How we got started

Founder of the Haiti Orphan Rescue Program, Mike Mahon shares his family’s story.

First, I would like to acknowledge the incredible efforts of two family friends; Janie Livingston and her mother, Jane Corbett.  These two women and their families are an inspiration to us all.  Their time and investment in the children of Haiti has been nothing shy of miraculous and neither of them has ever sought any recognition for the work they have done.  Thank you Jane & Janie, none of this would be possible without you.

This is a brief history of how my family became involved with Haiti.  I owe a great deal of gratitude to my parents for their commitment to healthcare and for teaching us about compassion through helping others.  My father (Dr. Mike) is a physician and my mother (Ruth) is a registered nurse RN).  In June of 2001, my father, brother (Joe) and I took part in our first two-week medical mission to Haiti with a group of thirty medical professionals from Utah.  The name of the organization that sponsored the mission was Healing Hands for Haiti.   Broken into teams, the groups traveled to some of the poorest sections of the country visiting farming communities, villages and even a leper colony.  There was a prosthetics clinic for my brother to work his magic where he fabricated a set of legs for a boy who had never walked.  The boy told our translators that the scars on his legs came from the rocks that “came his way” as he crawled to school every day.  His courage overwhelmed us and this was our introduction to Haiti, an impression that would set the tone for years to come.

The slums where we set up day clinics are like no other. Outiside of Port au Prince, Citie Soleil is home to some of the poorest people in the world. Most live in tin roofed shacks with few possessions to speak of.  I was shocked at the brutality of the living conditions and how people managed to maintain a calm composure amidst the turbulence and despair.  I would later come to realize that “this is Haiti” and what I saw was not always fair to judge.

From the center of the capital city Port au Prince to the suburbs of Petionville, we saw many streetlights but not one of them was actually working. Most of the slum areas had no police force to keep rule.  It is the social interdependence that keeps most Haitians alive. I actually witnessed a woman’s body burning in the street because she had been accused of stealing.  It was a place that I could have never imagined.

While my father (a dermatologist) and my brother were treating patients, I was assigned to help set up make-shift clinics and distribute medical supplies to the parents of sick children.  I was the only one in the group with a non-medical background so I was tasked with a variety of jobs.  One day I was assigned to help a crew of medical students re-roof an orphanage, and that is when I met John.  He was one of fifty children living in the orphanage.  At the time, John was about 4 years old and I found him sitting on a bag of rice, crying from being beaten with a stereo wire for pushing one of the younger kids.  His head was covered with large cysts the size of chicken eggs.  I could see that John needed medical attention so we convinced the orphanage director to let us take him back to the clinic where my father could do a biopsy and start treatment.

Since then, my father has continued his medical mission work and returned almost every year. My brother, Joe, also came back to Haiti and continued his work making limbs for the amputees.  Our dad would always report back on John’s condition after each trip and soon he became a household name in the Mahon family. We always look forward to seeing pictures of John and the other orphans, no matter how hard it might be for us to know their living conditions.  These kids can truly steal your heart.

Eventually, my father would find a way for John to come to the U.S to receive the extensive operations necessary to remove the painful cysts growing on his head.  In drastic contrast to Haiti, he lived in Grosse Pointe, Michigan for almost a year.  This is one of the most affluent cities in the country.  John enjoyed going to school, playing baseball and living with his host family, the Livingstons, who treated him as one of their own.  But the orphanage came calling after his wounds healed, and he was forced to return to Haiti by his legal guardians at the orphanage.  It was a tough on all of us and we felt frustrated about the injustice of the system.

The last trip my father made before the earthquake was in the summer of 2009.  My sister, Suzi, accompanied him on that visit for her first encounter with Haiti.  As a mother of three children, she was bewildered to see so many orphans in such a small country, and her heart went out to them.  Suzi was helping a friend who was trying to finalize an adoption which is actually quite difficult to do in Haiti even though there is such a staggering number of abandoned children.  That week they stayed at the Hotel Montana, which would eventually be destroyed by the 7.0 earthquake and claim the lives of over one hundred people.

While my family has had many memorable experiences throughout our connection to Haiti, the most significant story started in 2007.  My father and cousin Jillian were able to return to the U.S. with a little girl, Melissa, who was in need of several extensive and expensive operations to attempt to correct a congenital birth defect known as bilateral knee contractures.  At 4 years of age,  Melissa had never stood or walked.  Because the Haitians seem to believe birth defects are taboo, her birth mother, with the hope that she would be discovered and cured, left her in a garden.  I am proud to say that my sister Lory and her husband Roger have adopted Melissa.  She lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan with her five new brothers and sisters.  After four operations at Sinai Children’s Hospital in Baltimore , she is undergoing intensive physical therapy, attending first grade and learning how to walk.  She is the most amazing child and she is our inspiration.

Our family welcomes you to the Haiti Orphan Rescue Program.

*See Melissa in a video clip from WJZ News in Baltimore:  http://wjz.com/seenon/sinai.hospital.2.799658.html