Beads From Haiti

Helping Families Stay Together

I stood on the balcony of the orphanage, sweat dripping down my back under my loose cotton tank top. The sun was beating down and turning my shoulders and nose redder by the minute. The kids were all playing down below in the cement courtyard. Everything around me was made of cement- the house, the twelve-foot walls, the yard- all reflecting the sun’s intense heat back at me. I was offered a Coke made with real sugar. It was handed to me in a vintage looking glass bottle. Nothing ever tasted so refreshing.

Right then there was a knock at the gate. The game that the children were playing was some form of Ring Around the Rosie. The hands that had been held together in a perfect circle in the courtyard broke apart. A young boy ran to the gate. He knew she would be coming today. She always comes on Tuesday.

The gate slid open with a loud squeal and some elbow grease and effort from the gate guard. The thin young woman slid in through the gate, just barely opened. She dropped to her knees and embraced the boy. I watched from my perch on the balcony as the scene unfolded. His mama was here.

“Mama, mama!” He squealed in delight.

At her knees and embracing him, she pulled out a mango and a bag of chicos. It was all she had to give. But she came weekly with a treat or two to let him know she still loved him and was thinking about him. They sat quietly in the courtyard for hours chatting and laughing. I could tell her heart was being filled.

My paradigm shift happened on this very day. I had been visiting the orphanage, waiting to adopt from that very same orphanage in Haiti. For the first time I saw these children and mothers for what they actually were. These were not orphans. They were children of poor mothers. Because of economics alone, 95% of these children had been institutionalized and placed on a website in America labeled as “waiting children” and offered for adoption to people like me far away who had no idea that there was a living and loving mother visiting her son every week to make sure he knew she still loved him and cared about him.

Not all children left in orphanages in Haiti are lucky enough to have a mother who continues to love well in spite of the circumstances. Many times and maybe most times, the grief and guilt keeps them from wanting to face the situation. Either way, I knew then as I have come to know even more through my thirteen years of work in Haiti that the majority of children left in orphanages are abandoned only because of poverty.

In that poignant moment, when I saw the mother and her son embracing, I asked the orphanage director, who was drinking a sugary Coke next to me, a question that would change my life forever.

“Would she have left him here if she had money to keep him?”

He looked at me with a smirk and chuckled. “No way! You can see she loves her son. Why would she leave him here if she could feed him?”

“So, if she had a job she could keep her children?” I asked not realizing that jobs were not easily found for the average poor woman who could not read or write. If they were able to be found, she could only expect to make about $60-$100 a month, not even enough to shelter and feed her kids, let alone send them to school. “If she had enough money to feed and send her kids to school of course she would keep her children. You see, that’s the problem. They don’t have hope to provide for their kids and don’t want to see them suffer, so they leave them here.” His eyes were looking down at the children who had resumed their play and were holding hands again.

It was at that moment that a spark ignited in me and I knew what I was supposed to do. Help women with jobs that would allow them to feed and shelter their children and send them to school.

Nine months after that initial visit, I had moved my family, including my 4-year-old daughter and still nursing infant son to Haiti. I spent a year living in an orphanage in order to learn the language and understand the complicated world of child abandonment, orphan care, and adoption. The year working with children in orphanages, seeing the incredible emotional toll institutionalization had on them and seeing the pain of separation and abandonment on both sides (parent and child) only solidified my desire to do something about the problem

Churches in America were busy throwing money at orphanages all over the world and calling it “orphan care” and I was seeing for the first time that it was creating an even greater problem where it was easier for a mother to abandon her children to an orphanage then to find any kind of assistance where she would be able to keep her children. Unfortunately, the lack of regulations and corruption often meant that children were left in unsafe environments where their needs were hardly met even within the walls of the institution. The temptation for people to follow the money trail and see how lucrative opening an orphanage could be was too much. Orphanages were opened, kids were literally collected and the money would start to flow. A fraction of it, in many cases would be used to meet the needs of the children, and the rest was pocketed or mismanaged. It felt like the church in America was creating a Pied Piper scenario where the families were enticed by the hope of good food and education for their children- unaware that their children might actually end up in a worse place than at home with mom and hungry. There are definitely worse evils  than hunger for vulnerable children in the world. I witnessed many of them. To make matters worse, many families didn’t know that they ran the risk of actually losing their children forever. The adoption process was not, in many cases, fully understood.

Let me be clear, there were several good orphanages that I knew about run by good people who took care of the children well, but their numbers were few compared to the hosts of others in which it was devastating at best to see how the children lived. We had no less than 20 orphanages in our neighborhood alone.

After a year of observation, my resolve was even more strengthened. I had to figure out a way to create jobs for mothers who were at risk for losing their children as poverty orphans.

I started small. There were four women who came to my house twice a week and met in my living room in the afternoons. We made bracelets and necklaces out of whatever shells and beads we could find downtown at the market. The jewelry was on par with what my then six-year-old would have made, but I posted these treasures on my Facebook page and solicited help from my friends to buy them up.

One bracelet and necklace for $20. Ten sets for $200 and she could keep her children and feed them for a month. We figured out a goal income for each woman. $300 per month was our baseline to where she could keep her children, feed them well and send them to school. She needed to sell 15 sets of necklaces to make this happen. It worked! And they got better. And the jewelry was selling fast. People in America rallied around the ideals of helping a mother be able to  keep her baby.

We knew pretty quickly that we couldn’t rely on using only the beads and shells we were finding locally. Everything was looking the same and we needed something that would stand out. I had seen the paper bead jewelry they were making in Africa and it was suggested to me by some of my Facebook friends’ to try that concept out. Not wanting our beads to look the same, I wondered if it could be done with lightweight cardboard. I came home with some cereal boxes and Christmas present packaging and showed the ladies my idea. They weren’t having it. They just wanted me to keep buying the beads from downtown. It was too time consuming to stop work to make your own beads! Time is money!

At that time, we were also running a feeding program for the kids in our neighborhood and several of the older street kids would spend a significant amount of time at the house and were watching my attempts to make beads out of cardboard. Probably out of boredom and so that they could stay a little longer, they wanted to try to help me out. So, a few of the kids- Leo and Little Richard- sat down with me at my kitchen table and helped me cut little strips of Frosted Flakes boxes into long triangles and roll them on bamboo skewers to make fun and chunky beads that were a hit. Because they were willing to give it a go- I let them start making jewelry to sell as well. Within a few weeks, the boys work was outshining the ladies’ work and so the ladies did a 180 and hopped on board!

We quickly became known as the artisan group in Haiti that was recycling cereal boxes and turning them into jewelry. To this day, you can find cereal box beads in almost every part of Haiti due to our small beginnings in the winter of 2009 and how the idea exploded around us.  We started to grow and add to our numbers and at the end of 2009 had about 20 people working making cereal box jewelry. Mothers were providing for their children and my dream was turning into a reality. All was going as planned.

Until the next month. In January of 2010 an enormous earthquake hit our region in Haiti. We were working on jewelry that afternoon with a house full of artisans when the trembling began. The enormity of the devastation was indescribable. Several hundred thousand Haitians lost their lives that day. Every single wall in front of  the houses up and down my street had crumbled. Mine were standing firm. If mine had crumbled, my children would be dead.

Why did I survive? Why did my house stand? Why did my children live? Why did the people buried alive for days with no help have to endure what they did? Why had God allowed such an incredible tragedy to be inflicted on the poorest country in the western hemisphere. My faith took a nosedive and PTSD set in. The road to recovery was hard and bumpy. But I continued. I knew that the only lifeline that many of these women had was the sale of jewelry and that I was the bridge to that market for them. I had to continue. And so I did.

Over the next few years we grew into an artisan center over more than 300 parents working to care for their children. We had a long list of celebrities come and see the work that we were doing and we began to transition to a more sustainable wholesale model so that we could sell to businesses in the United States. We brought in specialist to teach and train how to use the local clay and process it to make pottery and beads. Our mugs became a bestseller. We started working with metal artisans to develop products made out of recycled 55 gallon drums for home décor. We had a team of seamstresses trained to make tote bags and stuffed animals and other items to sell abroad. We started our own screen printing production so that we could create jobs by making T shirts and printing on tote bags.

The journey has been amazing. And yet it has not been without enormous pain and setbacks. We have endured not only the earthquake together, but also the cholera epidemic, the Chikungunya virus outbreak, the Zika virus outbreak, weekly death and sickness, the instability of Haiti, the gang rule in our area, Covid, the President’s assassination and now another devastating earthquake.

The last two years have been the hardest it has ever been. The Coronavirus pandemic crippled our buyers and almost stopped production. Hours were cut, income was cut more than in half and our people have suffered because of it. They say when America catches a cold, Haiti catches pneumonia. I have seen this played out so many times in Haiti’s relationship to America economically, but whatever setback Americans have experienced in recent months because of the pandemic is most certainly magnified in Haiti and in much of the developing world. Where economic setbacks hurt pocketbooks in places like the United States, they can be deadly in a place like Haiti.

Today we continue to work in Haiti with just over 200 artisans employed through our sales channels on Papillonmarketplace.com and Papillonwholesale.com. We also have a non-profit organization set up that helps with emergency needs as they arise and with continued training and education. Papillon Empowerment (papillonempowerment.org) is currently helping with needs for shelter for people who recently lost home in the earthquake on August 14th of this year.

Our hope is to continue to grow, expand our reach and our market so that we can continue to provide jobs for vulnerable families in Haiti. I will never forget the day at the orphanage when I had my moment that set in motion my desire to come along side mamas in Haiti and allow them to keep their greatest treasures.

My faith is ultimately what is behind my journey. I believe with all my heart that God is moved with compassion when he sees a mother who is forced to abandon her child because she can’t feed him. Although orphanages are often needed for crisis situations, children were not, by design intended to grow up in orphanages, but in the loving arms of parents. We are simply made for that one-on-one human connection as little ones. As much as churches in America have been so generous with orphanages all over the world, it is encouraging now, after 13 years of this work, to see many faith based communities look first at family preservation and how we can be more supportive to mothers and fathers in need. When we can offer assistance to one mother, we can keep mothers and children together and also support all of her children by helping her.

My heart for mothers in Haiti ( and all over the world)
“To bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,
The oil of joy instead of mourning, A garment of praise instead of the despair.”
Isaiah 61:3

Please feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay up to date about our work in Haiti and how you can join us in our mission to keep children in families. If you would like to know more of my story, you can also purchase “Shelley in Haiti” or “The Orphan Gospels’”- two books I have written about my life and work in Haiti. (Available at papillonmarketplace.com)

Links:

Papillonmarketplace.com (Artisan goods for sale)
Papillonwholesale.com (Wholesale buyers)
PapillonEmpwerment.org (Non-Profit)
Papillon Marketplace on Instagram and Facebook
Shelley in Haiti on Facebook (Author page)
Shelley Jean on Facebook (Personal Page)