29603: Hermantin(News)Reaching up (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Reaching up


AIDS orphans are shunned, unwelcome in most places where fear and uncertainty 
reign. But things are different in a handful of orphanages. The founders of 
one, Rainbow House, took a chance on an angry 7-year-old. A girl named Charline 
Noel Jocelyn.



By Tim Collie
Sun-Sentinel

December 3, 2006



BOUTILLIERS, Haiti · Trees grow here.

Cloud forests.

They reach through the mist that blankets the morning.

They shelter tree frogs and other endangered creatures.

As close to heaven as anything in Haiti.

Nearly a mile above the city, you find La Maison l'Arc en Ciel, Rainbow House, 
the first orphanage in the country, and still one of only a few, built for 
children of AIDS dead.

The home is another world, far from the city's humid slums, cinder block 
outcroppings, gangs ferrying ransom money, children sleeping in storefronts and 
parks.

It is here that Charline Noel Jocelyn arrived nine years ago.

The sanctuary was founded in 1996 by a French Canadian lawyer and her Haitian 
husband in response to a gaping national need. Haiti had orphanages, dozens in 
every major city, some run by churches, some by the government. But none, not 
one, would knowingly take a child orphaned by AIDS. There was too much fear, 
not enough fact.

Danielle and Robert Penette hoped to change that.

They found a home on a choice plot of mountain land -- a mansion once owned by 
the family of the wife of Haiti's former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" 
Duvalier.

Within the year, Rainbow House had 17 children.

Some came from hospitals, others from the street, still others from dying 
parents who simply gave them up. The youngest was 14 months old.

The Penettes had one rule: No child older than 6, because after that, children 
are too tough to reach, too far gone.

But something about Charline touched them.

They gave her a home.

Here is what happens to children whose mothers are dying:

They can be angry.

They can be scared.

They can have nightmares.

They might feel guilty, as if they could have done something to stop it, should 
have, but didn't.

Charline was all of this when she first came up the mountain with broken teeth, 
skin rashes, scars on her legs, scars on her stomach, scars on her psyche.

These psychic wounds, from growing up without parental love and care, are what 
so worry scholars and other experts. To them, Charline is only one among 
hundreds of thousands of children throughout the Caribbean who are scarred in 
this way.

A society can measure lost income, lost production, lost lives, the experts 
say. But how can it measure what one child loses, what a generation of children 
loses, when there is no one to hold them, feed them, send them to school, 
shield them from violence, guide them into adulthood?

What does it mean for the future of this fragile island region?

No one knows.

Charline is luckier than most. She has lived in the protective fold of Rainbow 
House.

Twice she tried to escape over the compound walls, to go back to the city to 
beg, to bring help for her mother, maybe to keep her alive a bit longer.

Her mother died one month after Charline arrived.

Charline:

"When my mother died I wasn't sad at all because I saw that she was suffering 
so much....

After her death, I became very mean.

I didn't want anybody sitting next to me.

I was doing mean things to the children in the orphanage.

When I realized I didn't have a mother or a father anymore, I started crying.

I did not sleep. I could not eat.

But you know, it was Mrs. Penette who gave me strength.

She always told me that if I was here today in this orphanage it was because I 
had enough strength to take care of my mother."



Strength is what they teach on this mountain.

The older children needed strength to survive the deaths of the younger ones at 
the orphanage. Three or four died each year in those early days.

They needed strength to stand up to the world outside the compound walls, a 
scary and threatening place where anyone connected to HIV/AIDS is ridiculed, 
ostracized, feared.

They needed strength to accept that any of them could develop symptoms of the 
wasting disease at any time.

There was no medicine, no AIDS cocktail, nothing but a sure death sentence for 
the roughly one in four children of infected mothers who end up with the virus 
themselves.

As part of their social education, the children at Rainbow House who were old 
enough to understand heard the questions: What would they do if they found out 
a friend, a teacher or a roommate had HIV, the virus that causes AIDS?

The questions are the underpinning of the Rainbow House philosophy: The only 
right way to live is to embrace anyone who is infected.

It well could be any neighbor, classmate, friend.

Just as it was their mothers or fathers.

And it could be, at any time, any one of them.

Charline's emotions softened after the deaths of some of the younger children.

She opened her arms when the younger girls, some frail and sick, climbed into 
her lap wanting to play and be held, wanting her to love them back.

They were her new family, and they needed her, just as her mother had.

Charline:

"I had God to help me and give me strength.

I realized that I had to tolerate these children, that they were my brothers 
and sisters.

I asked my mom for strength, too.

Sometimes when I'm depressed I ask her to give me strength and light my path 
because I don't see where I'm going to put my feet."



Inside the airy compound, the children sleep in bunks in multicolored rooms 
decorated with murals they have painted.

They draw, write poetry, go to school.

Musical instruments and toys are stacked on the floor, and on the wall above 
hang faded black-and-white photos of children who died.

In the early days, when a child at the orphanage died, the other children 
didn't know. Or at least, they weren't officially told.

The oldest, like Charline, intuitively knew.

They started asking questions. They wanted answers.

Hiding things has been a fact of life in Haiti and the Caribbean when it comes 
to HIV/AIDS.

Throughout the region, even 25 years after the first case was recorded, the 
epidemic is still cloaked in myth, folktale, bad information and fear.

Villages and neighborhoods still ostracize whole families.

Families still throw out infected loved ones.

Husbands still punish wives.

Children of AIDS dead still are not welcome in many places.

In the poorest Caribbean communities, where the epidemic is rooted, the common 
wisdom for social survival is to keep quiet, to lie, or to simply not know.

Charline believed, because her brother told her, that their mother died of 
tuberculosis.

Technically accurate, just not fully true.

Tuberculosis was simply the final blow.

The Penettes believe that full truth -- how the other children died, which 
children had HIV, what that meant for the rest -- was best for the children 
and, in the end, would make them strong.

Exactly when to tell them the truth wouldn't be a question of age so much as 
readiness.

So they watched.

Charline:

"I don't think that when people have AIDS they should be out of society ... .

I always tell everyone ... people who are infected, who have AIDS, the only 
thing they need is love and affection and wisdom.

If you're wicked toward them, they'll be wicked toward you.

If you misbehave toward them, they'll misbehave toward you.

But if you're their friend, they'll be your friend.

Here [at Rainbow House], you know, we can't say who has it and who doesn't have 
it.

I know that if you have it and I don't have it, that cannot stop us from being 
friends."

One day it was clear that this child was ready.

So they told her the truth.

She is infected with HIV.

The virus that killed her mother.

In this mountain village, temperatures average 60 degrees year-round.

The cloud forests, so-called because misty clouds hug the treetops, keep things 
damp and cool.

Rare for Haiti, a land of dry, denuded mountains, no topsoil and eroded hope.

This is where AIDS orphan Charline Noel Jocelyn came to know her real strength.

Charline:

"I am like a big sister.

When the younger ones are desperate, discouraged ... you have to show them you 
have hope, to overcome the weakness.

You're like a stick. ...

Ou meme jan ak hon baton

You're like a branch to hold on to."



Next Sunday: Charline prepares for the future in a world that is hostile to 
people with HIV/ AIDS.

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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