Miracle on Voodoo Mountain

by Megan Boudreaux

  Our prayers grew louder and more confident. We had the sense that the enemy was losing and had already lost. A peace came over me that surpassed all of this chaos, and I knew the battle belonged to God, and it was over.

  I opened the gate and went back outside just in time to see the woman picking up her sheet, stuffing it back into her bag, and running away. The team and I continued to worship, praying for her and her spirit. We prayed the same prayer we used every time we sensed an attack from a person—we prayed we would see her again “in the light of day.” We asked God to use us to bring light to her and that we would see her during daytime soon.

  Sleep that night was just about impossible as I reflected back on the strange events of the day. Finally I relaxed and fell asleep, but in what seemed only minutes later, I heard a familiar voice outside the gate. “Megan? Megan?” the voice called.

  I sleepily made my way down the stairs and out to the gate. It was Bernard waving a piece of paper in my face. He was delivering the leasing paperwork for Dan and Rita’s house across the way. I told him I’d sign it and get it back to him as soon as possible. I thought about the woman and the head horseman, expecting a stab of fear to strike me, but even though I searched in my spirit for that same feeling of fear, it was not there. I thanked God for His intervention and immediately felt a feeling of comfort, boldness, and protection. Then a thought came into my head—if Satan was desperate enough to physically place someone in front of my gate to stop me from renting the house for Dan and Rita, then he was not only desperate but pathetic. And I could only imagine what huge things the Lord had planned for Dan and Rita in Gressier.

  During my time in Haiti, I have experienced many different encounters with evil, including walking up and interrupting full-blown voodoo ceremonies on Bellevue Mountain, confronting and fighting child trafficking, and battling the abusive restavek situation. Prayer and worship are my secret weapons, whether dealing with a voodoo priest, a corrupt pastor running a sham orphanage, or a servant of the head horseman. I am learning to let God fight my battles.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Freedom House

  “He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free.”

  —Jesus in Luke 4:18 NLT

  I heard a soft tap at the gate. I swung the gate open and saw a young girl about my age with a toddler. She looked tired and so did the baby.

  “I can’t take care of him anymore,” she said. “I have two other children, and I just can’t do it anymore.” She continued, telling me of all her problems finding food, medicine, and a place to live. I knew what was coming next. It had happened to me before and to many other foreigners here, and it always crushes me. My heart was beating so hard I thought she might be able to hear it too. The girl took a deep breath, looked into my eyes, and said, “I thought you could take my baby because you can do a better job.”

  As I took a second to gather my words and thoughts, I pleaded with God to help me speak truth into her life, to speak confidence into her parenting ability, and to speak opportunity to us both as we worked together to find a next step.

  Then I had an idea, so I shared it with the girl. Her face lit up as I offered her a job carrying sand on the mountain to help build our school. “But I don’t have anyone to take care of the baby,” she said, her smile melting away.

  “You can take your baby with you and we will work on a solution,” I said.

  The next day, as I stood on a scaffold at the school with a paintbrush in my hand, I heard beautiful singing from behind the building. As I peeked through the metal bars over the window, tears filled my eyes. “Look!” I said to Kat, who was visiting me in Haiti again. “That’s her!”

  I’d just been telling Kat about the young girl who had knocked on my gate the day before. Now we both watched as she walked with a group of ladies carrying five-gallon buckets of dirt on their heads, her daughter sitting in the shade of the tree on Bellevue Mountain. And as she walked and worked, she sang, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah to the King of kings.”

  Unfortunately it’s not at all unusual here in Haiti to have a woman offer to give you her child. It has happened to me so many times I could have numerous houses full of children by now. It is one of the most heart-wrenching experiences I’ve ever had, and every time it brings me to my knees at the end of the day. I always beg God to keep these families together, protected, and provided for. And I am again reminded why I am here in Gressier, doing what I am doing.

  Through Respire Haiti we are able to provide education for children at an extremely low cost (or free, if needed); we are able to encourage parents that they can keep their children and put them in school; we feed the schoolchildren, and on weekends we feed the community’s children; and we provide employment for hundreds of local people.

  Women like the young girl who knocked on my gate make me fight harder, work longer, and drop to my knees begging God to show me the steps to take to help these women provide for their families. So many women here in Haiti do not want to give up their children. But so many people, Americans especially, come to Haiti thinking that building orphanages is the only solution to this problem. Instead, the reality is Haiti needs businesses, jobs that would allow these women to raise their own children. These women long to be good parents and mothers to their children, but so often they have no way of providing for their children’s needs of food, medicine, and education. With so many problems and obstacles, their stories don’t always have happy endings.

  Not long ago I ran into my house in a hurry and passed a young girl sitting on my front steps. I made it all the way into the kitchen before I stopped dead in my tracks. Did I just see what I think I saw? My eyes welled up with tears. I turned around to walk back outside to see her again, and this time I really looked. She was turned sideways and her belly curved out noticeably, resting in her hands.

  A million thoughts spun in my mind. She’s so young. Where has she been? Why couldn’t I find her in time? I closed my eyes tight, prayed to keep in the tears, and turned back around to head outside and sit down next to her.

  “Where have you been?” I exclaimed. I bent down to hug her, and she held on to me tightly. I brought her inside where I asked her why she wasn’t at school this year. “I looked for you,” I said. “I asked everyone, but no one knew where you were.”

  “I was living with family in the next city over,” she said.

  “How are you doing?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I just turned fifteen years old.”

  I pointed to her belly but couldn’t seem to put words together to ask a question that made sense. She knew what I was asking, though.

  She looked at the ground and wrung her hands. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Yeah?” I squeaked out, trying not to assume anything.

  It was worse than I thought. She had been walking to her house and was attacked. Mouth covered, held down. After it was over, she told a police officer, but nothing was done. Her attacker got away, never to be found and punished for what he’d done.

  I squeezed her hands and looked into her eyes. I saw fear, sadness, hurt, and pain pushed down deep.

  Rape is so representative of the ugliness of the enemy and the evil of this present world. As I focused on this dark and broken situation, something that always threatens to break me, the Lord immediately reminded me that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12 ESV).

  God reminds me the battle here on earth is full of tragedies, heartache, and brokenness. But it’s not our job to fight against this world. Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). Instead, my job is to spread the light.

  Because some of our students, such as this young girl, face very difficult, compromising, and unsafe situations at times, I kept feeling as though we needed a small safe house for
them. While I had the desire and the dream to do this, I was afraid to move forward and wasn’t quite sure how to organize or how to fund it. I also wasn’t sure how to choose which girls should be in the safe house.

  Of course, once I actually stopped worrying about all of the details, God put everything into place. Honestly, He just began organizing it all, and I had no choice but to catch up with Him and listen.

  In January 2013, one of our students came to my house after school to talk. This sixteen-year-old girl had been asked to leave her orphanage because she was too old and the director only wanted young, cute children. Not knowing what else to do, she began living with her stepbrother, who worked in Port-au-Prince during the week. She hardly knew him. As she talked, my heart was drawn to her and her situation.

  A few weeks later she came back to my house. That moment is seared in my memory, how she looked me in the eye with enough boldness and intelligence to say, “I am not safe.” She was afraid but found the courage to speak up, unlike so many other children her age here. That’s all it took for me to take the jump. That same day I sent an army of men, both Haitian and American, with her to pick up all of her belongings from where she was staying. Then she moved into the house with our Respire interns. I didn’t yet realize that the wheels were turning and God was showing me that the safe house was needed now.

  A few days later the next rescue took place when our sweet and sassy friend (and Respire employee), Darlene, discovered her sixteen-year-old sister was a restavek a few towns over. Through Respire, Darlene had begun to understand the bondage that her sister was in. They hadn’t seen each other in five years, but the more Darlene found out about her sister’s situation, the more she knew she had to do something. Darlene discussed the situation with me with burning tears of passion in her eyes.

  Sadly, it was a typical situation for a restavek. Her sister woke up between three and four in the morning, washed the car, made coffee and breakfast, packed the other children’s lunches, and walked them to school. Next, she came home and cleaned, washed clothes, cooked, bought food, and did various other errands. Although she was “enrolled” in afternoon school, she never actually had time to go, nor did she have any schoolbooks. Every night she was up until eleven o’clock doing household chores.

  As Darlene expressed her concern about her sister, I could feel the Lord working.

  “So what do you think we should do?” I asked her, then prayed silently.

  “She can’t stay in that situation anymore,” Darlene said in a spunky, outraged voice. “I have to get her out, even if I rent a house and she lives close to here. I have to get her.”

  I smiled at Darlene’s righteous anger.

  “But I want her to go to school. Can she go to your school?” Darlene asked.

  “Of course. Go get her and bring her back here no matter what,” I answered. “You know we have room!”

  It wasn’t easy. The people she’d been living with were holding her birth certificate from Darlene so they could keep her sister as a restavek. Darlene hopped on a motorcycle with Tachi and arrived at the house a few towns over. As she argued angrily, the man holding her sister hostage claimed that he needed her sister to stay because his wife was in the United States giving birth to their third child. Hearing this, Darlene was enraged even more and stood her ground fighting for her sister’s freedom.

  Days later Darlene’s sweet sixteen-year-old sister sat on our porch, rocking back and forth on the hammock. She didn’t smile. She didn’t talk. Just rocked back and forth. She was in utter confusion and shock at the change, I’m sure. And in time, with therapy, love, and Jesus, she began to adjust to her freedom from slavery.

  Within another few weeks we had added a fourteen-year-old, and a sixteen-year-old clutching her own small baby, both escaping from difficult circumstances of slavery and abuse. Now that the staff house was nearly full, this was the kick I needed to move forward. I knew these girls needed a safe place, where they could begin to heal, to forgive, and to grow. I searched around the area for potential houses and almost immediately found one on a hill within walking distance. It was cute, an incredible price, and perfect for the girls. I signed the lease, and we moved forward, furnishing and decorating it for the girls and their children. Everything happened so easily and quickly. I know I shouldn’t be surprised at how swiftly God moves sometimes, but I still am.

  We named it the Freedom House, and the walls are decorated with inspiring and loving verses from Scripture, making it feel comfortable and safe. The Freedom House girls have started school, and some are learning to be mothers at the same time. They have an incredible house mom who guides them, loves them, and teaches them. What the enemy meant for destruction and ashes, God is transforming into something beautiful and free.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Theodore’s Dream

  Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

  —Corrie Ten Boom

  Haiti is a country of walls. Everyone in Haiti who can afford to live behind a wall does so. More expensive walls are made of concrete block, ten feet high or more, and with coiled razor wire or broken-glass bottles and spikes embedded in the top. Heavy metal rolling gates give access to the house and yard behind the wall.

  People who can’t afford walls try to put them up anyway, with sticks and plastic and plywood and old pieces of USAID tarps left over from the earthquake relief efforts. Walls and guards are necessary because people who are hungry and desperate will steal whatever they can, whenever they can, from whomever they can.

  Theodore, a tall, thin man from Gressier, knows this. One night he awoke to the sound of someone out front, so he got up out of bed and went to check. Theodore saw a man using a machete to cut plantains out of the tree in his carefully tended garden. The plantains were precious, and Theodore had three boys and his wife to feed, so he rushed out to stop the man from stealing his food.

  The thief turned on Theodore and swung the machete right at his face. Theodore put up his hand to ward off the blow, and the machete sliced into his hand almost to the bone.

  We got word of Theodore’s horrendous injury when his teenage son brought his dad to the house and asked us for help. As Josh and I peeled off the dirty bandage on Theodore’s hand, we gasped at the same moment—a doctor from a hospital in a neighboring city had worked on the injury, but it looked as if a butcher had tried to sew together a piece of meat with a few haphazard stitches. The hand didn’t seem to be healing, and now Theodore was experiencing a lot of pain, with his fingers and wrist not working well.

  “I need my hands to work. How can I farm if I can’t use my hands?” We could see the sadness, anger, and fear in Theodore’s eyes as he worried about feeding his family. I didn’t know how to answer him. All we could do was clean the wound and bandage it back up.

  While I was working on his hand, Theodore said something that set off every warning bell I possessed. He was thinking about sending his three boys, between the ages of six and fourteen, to work in the Dominican Republic. He’d heard rumors about the poor treatment of Haitian children there but claimed he had “family.” With his injury, he explained quietly, he thought it was his only option.

  Then Theodore said something that horrified me even more. A man had come to him once and offered to help. All he needed Theodore to do was bring his children to Port-au-Prince. When Theodore arrived, the man introduced his children to a stranger. Pointing to Theodore, he said, “This is just a nice man who is helping these children who have no mother and no father.” Theodore realized that his children were about to be sold to this stranger, and he grabbed them and left.

  After hearing these stories, I begged Theodore to please not do anything with the children right away. “Give me a few days to pray and see what we can do,” I asked, finishing up the bandage. He agreed, and I sent him away with a small bag of beans and rice, enough to feed his family for a few meals.

  Josh and I talked about Theodore for the next few days. Where can Respire Ha
iti use him? The wall around campus wasn’t quite finished, and we needed an extra guard. Theodore would be perfect for the job! We were in the middle of a break from school, so he would have time to heal up.

  However, Theodore’s pain got worse, and over the next few weeks he continued to lose function in his fingers and wrist. He showed up one day with no feeling in the injured part of his hand and complaining of intense pain. Josh had been praying for this man and had grown to really care about him, so he decided to take him back to the hospital and find a different doctor to look at him. Ten hours later the two returned. Theodore had some green marks on his palm, where they had tested for “feeling,” and that was it. No recommendation, no information, and no treatment. Nothing.

  It had now been three weeks since we had met Theodore and started helping him with cleaning and bandaging his wound. We knew we needed to do something more, or he could lose all function in his hand. But before we could, Theodore showed up one morning looking a little different, a little happier. He started talking to Josh and told him about a dream he’d had just the night before.

  Josh and a group of Americans had surrounded Theodore and prayed for him in a language he didn’t know. Theodore was frightened, and he’d looked up at Josh. “What is happening?” he asked.

  “We are praying for you,” said Josh, calmly.

  Theodore was still frightened and anxious as the group prayed in English over him.

  Josh said, “You will be healed. You will be delivered. You will not need surgery or to spend any more money on your hand.”

  Then Josh put some cream on the wound and covered it back up.

  The funny thing is that this was all just a dream. None of us had gathered in a group and prayed over Theodore’s hand. Josh had not said those words to him or put any medicine on his hand.