A big surprise!

Photo from: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_30578.html

He crouched in the back of our pickup truck, like a rattler ready to strike. Silent, stealthy, and totally hidden to us until we were in front of our house and I was unlocking the gate.

Then all of a sudden, Carol called to me and said there was a boy in the back of the truck. I walked around the back and there he was. He looked about 8 years old, dressed in raged, dirty clothes, and told me he was homeless and wanted to come and live with us.

My heart immediately melted, but I knew I had to be careful none-the-less, even though there didn’t seem to be an immediate threat. I asked him to get out of the truck and wait outside the gate until we were settled inside as we had just come home from a shopping trip and had splurged on some special goodies.

Carol was a little shaken up by this intrusion on our “personal space” and urged caution, but all I could think about was his dark, piercing eyes encircled by white, barely glinting in the dark, and his plea to take him in like a stray puppy.

Just to be safe, I alerted Ecdes, the young Haitian man who lives with us of the situation. He said the boy was probably one of the thousands of street boys who are homeless and try to survive by swarming cars at intersections to earn a few cents cleaning windshields and hustling small change, telling stories of woe to play on people’s emotions.

Still, the plight of the boy moved my heart, so I got some food together and grabbed a gospel tract and children’s Bible story book, and went up to talk to the boy between the slats of the closed gate.

It was like talking to a person in prison, but now I wonder which one of us was the prisoner. Was I the prisoner, cocooned under house arrest behind an iron gate, with razor wire crowning the walls and two guard dogs roaming the grounds? Was I a prisoner to my lifestyle that included internet, cell phones and laptops; electricity, running water and plumbing; a car and money for gas? As the saying goes: “Let us live simply, so that others may simply live.”

I asked the boy his name, and he said it was “Jean Noel”. The irony of his name did not escape me. “Noel” means Christmas in French, and here he was asking for an early Christmas present. He said he was 13 years old and that his mother had died in the earthquake. Recently his father had kicked him out of the house and told him he would kill him if he came back.

Whether all this was true or not didn’t really matter to me at that point, for all I could see was a child who had to grow up all too fast in a country where most normal people only get one good meal a day. But he didn’t seem to be lying, and he had in innocence about him that drew me in.

I asked him how long he had hid in the back of the truck, and he said he had climbed in near the school where Carol teaches. Of course I told him that what he did was not good, and that he could have been hurt when he surprised us.

But I understood his actions as a desperate attempt to get what he really wanted: a home with a loving family, a bed to sleep in protected from the rain – all the things a child should have as he is growing up. It pained my heart knowing that I could not give him these things at this time.

As I showed him what was in the bag, I asked him if he could read, and he said yes. His mother had paid for his schooling before she had died, and he had learned to read.

I also asked if he was a Christian and he said his Mom had taken him to church regularly, but now he did not have any clothes to wear to go to church. “What about the pastor at the church”, I said, “Does he know who you are?” “Maybe he can help you.” He said he had asked the pastor already, and he could not help.

If I had been feeling better, I might have talked with him more, but I had been struggling with fever, chills and muscle-aches all week, symptoms of malaria. So I asked Ecdes to take the boy back to where he had sneaked into the back of our truck, and gave him money for the tap tap.

Sometimes we think that the horrors depicted in Dicken’s stories like “Oliver” and “A Christmas Story” are long over, but in most countries, they still exist.

“Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.” (Hebrews 13:2)