Protecting the Throw-Away Children

Photography by Scot Facer Proctor

Maurine and Scot Proctor have been embedded with the Utah Hospital Task Force in Haiti.

To donate to Foyer de Sion orphanage, click here.

Orphans are an epidemic in Haiti. Sometimes these are children without parents, but often they are children given up by parents, too tired and helpless to know how to feed them anymore. It may be a baby tossed over the wall of an orphanage, whose malnourished mother no longer can produce milk. It may be a disabled child whose teenage parent cannot cope.

Now, since the earthquake, the number of orphans has swelled from an estimated 380,000 to more than 600,000. Nobody knows for sure. But they are everywhere.

A couple of years ago 40 4-year-olds were found fending for themselves in a drainage ditch.

Waiting in line at the airport, two women tell us that two children have been dropped off at their apartment in the week they stayed in Haiti. “She is yours now,” the mother says. In the other case, they had to talk the parents out of selling their child into slavery.

So those Haitians who step forward to protect and nurture orphans have a heavy mission, especially since the earthquake when it is difficult to find food, and two Latter-day Saints are foremost among them.

Sister Majorie Mardy

Guesno and Majorie Mardy have three orphanages called Foyer de Sion in Haiti where they are currently caring for 70 children. Known by everyone with affection as Bishop Mardy, he is currently a counselor in the mission presidency in Haiti and she is the Relief Society president. They have plenty to do without adding orphans to the mix.

When the Utah Hospital Task Force first arrived at midnight, Bishop Mardy was at the airport, dressed in a white shirt and tie to greet us, while Majorie, both legs injured when she was pinned for three hours during the earthquake, waited in the car.

Kidnapped!

In the next few days, they were to become our teachers about the plight of orphans in Haiti as we tried to help them, but they were also to teach us something more about how one can maintain grace under pressure, faith when tormented, charity when your own need is furiously calling.

Bishop Guesno Mardy has the face of an angel.

Their anguish began before the earthquake, when on Dec. 6, their three-year-old son Gardy was kidnapped right after an LDS Church service, and they haven’t seen him since. Since the Port-au-Prince police department saw 51 of its members killed in the earthquake and havoc reigns in this nation, you can be certain that the police are not able to follow up on the loss of this one sweet child.

While the Mardys have heard through an informant, that their son is still alive, their hopes of his return seem diminished day by day. How do you live with such an enormity of pain? Where is the nation’s outcry against this kidnapping?

Rain Falls on the Just

Then came the earthquake, and in a further demonstration that rain falls on the just and unjust, Bishop Mardy lost his mother, his sister, his brother-in-law, and a close friend while the world heaved and hurled. They also lost one of the buildings where their orphans were staying and their downtown administrative office.

Bishop Mardy was standing here when the earthquake struck.

Bishop Mardy had just picked up one of their children from school and was walking back toward their office, when not twenty feet from the front door, he felt the earth quake and roar, a choking dust fill the air, and saw his office collapse like a stack of pancakes before his eyes.

Bishop Mardy climbs across the rubble of his former administrative building where his loved ones were killed and his wife was trapped.

His loved ones had passed away as he stood, helpless, before the building. He started to scream in terror, “My wife is dead. My wife is dead.” Then in the cacophony he heard her voice, “Mardy. I’m alive. I’m trapped.”

From her perspective, she was in the office, when the ceiling began to collapse and the earth shook. Pieces of ceiling were falling everywhere, and she cried out, “Jesus, I will not die.” She was thrown to the earth, trapped in place, and her feet were lodged at a painful angle. She was stuck there for three hours until they were able to pull her out.

An earthquake of this magnitude not only provides terror in the moment, but the sick feeling that you cannot know what is happening elsewhere. Has the whole world been destroyed?

No sooner was Majorie free, then Bishop Mardy walked on foot to check on all of their orphans, whom he found to be safe, though one of the orphanages was destroyed. He had to crowd the orphans into the remaining two orphanages. He knew if they were to survive, they had to work as a tightly-organized unit.

Reeling with all this loss and pain, the Mardys have not lost their faith or confidence in God. “I refuse to believe I’m living this kind of nightmare,” Bishop Mardy said. He said he will not be defeated because he knows the plan of salvation.

The Heavy Burden

Still, the burdens are immense in caring for the children, especially in a Haiti that has become completely broken. “When you are running an orphanage,” he said, “you never have enough of anything, and you are always worried about renewing the store of food and goods, which we go through quickly.”

After the earthquake, he had to buy food on credit from good-hearted local business owners and pick his way across a fractured city to find enough water for the children.

“If I could, I would run away,” he laughed ruefully, speaking of the immense burden he carries. “It’s too late for me now. When you put your hand to the plow, you cannot look back.”

When we arrived at the orphanage, the UN was just delivering a large truck full of water. Food was much more scarce, a rare commodity. If parents are willing to give up their children because they cannot provide for a single child, you can only imagine how much more difficult it is to provide for 70.

Bishop Mardy said, “An orphanage is not an ideal place to raise a child, but someone has to do it. We are meant to be a bridge until these children can be adopted.”