2 women, 16 kids, 8 two-year olds.

A cousin of mine asked me a while ago to post about adoptions in Haiti. She said my letter made her want to go all Brangelina and fill up her house with kids who need a home. International adoptions are always a long process, and it's no different for Haiti. You can go to the State Dept. website to find a lot more specific info, but what I found was that for Haiti it seems to be an issue of paperwork.
A lot of people don't have any sort of nationally recognized personal ID. Many don't receive a birth certificate to start with, mostly because a lot of people aren't born in hospitals. This is just one more area where the lack of infrastructure creates a void of systems and processes that we're so used to having here on a daily basis. While we would worry about having our identity stolen, most of the people I'll be living with would be concerned with gaining some sort of official identity in the first place. So when there are no papers to be had in a process that revolves around paperwork, like adoptions, it causes major problems.

Anyway, there's a lot of kids who need a loving and stable home, and I met one woman, Connie, who is providing that for a group of kids Petite Goave in an amazing way. She lives about eight miles up a mountain in a village outside of Petite Goave with one other lady who helps. She takes care of 16 kids, 8 of which are two-year-olds. When we met Connie, she was with her oldest girl (who is 8) in P-au-P trying to get a passport for her. The common thread for the kids that Connie takes in is that their mothers all died in childbirth. So she takes them in and raises them up! And she has so much of my respect for dedicating her life to specifically walking in the command of Christ to care for orphans. I met her and thought to myself - 'who DOES that?!' I don't feel drawn to serve in that way, but thank God that someone has the drive and strength and guts to give up what they know in order to care for these 16 kids! Kids who have an amazingly blessed life compared to what they would have known if she hadn't been there.

And I think many of us can have an impact of that magnitude within our lifetime, but we don't submit to the possibility that God wants us to take part in such amazing things for His glory. But that drive and commitment that I see in Connie, that willingness to give it all up, I hope to find in my own pursuit of God's plan for my life.