Christmas in Haiti – documenting hope in a land of despair
A child praying at the ravine feeding. Photo by Lucas Simmons
On the night of Oct. 6, their dream finally came to full fruition. They slept that night in a tent on the rooftop of a guesthouse in an orphanage in Haiti. For the next month – even as Hurricane Tomas arrived, even as Port Au Prince was consumed with the frenzy of a cholera outbreak – this was their primary residence.
But their new home was down below, among the 50 kids who reside at the Maison de Lumiere orphanage. Most were former street kids. Some had suffered horrible abuse. All had suffered heart-wrenching loss in their short and turbulent lives. Lucas and Alicia moved to Haiti to love and serve these kids.
“It’s a calling,” Lucas said in an interview via Skype this week. “It’s just amazing here. I am so thankful to be here to serve God and to serve these kids. It’s a very special place and I am just excited to be here for however long we are supposed to be here.”
The Simmons’ arrival at Maison de Lumiere is part of an unfolding love story. It began nine years ago when a nine-year-old girl named Arianna Manassero fell in love with Haiti. Her father, Bill Manassero, had noticed a jar of coins atop a dresser in the bedroom of their Redondo Beach home. He asked what the money was for and received a wholly unexpected answer. “Well, Dad,” she said. “That’s to build an orphanage and school in Haiti.”
Bill and his wife, Susette, were devout Christians. They felt it was important to pay attention to the call their daughter seemed to be hearing. Two years later, they travelled to Haiti to investigate Ari’s dream. Bill, a musician, played a series of concerts at orphanages. On the last day of their two week trip, they visited an orphanage where something felt amiss. One of the children whispered to a member of their travelling party, “Take me out of this place,” The man who ran the orphanage, it turned out, had been abusing the children.
The Manasseros returned to the United States with heavy hearts. Two weeks later, they received a call – the man who ran that orphanage had been arrested. The Manasseros immediately flew back to Haiti, rented a large truck, and drove to the orphanage. They found the kids walking on a road near the orphanage in a ragtag exodus, some dragging mattresses, others clinging to the little red rags they planned to use as street kids, once again cleaning car windows in traffic for spare change.
The Manassero’s took the children in. Over the next year, they founded a new orphanage, Maison de Lumiere, and moved with their three kids to Haiti. By the time the earthquake hit Haiti last year, the orphanage had lived up to it name as a lighthouse, a beacon of hope. The orphanage had launched a school and a medical clinic. The orphans themselves had started a feeding program that served hundreds of other street kids. After the quake, the orphanage served as one of the nation’s first triage centers. Hundreds of lives were saved at the makeshift hospital, where the children themselves served as nurses, little angels of mercy.
Lucas Simmons first visited the orphanage in early 2008 as part of a team from King’s Harbor Church. Simmons, a 1997 graduate of Redondo Union High School, had felt trepidation about the mission trip. News from Haiti, even before the earthquake, seemed to be grim and tragic. But what Simmons experienced upon arrival was the purest expression of love and faith he’d ever encountered. He took part in a worship service that day that changed his life forever.
“They were singing songs in Creole, and I was just like, ‘This is the most beautiful worship I have ever heard,’” he recalled. “I loved it. I was crying. It was just really amazing.”
Pastor Dan Bradford of King’s Harbor Church said Haitian worship frequently catches Americans off-guard in the startling strength of its expressiveness.
“I think people of faith often have this experience in Haiti,” he said. “They might go to worship service every Sunday morning at home…but when you land in Haiti, and drive down a road and see this crushing poverty and pain and end up in a church and see this expression of worship, you think, ‘Oh my God, they really mean it. This is not just a Sunday morning experience. This is a living experience of hope and gratitude and worship.’ And it’s a paradigm shift for many westerners.’”
Lucas had met his wife on a King’s Harbor mission trip to Mexico in 2006. Now, he asked her to visit Haiti. Over the next two years, the couple visited the orphanage seven times together. Lucas, a website developer and computer programmer, is a self-taught photographer. He’d formerly had his own website, Lucas the Experience, where he documented his life. Now, he decided to document the lives of the children at the orphanage.
“I just thought, ‘Man, people need to know about this. How do I get the word out? How do I share what I have seen with people?’” Lucas recalled. “They just seemed to be such light in the middle of all this despair.”
After the earthquake hit, Lucas’s work became essential. His photographs helped get the unfolding story of the orphanage out to a broader world. A campaign he launched through the web-based charitable fundraising organization eDivvy.com raised $190,000 for Maison de Lumiere and its associated non-profit, Child Hope International, at a time when funds were desperately needed.
“He helped us raise enough earthquake relief funds to help over 100 people rebuild homes, rent homes, or build new homes, not to mention the hundreds assisted medically, with food, clean water, education and other critical resources,” Bill Manassaro said. “He was in the right place at the right time to help us out with a very effective post-earthquake response.”
“Lucas is really a rare breed,” he added. “Someone you wouldn’t normally expect to find in the mission field, especially in a third world country. He’s more like one of the ‘tech’ characters you might find in an episode of 24 in which Jack Bauer says, ‘Come on, let’s hack into their system and reconfigure it for our purposes. You have five minutes.’ But his passion is unmistakable. He truly was taken off-guard, captured by the Haitian people. Captured by the beauty most people never know in this country.”
King’s Harbor Pastor Chris Cannon said that the thousands of photographs that Lucas has taken reveal the depth of his and Alicia’s connection to the children at the orphanage.
“These kids don’t turn that deep smile on for just anybody,” Cannon said. “The vibrancy of the pictures speaks for itself. I think there is a quality about Lucas and Alicia that is very unusual. There is a gentleness, and a humility that oozes out of them – in any capacity, really, but in Haiti they seem to just really come alive.”
“I think Lucas has been able to paint a picture that needed to be painted,” Cannon added. “And God has used his unique abilities to frame a picture.”
Alicia, a former Americorps and Red Cross volunteer who was working as a waitress in Manhattan Beach before the couple left for Haiti, has been teaching the kids dancing and continuing to manage relief teams’ trips to the orphanage. Lucas is teaching the children computer skills and continuing to manage fundraising efforts.
Alicia said that the two months they have thus far spent in their new home have showed her not so much the difference between America and Haiti but the commonalities.
“All people need the same things: love, laughter, food, clothing, home, family, forgiveness,” she said. “And someone to care about you.”
To learn more about the Simmons, see www.experiencesinhaiti.com and for more information on the orphanage see www.childhope.org. For an earlier cover story on the Maison de Lumiere and the Manassero family, see here