ORPHANAGE BUST OUT

While in Ducity, Haiti; one place, one group of people seemed to dominate our thoughts and conversations...the kids in the orphanage.  There was a group of 20 kids, 3 babies and about 17 in grades ranging from 1st grade through high school, living in a two-room building with a backyard.  These children knew two things, school and the orphanage.  They would wake up from their sleepover (17 kids smushed in one room) every day, get ready for school and spend a big chunk of their day at school.  They would get home, eat at the orphanage and then be locked inside that building until the next school day.  It was sad.  So we had a great plan.  Without any thought of being respectful or disrupting their culture, we were determined to get those kids to be able to go swimming at the river.  The leaders of the orphanage told us that we could select a handful of kids to go.  Weird?  They may not have trusted a group of teenagers from a foreign land with their kids.  We determined that we couldn't just leave some kids there.  So in what is not my most prould moment, we opened the gates and escaped with every kid from that orphange and ran to the river.  They showed us how to take a bath, how to dive off the rocks and the best spots for swimming.  And while what we did may have been totally illegal, it was great to see every kids smiling and just being kids!