Canadian volunteer finds new life amid Haiti’s rubble
EDMONTON, AB—Immediately following the massive earthquake in Haiti, three years ago this January, University of Alberta hospital medical clerk Kim O'Dwyer felt God calling her to go there and help in the recovery efforts.
Her original plan was to go for two months. Little did she know it would forever change her life. Working with North American medical teams in Port au Prince, Haiti's ruined capital city, O'Dwyer began treating Josiah, an 11-month-old baby who was close to death.
"We prayed for him, put an intravenous in him, and he got quite a bit better," she says. "But we knew he wasn't going to live if we just gave him back to his mom, [because] he was so vulnerable. So I prayed, 'God, what if I stayed? Maybe the baby would live.'"
O'Dwyer did return home—but only to quit her job, pack up her car and head back to Haiti. She has lived and ministered there almost continuously ever since.
"I just really knew it was something that God wanted me to do," she says. "And so I did it."
Today, O'Dwyer directs Children of Grace, an orphanage in Carries, a village about an hour's drive north of Port au Prince. It currently cares for 32 children, many of them malnourished babies younger than two years old. With their parents' consent, O'Dwyer is also working on adopting Josiah, who is now three, and his twin brother, Joshua. They live with her in the orphanage.
Children of Grace is one of five Christian ministries under the umbrella of Mission of Grace, founded by Linotte Joseph, a Haitian, in 2010. The others are a care home for elderly women, a school, a church, and a medical clinic.
Recently, the orphanage received the government's approval to handle international adoptions. It appears those in authority are more open now than previously to allowing families from overseas to adopt Haitian children.
"Orphanages aren't families, and they want these kids to have a mom and a dad," says O'Dwyer. "But for all the opportunities that they have in North America, our prayer is that they'll go back into their country as world-changers, and make a difference in Haiti."
There is also the reality that Haiti's recovery from the earthquake is still very slow.
"They just don't have an infrastructure to sustain them through natural disasters," she says. "In our village, after Hurricane Sandy, people were so hungry, because they didn't even have enough food to last them for three days. So we did a feeding program."
Yet O'Dwyer says she remains so firmly committed to the mission and to Haiti, that she has no plans to move back to Canada with her boys for at least a few more years.
"It's not easy. Haiti is hard soil to plough, and it seems like you're really just jumping over boulders all the time," she says. "And I'm not used to it. It's a whole new ballgame for me, with their culture and the way they think, and what they believe. But we're blessed to have this community, and seeing hearts softened to God."
For most of November, O'Dwyer was travelling in Alberta and British Columbia, visiting relatives and friends, and speaking in churches about the work of Mission of Grace. But she planned to be back in Haiti well before Christmas, bearing gifts from Canada for all the children.
"There's 32 of them, so I don't know what I can bring back," she says. "But I'll definitely bring them back a treat."
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