and listen to the kind of life he lives.  

So many turn blind eyes and deaf ears to them…sometimes they get tired of crying out…hope weakens.  But when Oldo sees you he believes you are different, he believes you will at least stop to hear his story.  So he cries out once more.  You hear his call, you turn and lock eyes…and you see this small 8 year old wonder, filthy and helpless, but precious, God’s creation.  All you can feel is the pounding of your heart... 

...and you can’t look away because those eyes grab you.  They are so dark, holding deep pain, begging you to respond.  He sees how you are strong and could rescue him if you wanted.    

You kneel down beside him and playfully shoot one of his marbles across the dirt just outside his mud hut.   

He lowers his head, stares straight through the dusty ground, and starts to empty out his child sized heart.  You have to listen carefully because he can only get it out in a whisper.  That dark night when his mama died after she gave birth to his twin baby sisters in their mud hut.  He was only 6 years old...and his mama meant the world to him.  His finger traces lines hard into the dirt as he fights back tears.  He searches for something good to take away all that pain and then you see a half-smile on his brown face as he tells you the part of the story of when God opened the door for a family from Texas to adopt his baby twin sisters.  That part always makes him real happy.  He tells you how this new mama of his twin sisters comes to visit him and his brothers in Haiti as often as she can.  How she always will hug and kiss all over him and sometimes his other friends will stand off in the distance snickering but he doesn’t care because all of her love gives him a crazy kind of joy and almost reminds him of when his own mama was alive.  

He tells you how she brings pictures of his twin sisters for him and his brothers and daddy to keep and they all love seeing them grow.  Oldo tells you how Raphaella looks most like him and Wana looks a lot like his oldest brother, Lenel.  

Simeon, Lenel, Oldo

Then he tells you about the gifts she brings for him.  She knows how he loves candy, soccer balls, and marbles.  But it’s hard because the bigger boys in the village will eventually steal these gifts.  Even while you sit listening to him he only has 3 marbles left… the rest were stolen and that makes him sad.  His finger traces dirt lines again and he tells you how his daddy is getting older but every morning he has to go work the fields under the hot Haiti sun all day long for less than one US dollar a day.  

Oldo's daddy

All of this tragedy and poverty nearly crushes him and there’s a lot more but he stops and wonders if you’ve heard enough.  He looks straight into your eyes and pleads for help, “Please, will you do something?  Will you help me?  If I don’t go to school I’ll end up on the streets and if I end up on the streets I’ll have no hope of becoming anything here.”   

I wish Oldo’s story was me being over dramatic but it’s not.  It’s the real ugly truth of his life and I know because I’m that mama who adopted his twin baby sisters.  And there are another 200 plus village children and their stories read this same way.  Sorrow scars their tiny hearts and suffering defines their daily lives.  These children have gone through more tragedy in their short lives than most people will experience in a life time.  And they need someone to see them worthy.  What they all need most right now is a loving Christian education…the hope of breaking poverty chains so that they can extend the same love of Jesus to others in their broken world that they were offered when you made a way for them to go to school.

Here’s the place where it’s easy to let out a sympathetic sigh but then scroll down to the next Facebook news feed.  But Oldo is a real child and he thinks after you hear his reality that you will do something…he doesn’t think you are going to walk away leaving him to drown in all of his poverty.  If your heart has been stirred for Pastor Nahum’s children, please pray about investing a small amount into their future.  Your $30 monthly sponsorship will change the faces of hundreds and make an eternal difference.  We need 20 more people to commit and become a sponsor to save their school.  What if you clicked here, went to the Back to Life Ministries donate page, scrolled down to Gilbert Christian School Sponsorship and became a monthly sponsor for only $30 a month instead of just scrolling to the next status update on Facebook?  You’d be doing something beautiful...

You’d be staring into Oldo's eyes and hundreds more just like him and whispering tenderly, “I see you.  I hear you.  You are a treasure.  Don’t be scared.  I will sacrifice for you.  I will make a way for you to go to school.  I will love you.”

So you do it.  And you can't believe this joy-gift that floods your soul...this is just the beginning of this wild journey of loving Oldo and all of his school friends who live in that small village in Mirebalais, Haiti.