Nearly four years after Langford Fire Chief Bob Beckett and a team of volunteers helped build an orphanage in earthquake-torn Haiti, they’ve taken on a new challenge in the area.
“We went down to work on the orphanage in April and met a Quebec police officer who asked us to visit another orphanage that he helps — it was very personal for him,” Beckett said. The officer worked for the United Nations in Port-au-Prince and was impressed by the facility built by Greater Victorians over four years and 12 trips, with $250,000 in funds raised.
“We agreed to go but said no commitments,” said Beckett, who has a long history of volunteer work with Rotary Club and around the world.
Beckett and Dan Reynolds, a retired Langford building inspector, went to check out the Divine Hands Orphanage. In one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods, they found the gated property held a single 800-square-foot building to house 50 children from age one to teens, in an open room.
“It was clean but very small, cramped quarters,” Beckett said. “There were no changerooms, closets, cupboards. The clothes were in a pile and boys and girls dressed separately in a kind of cubicle.”
Beckett saw some immediate safety concerns, including an outdoor kitchen “that was just awful, full of smoke and charcoal. Very unhealthy,” he said. And also a water well with a 15-metre drop.
“It wouldn’t take much for a kid to fall down that,” he said.
But it was the desperate action of one small girl that moved Beckett the most — and it still brings him to tears to talk about it.
“We were outside playing with the kids around a small cherry tree,” Beckett said.
All the kids wanted a cherry but, with so many, the last few got green, unripened ones — including a small, thin girl who took her booty and disappeared.
“I went back in the house to get more photographs and saw her alone in the room holding these cherries, protecting them like that’s all she had in the world,” Beckett said.
“We all have so much here [in Canada]. I thought, ‘My God, we have to do something here.’ ”
Beckett and Reynolds agreed to help the orphanage.
They came home and enlisted the Colwood Rotary Club and Langford Fire Rescue to raise funds and helping hands for a work effort in late September. They plan to build a solar pump for the well so a safety cover can be put over the opening, put a roof on the boys’ latrine, build a proper cookhouse, additional room, shelving and closets for the kids. They also want to install better safety infrastructure, including solar lights and barbed wire on the exterior walls.
“We’re just trying to do something that gives the kids a chance and some quality of life,” Beckett said.
The six men on the work team, which includes police officers and business owners, need to raise about $15,000 for the project. They are each paying their own way on the trip and using vacation time for the volunteer work.
> For more information on the Divine Hands Orphanage project, go to helpforhaiti.ca
