Orphans find new hope in Haiti
BEAUSEJOUR, MB—Sharon Dugard remembers the moment she fell in love with Haiti and its people. It was during a visit in 1995 as she held an orphan.
"He put his arms around my neck, and you know how your heart sometimes enlarges? You feel it's going to burst," Dugard recalls. "There was such love in my heart for this little boy—it was just pure love, and that's what laid such an impression in my heart and in my mind. I thought, 'We need to do all that we can to help here.'"
Dugard heard about Haiti from a priest who was visiting St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, her parish in Beausejour, a town 46 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
"I fell in love with the country just listening to him," she recalls. "Something was stirring in my heart."
Soon, she and her husband were headed to Haiti for a two-week service trip where they helped build a college and visited different orphanages and hospitals.
Dugard's love for Haiti led her to establish an orphanage called Open Doorways in La Chapelle. The journey began in 2003 when a board of directors was established. It continued in 2008 when the group started looking for land to build the orphanage on. Construction began in January 2010 and the first three children moved into the orphanage in November 2011.
Today, 12 children between the ages of three and 10 call Open Doorways home. The orphanage has eight staff and is looking to expand with the addition of a second floor.
"We plan to keep the children until they finish high school and also even [teach] them a trade," Dugard explains. "We'd like to educate them with the trade so when they do leave, they can make a living on their own."
The message she wants the children to learn: You can be anything you want to be.
"Doctor, nurse, whatever—we want to let them know there is hope for them, they can be whatever their heart desires, and that we are there to help them."
Dugard and some of her fellow board members visited the orphanage in March 2012 and plan to return in February 2013. Dugard says the best part of last year's trip was loving the children.
"We had a wonderful time with them," she recalls. "Just knowing they were being well taken care of and loved, just to feel the love in that building and the hope."
Seeing how the project has developed has been wonderful, she says.
"I know many times in the beginning I would think, 'Lord, I can't believe I'm doing this,'" she says. "I was overwhelmed at times, because I've never done anything like this."
But Dugard felt God telling her to just keep taking the next steps, and that if she did that, God would be there with her. God even gave her the name for the orphanage.
"One evening I was praying for discernment and wisdom and knowledge and Open Doorways [kept] going through my mind," Dugard says.
"I just knew in my heart that was the name for the orphanage."
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