Jonah Ogles: The cinder-block school has no windows and no doors, just a string of incandescent lightbulbs hanging down the center of the ceiling like the spine of a great whale. It’s hot and humid, and the room throbs with the voices of 200 Haitians who have paused from fishing, gardening, or painting the sides of handmade wooden sailboats to come see the special visitor who has traveled 1,500 miles to Île de la Tortue, an island where the hills are green and lush and the sand is sugar white and the small children play with shells that line the shore by the thousands.
They have been waiting all day under this tin roof, watching one local man set up his old Casio keyboard and another tune the heads of his bongos, so that they can see the blan, the white man, the first ever to visit the school on this nearly roadless island five miles north of the Haitian mainland. In short, they have come to see me. And I have come to see one of them: Ervenson, the Haitian boy whom I have been sponsoring for 12 years.
Every month since the fall of 2000, I’ve sent roughly $35, or about $5,000 in total, through a Christian organization called Compassion International. Compassion funnels money to children all over the world to pay for things like tuition, schoolbooks, clothes, food, medicine, and sneakers. I sent the money to give him a better life. And I’m here to see if it actually made any difference.
Leave a comment