Berline: In God's Time

In 2006 I met a little girl.

The second morning of Vacation Bible School at Quisqueya Chapel was a Tuesday, and I stood like a stone in a river of orange-clad children, lost, stuck, forlorn and incapable of articulating why.

Even greeting these jubilant, beautiful children was a daunting, impossible task. I wanted to hide away until they’d all departed.

Then, a small person hugged me tightly around the middle. I looked down to see a girl with her arms wrapped about my waist. She looked up and I met bright black eyes with typical thick lashes, and a smile bright as that Caribbean sun.

This was Berline, and she adopted me as her own.

Berline became my shadow those next few days.

She was the one I looked for in the morning and on whom I could depend for attention, for favor.

I was not outgoing or boisterous or squishy or amiable, I could not speak Creole or French, lacked confidence, tact, and all manner of charm. I was an awkward fourteen year old who was far from settling in my own skin and still harbored ludicrous notions including my own obesity.

Berline didn’t care about any of that. She didn’t mind that I was painfully awkward, prone to say the wrong thing, use the wrong tone, motion incorrectly. She didn’t care that I was withdrawn and red-faced.

She took a chance on me. Perhaps because no one else would.

Whatever her reasons, we enjoyed one another’s company.

On that final day of VBS, which the team had predetermined to be a fiesta like no other where we would dance the kids out the door rather than consider our separation and weep; on that final day she joined me on the stage. I sat her beside me as we listened to the Bible story, had her mimic our gestures during the songs.

I was proud to have this eager little shadow, and I’m sure she was proud to be on the stage before her peers, many of whom were older than her seven years.

That raucous day of VBS was the last time I’d see her that year.

But one year later I returned to Haiti on another well-intentioned team. Our first Sunday we attended Quisqueya Chapel and there she was.

Her hair was short and braided straight down, a very demure hairstyle. Her dress was red and her smile was huge.

She remembered me.

Certainly I remembered her, and excitedly introduced her to Alison, my best friend from the States who’d joined the team. Together we posed with her and two other children seated beneath the palm trees beside the baptismal tank on that verdant chapel lawn. The camera quality is poor but our smiles are visible. Obvious.

A few days later our team visited the Baby Orphanage run by Berline’s adopted parents. Yes, in that last year she and her baby sister had been adopted by the American couple who’d founded an orphanage. Those children had attended VBS with us the year previously.

Our team trekked up to the second floor with its white tiles and chocolate brown babies, many of whom wore diapers and all of whom needed attention. The few workers were kept constantly busy with maintenance of children and facility. There was not enough time, not enough hands, to sit and play with the babies. Mostly they sat on that white tile.

When visitors did come, they were swarmed with babies. The challenge was the incapacity to hold them all.

When we crested that staircase we immediately fell to, scooping up babies left and right.

Then Berline appeared, and led me by the hand up to the third floor. I do believe I was holding a baby in my arms, a wee one who didn’t weigh enough to recall.

On that floor Berline curled up and held my hand.

She may have been adopted but she still needed attention. Among so many children and so much need, and with a history of God knows what, this little girl yearned for exclusive attention, unchallenged cuddling.

Unfortunately she couldn’t get it from me either.

A foreign worker busied with feeding on the tinier residents, an enormous-eyed little boy with a feeding tube, told me off for being on that floor. Visitors weren’t allowed. Like a coward I gestured to Berline, telling the blan Berline had brought me up.

I’m still ashamed of that—throwing my dear little shadow, this cherished child, under the Blame Bus. Sheer cowardice, it was. Berline said nothing to the blan woman, just kept looking down, wanting no more than her and I and peace and love. Oh, if only the world allowed.

We left the Baby Orphange later that afternoon and I didn’t see Berline again. I’d expected she’d come with the other children to play at Quisqueya another afternoon that week. The expected surge of children did indeed come through the gate and run screaming onto the soccer field, ecstactic about the new nets we’d assembled just before.

However, Berline was not one of the screaming runners. Nor was she one of the more docile, bossy, girls who set themselves by Alison and I, playing with our hair, especially admiring Alison’s light blonde long hair so smooth in their fingers.

I kept searching for Berline among the smiling faces, but she didn’t appear.

I didn’t see her again.

Not until now.

Last Saturday Beverly and I worked at Agape Missionary Flights for a few hours. The office is located on Delmas 75 just across from the large epi d’or. We left the office just after noon and crossed over to epi d’or to await our friends.

On our way to the restroom we passed a party, several tables pushed together to form an enormous rectangle around which an uncountable number of children and young people were sitting. At a table parallel there was a white woman with softened brown hair (mostly gray) and a man who’d come to the mail office, a large, squarish man with a friendly red face and an admirable white mustache. He’d looked so familiar to me when I’d searched for his packages before.

Now the woman by him was familiar too.

Their names were Hal and Chris, and they were the founders and yet managers of a collection of homes for children.

Beverly was speaking with Chris when I joined them and when my turn came she took my hand as I explained I had met her long ago. She surely didn’t remember but…

I told her of my memories and the blessing I was now living here in Haiti, teaching in Ti Goave. How I’d waited a long time for this. And although I was afraid of the answer, afraid that that little girl of the bright black eyes and longing for affection might still harbor some bitterness towards this faithful blan who’d left her—although I feared the response, I knew I couldn’t relax without trying for the answer.

“Did you adopt a little girl named Berline?” I asked, still holding Chris’s hand, as I had through the conversation.

“Yes,” she responded at once. “She’s over there.”

She led me around the tables and then brought forth a young woman. She was big—taller than me and well endowed. She looked healthy and strong and sure and beautiful. Her hair was long, admirable long braids half-pulled back. She wore leggings and a bright pink shirt. There were braces on her teeth.

And there were her bright black eyes. The same eyes that had boldly looked up at me that Tuesday morning at Quisqueya when she’d wrapped thin arms around me and hugged me tightly, setting forth her heart with nothing but hope.

Chris introduced us and I tried to explain. Smiling in disbelief and determined coolness, I told Berline how we’d met. And I thanked her.

“You’re one of the biggest reasons I wanted to come back to Haiti,” I said.

Those bright black eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, don’t cry!” I said, stroking her face. “I’m so happy to see you, see how beautiful and grown-up you are!”

We hugged. I scribbled down my name and phone number and told her to look me up on facebook. I wanted to keep in touch this time.

We parted ways, Berline joining the group of many from the children’s homes. I’m sure she has many responsibilities being her parents’ daughter.

I watched her walk past as Beverly and I sat waiting at a table some minutes later. Her stride was confident and her hair swayed in a lovely dance.

There are many times I am overcome.

Sometimes tragedy overtakes me, sometimes mourning. Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes immense frustration. Sometimes it’s fatigue or hunger or a certain hopelessness that all this is too much.

But many time I’ve overcome by disbelief. Disbelief that this is my life now. Disbelief that after years of hoping, of waiting and looking and working and wanting, here I am, living in Haiti. Not only am I here, I have a place. I have a purpose.

I consider all the preparation over the past ten years. That includes three years of high school, four of college, two of working part time, odd jobs and odd assignments, one of working as a fulltime ESL teacher in Korea. That includes a lot of heartache, a lot of growing up, a lot of friends, adventures, new places and faces and rarely days without yearning for Haiti.

Often when I’m quiet, sitting on the roof while the sun comes up or goes down, when the sky is displaying the marvelous craftsmanship of God [The heavens tell of the glory of God. The skies display His marvelous craftsmanship. ~ Psalm 19:1], or when the WORD comes alive and knocks on my heart like Pastor honks at the gate—often when I take moments of stillness, that disbelief hits me anew.

Then I can only repeat my awe and my thanks to God, who knows what He is doing, and is ever arranging an exquisitely complex yet breathtakingly wise tapestry of our lives.

He sent me to Haiti long ago. He went with me to Missouri, to South Carolina, to Paris, to New Hampshire, to Camp, to district schools and classrooms, to Korea, and brought me back to Haiti for the eighth time, telling me “Now you will stay.”

And He brought me against my plans, against my preparations.

He brought me on His plan with His preparations.

He brought me to Beverly and Petit Goave, to His marvelous Christian Light School. He kept me during the hurricane, during the whole of October, so I would need to get away for the final weekend. He brought me along with Beverly to work at Agape in PAP last Saturday. And He brought me full circle to meet one of my heroes, one of the inspirations, one of the reasons for this inescapable love for Haiti.

Now I sit here and marvel yet again at the sovereign wisdom of our God.

And all I can say is Thank You. Thank you for that little girl’s hug so long ago. Thank you for giving her the courage to take a chance on a stranger, a blan: on me.

Thank you for taking care of her all these years. For me, too.

And thank you that now I am proudly connected with a seventeen year old young woman with bright black eyes, reunited in space, truly united in Christ.

Habakkuk 2:3

“For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. But if it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”

“When I’m lost in the mystery, to You the Future is a memory, because You’re already there, You’re already there. Standing at the end of my life, waiting on the other side, You’re already there, You’re already there…

Someday I’ll stand before You and  look back on the life I lived. I can’t wait to enjoy the view and see how all the pieces fit.”  “Already There,” Come to the Well Casting Crowns

Berline, at VBS, 2006

Berline and I at Epi D'Or, 2016