How the Orphanage Began: Pastor Pedro's Story
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This orphanage was not born from a strategic plan or a wealthy benefactor's vision. It was born from a wound that refused to be ignored.
In our community, young boys were sleeping on the streets, some curled near open fires, some on the bare road, surviving on whatever the night allowed. The church passed them every day. We prayed for them. We talked about them. And slowly, painfully, we arrived at a truth we could no longer avoid: we could not keep watching and calling it faith. We had to move.
A Simple Question That Changed Everything
Around that time, a man from Kentucky named Bill Hayes came to visit. He started small, helping build latrines, but one afternoon he sat down with me and asked a question that cut to the heart: "What more can I do?"
I was honest with him. I told him the church carried a vision so large I wasn't sure any one person could hold it. When he pressed me, I shared it, our dream of building a home where children could be lifted off the streets, given food and safety, an education, and the Word of God. A place where they could simply be children.
Bill went back to his hotel that night. I didn't know what he would do with what I'd shared.
The next morning, he returned with a check for $35,000. "Pastor," he said, "God spoke to me."
I was speechless. When I told him the vision, I had no expectation that provision would come so fast, so quietly, so completely. That is just the way God works sometimes, not with fanfare, but with a knock at the door.
Building What We Thought Would Take a Lifetime
I showed the check to my wife, and together we brought it before the church and our engineer. Then the work began. Teams came from Florida, as servants. They broke ground, laid a foundation, and moved dirt by hand under the sun.
We told ourselves it would take six years, maybe more. We prepared our hearts for a long journey.
God had other plans.
Another Door Opens
While we were still building the second floor, a man from a Presbyterian church in Mississippi arrived to help. One day he looked around at what remained and asked how much it would take to finish.
The engineer's number was $275,000. I hesitated before I said it out loud. It felt too large, too much to ask of anyone.
But this man didn't flinch. He picked up the phone and called his daughter, a pediatrician who had adopted a child from Kenya. She understood, in her bones, what it meant to give a child a home. She donated $50,000 that same day.
Then he turned to me and said, "Give me one month."
Thirty days later, he called back: "We have the full $275,000."
That is how the house was completed, through the quiet faithfulness of people who listened to what God was saying.
From Six Boys to a New Future
In the year 2000, we opened the doors of the mission house for the first time. Six boys walked in.
Word traveled the way it always does among the desperate, person to person. Children kept coming.
Today, some of those first boys have finished college. Others are still studying. Some are learning trades that will carry them through life. One young man who arrived here with nothing, no family, no future, no certainty now plays guitar and leads worship. When the church grew quiet and times were lean, he stayed. He remained faithful.
That is what this place is really about. Not buildings. Changed lives.
The Challenges We Carry
The work is not easy, and we would be doing this story a disservice to pretend otherwise.
Many of the children here are Haitian. Haiti's economy has collapsed under its own weight, and families are desperate in ways that are almost impossible to describe. Children cross borders alone just to find food. Some arrive here without parents. Others have been taken back to Haiti by authorities, and we have to find them and bring them home again.
There is also deep tension between Haitian and Dominican communities. It shapes everything; schooling, safety, daily life. Some of our children are turned away from school simply because of where they were born. When that happens, we pay for private education. We bring teachers in ourselves. We refuse to let a child's birthplace determine whether they learn to read.
These things cost money. They cost time. They require more prayer than we sometimes feel we have.
Why We Continue
This orphanage exists because God opened doors that had no reason to open. It exists because ordinary people, a man from Kentucky, a doctor in Mississippi, teams from Florida with shovels in their hands chose to listen when something stirred inside them.
It exists because the church decided that compassion without action is just sentiment.
We did not begin this to build something impressive. We began it because children were sleeping in the road, and we could not sleep peacefully knowing that.
As long as there are children who need a home, the work continues.