Michelle's Haiti Blog: Orphanage excursion

Last Saturday I had the chance to go on a food distribution trip to a bunch of other Haitian orphanages, in the Leurbourg area (past Port-au-Prince). I stopped counting, but think we visited around 10 different orphanages of varying sizes. The food distribution trips, organized by an orphanage in the same neighbourhood as ours, happen every Saturday and reach hundreds of kids. They give out boxes of lentils, which as I understand it are pretty nutritious (I've been reading "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond recently, which has given me a whole new perspective on the different grains and foods we eat, but more on that later).
The kids were all very friendly, and always sang us a song or two. Many of these kids were orphans is the strictest sense, without any family at all. The trip made me realize how lucky our kids here are; it's most likely that all of them will end up in loving homes in North America or Europe, with the chance to go to great schools and have a great shot at living a long and healthy life. Every kid we met had some tragic story. It's hard to imagine thousands of kids are living in conditions like this only a couple hundred km south of Florida. It was also shocking to get a glimpse of the sheer number of makeshift orphanages here; every neighbourhood has at least a couple of places housing 30 or 50 abandoned kids. There must be thousands of such houses in Haiti. It's disenheartening to start to understand the scope of the problems here in Haiti, none of which are likely to disappear anytime soon.