“I bet going there really made you appreciate life in America,” a man from my church said. I was 17 years old and had just returned from a mission trip to Belize. I paused for a moment and then told him, “No.” How could I be happy living in the land of opportunity when I had just seen a child dying of malnutrition in a village in Belize?

It was during that short trip that an elderly woman cooked for me in her hut. She proudly rolled tortillas, using a rock as a rolling pin, and then placed the tortillas in a skillet over an open fire. Smiling, she urged me to eat the tortilla, and I felt guilty. I didn’t know what it was like to truly be hungry. She did. Yet she also knew the importance of giving.

Before that trip, I was blissfully unaware of what it was really like for people to live in a developing country. Sure, I had seen the infomercials and television shows depicting grass huts and barefoot children, but I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes until that trip. Returning to the United States was difficult for me. Something just didn’t seem fair.

And it still doesn’t. Last Tuesday, I was flying over the Caribbean on my way back to the U.S. after backpacking through Guatemala. I was writing in my journal about poverty, and about the contrasting plethora of fast food restaurants in America. Little did I know, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere was being jostled around by a magnitude 7 quake right below our airplane.

It wasn’t until the next day that we learned of the devastation in Haiti. Immediately, I thought of the children who would be orphaned, some left to live on the street because of this natural disaster. My heart ached for them.

According to an article released by Associated Press Tuesday, tens of thousands of childen were orphaned because of the earthquake.

As someone who was adopted, children in group homes and foster homes are especially dear to my heart. I have visited and/or volunteered in orphanages in Belize, Ghana and most recently in Guatemala. Just a week before this, in an orphanage in Rio Dulce, I realized something about the American perception of the word “orphanage.” Perhaps Hollywood is to blame, once again, for distorting a bitter reality. With movies and plays like Annie, most people are led to believe that orphans are children with no living relatives. This, however, is often not the case. Poverty is the main reason why children are left in orphanages. And corruption is oftentimes what keeps them there.

The situation in Haiti is different, however. These are children who now have no living relatives. According to the article, thousands of children are sleeping in Port-au-Prince parks and forages, trying to find whatever they can sell for food.

Today I was pleased to hear that some children from an orphanage in Port-au-Prince were taken to Pennsylvania for speedy adoptions. The majority of them were in the final stages of their adoptions, and the earthquake pushed them to speed it up. At the orphanage I visited in in Rio Dulce, one recently adopted child had to wait six years before being able to go home with his new family.

I found long waits common in Ghana as well. A volunteer at the Peace and Love Orphanage was overlooking her soon-to-be little brother because the process was taking too long. Social welfare groups were making random visits to her parents house in the U.K., making sure they were fit parents, and that the cupboards had child-safety features. Meanwhile, their almost-son was waddling around barefoot in an orphanage that oftentimes went without diapers, formula, nutritious food, etc.

In general, the developed world, though well intentioned, tends to cover up the problem with donations. While these are absolutely necessary to the survival of many orphanages, reform is what is truly needed at the core of the problem.

It’s difficult to visit an orphanage filled with children who will never know what it’s like to have a family. And it’s even more difficult to understand why we would not try harder to change the lives of the children who hold the future of our world in their hands.

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