Authors: Hoda Kotb
Where We Belong (13 page)
“I felt we had a secret weapon, and that was volunteers across the country who would help make the event in their city a success, and because there are people who care about making wrong things right, by the time the tour started we had six hundred volunteers, and when the tour ended we had almost a thousand,” Craig says. “It was an unbelievably magical experience because we had so many good people in this country who went out of their way to help.”
After every screening, Craig moderated a question-and-answer session. He then wrapped up the evening with these words:
“ ‘You may choose to turn your back on these kids, but from this point forward you can never again say you don’t know.’ That’s how I said good night, every night.”
The bus tour was timed to end in May 2013, while Congress was still in session. Craig and people from thirty-seven different states marched on Capitol Hill to make lawmakers aware of the need for change in the international adoption process. Ideally, the march would signify the first stirrings of a sustainable social movement.
The years since the Juntunens adopted were a whirlwind of raising kids and fighting for kids. Kathi spent about twenty hours a week focusing on ways to support and improve Enfant de Jesus, but Gina and Lucien handled 90 percent of the daily grind in Haiti; the goal was to eventually put the local couple in complete charge of the crèche. Craig and Kathi were constantly busy fund-raising for their respective charities, Chances for Children and Both Ends Burning. The hunt for donations was complicated.
“We have the same friends,” Kathi explains. “We know the same people. Fund-raising is very challenging. It’s very difficult. It creates another level of tension between Craig and me.”
By the middle of 2009, for her marriage and for her kids, Kathi was ready to opt out of any new projects in Haiti.
“I literally said to the Duncans, ‘This is probably our last year.’ I was thinking,
Okay, life is going to get back to normal again
.”
But in January 2010, Earth’s tectonic plates had a different plan. A catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince, annihilating the city’s poorly constructed residences and commercial buildings.
“The minute I heard that,” Kathi says, “I knew it was going to be horrendous.”
More than one hundred thousand people died, and millions already living in desperation were dealt another heaping pile of hardship.
Kathi’s first priority was to somehow rescue the twenty-two children living in Enfant de Jesus who were waiting out the adoption period. She knew the container of food that had recently been shipped to Haiti for the crèche would be stuck in port and looted. Immediately following the earthquake, humanitarian visas were issued by the US and Haitian governments to allow several hundred orphans who were paired with American families—but whose paperwork was not yet approved—to be airlifted out to Florida. Kathi knew the Haitian government was fickle and began scrambling to coordinate air transportation as soon as possible. Complicating her efforts were downed communication systems in Haiti and constantly changing rules and direction from Haitian officials. A US Army rescue team airlifted the unharmed children from Lamardelle to the Port-au-Prince airport, where Kathi was desperately trying to coordinate a charter flight to pick them up.
“It was the most stressful period of my whole life,” she says. “I remember the kids coming home from school one day and I had three phones going at the same time—a satellite phone, my cell phone, and a landline—talking to three people trying to orchestrate this.”
Thankfully, the charter company she was corresponding with allowed Kathi to board the orphans on the return leg of a flight that was transporting an American businessman sent by his company to do emergency banking work in Port-au-Prince.
“The person who went in my place texted me and said, ‘The banker just got on the plane and he has the hugest metal attaché case I’ve ever seen. He said it’s filled with cash!’ ”
To Kathi, the most precious cargo was the twenty-two children who ultimately landed safely in Fort Lauderdale and in the arms of their waiting parents.
She realized then it was not time for her to break away from Haiti. “Normal life” would have to wait. Kathi decided to search for a reputable, financially stable organization in Haiti that she could partner with long-term not only to improve the quality of life for orphaned children but also to empower women, one village at a time.
From March to September 2010, Kathi spent a week and a half per month in Haiti working with five different enterprises. She decided to partner with a Haitian nonprofit run by Pastor Renelus Maxime. Craig met Pastor Maxime while filming
Stuck
in rural Haiti. He told Kathi the pastor operated a church, school, and orphanage in the small mountain village of Kenscoff. Following the earthquake, sixty orphans were living in tents on the side of the mountain.
Chances for Children began a partnership with the pastor’s organization, and between December 2010 and 2012, construction projects included new schools, churches, a medical clinic, and several crèches. She made sure to supply the children with toys and games that would encourage them to solve problems and use their imaginations. Years earlier, when she was first raising her three kids, Kathi was sitting with Quinn in the middle of living room chairs that she’d set up to look like airplane rows. Toys served as passengers. She began showing Quinn how to spread his arms out like wings.
“I was watching Amelec and Espie looking out the doors of their bedrooms like,
What are they doing?
” she recalls. “Not asking to play, but watching; they were captivated.”
The women of Haiti were another important focus for Kathi and Pastor Maxime. They built a community center in Kenscoff where women learn how to earn money and their independence, and consequently, keep their children.
“Sometimes we can be very judgmental about these birth mothers because they have five and six kids,” Kathi says. “Why don’t they use birth control? But what I’ve come to learn is that these mothers love their children. They are great moms. They just find themselves in situations where they’re desperate. They’re desperate for a man to take care of them so that’s why they get pregnant again. There are so many factors, but the love that they have for their kids really is incredible. They’ll do anything for them. It breaks my heart that they have to make this very difficult decision, not because they don’t love their child, but because they have no hope to take care of the child. It’s tough to watch.”
How different Kathi and Craig’s life together looked in 2013. Just seven years earlier they had been a team of two, best friends who did everything together. Now they had three thriving children, two charitable foundations, and in August 2013, nearly three thousand miles between them. Kathi decided to spend ten months in Haiti to train and mentor the future leaders of the Kenscoff community. She brought along Espie, twelve, and enrolled her in a private Christian school for the duration of their trip. Kathi says the time together strengthened their relationship, and although Espie doesn’t remember her life in Haiti, her daughter got the chance to feel the satisfaction of serving others who need help.
“Espie was great with the kids,” Kathi says. “She really enjoyed taking care of the toddlers. Every Saturday night we had two or three kids over from the orphanage for movie night, and she really took pride in that. The kids waited in line for movie night.”
Craig and Kathi are busy at home in Scottsdale managing their foundations and caring for thirteen-year-old Amelec (who loves all sports), twelve-year-old Espie (who loves fashion design), and eight-year-old Quinn (who loves performing in school plays). Their bond is strong, as is the sentiment that family ties are for life.
“I talk about it now with the boys,” Craig explains. “I say, ‘When you get older, you’re going to take me out to dinner,’ or ‘I’ll come for a visit and we’ll have Sunday dinner at your house.’ We talk about it in the context of family and being connected forever but that the roles might change. I’m teaching Amelec to barbecue, and we were barbecuing the other night and I said, ‘Y’know, there’s going to come a time, son, when you’re going to have your wife and your kids and your family, and we’re going to show up and you’re going to have to barbecue for us, so you better get pretty good at this soon.’ He loved that.”
Kathi in Port-au-Prince, 2013
(Courtesy of Kathi Juntunen)
Kathi will continue indefinitely to commute to Haiti for a brief stay every six weeks, growing and maintaining the many facets of her foundation. The Juntunens acknowledge that the time they spend apart and that Kathi spends away from the kids may appear unconventional to many couples. But they feel strongly that while their three kids are the hands-down priority, they also feel compelled to speak for millions of voiceless children around the globe.
“We are both consumed by the sense of responsibility to serve kids we feel are neglected,” Craig says, “and that sense of responsibility and the passion to change things for these kids has trumped the traditional confines of a marriage. Our marriage now looks different from lots of other marriages because we’re living apart periodically. I think we’re both focused and energized about trying to achieve something that has a much broader impact than just worrying about taking care of ‘us.’ There was an enormous sacrifice to what Kathi was doing when she spent ten months in Haiti. It wasn’t just being away from the person she married seventeen years earlier: she was away from her two boys, the comforts of the lifestyle she knew, her family and friends; she was away from a lot of things that brought her comfort. She was living in a very harsh, demanding, frustrating environment. It would be very, very easy for just the general living conditions to wear her down to the point where she says, ‘I’ve had enough; I’m coming home for good.’ But that’s not Kath.”
Kathi’s days in Haiti were and are long indeed. She might leave the community at four forty-five a.m. to drive a sick baby to the hospital and not return until ten p.m. There are meetings with birth moms in the community or social welfare officials in town. Groups from the States who fly in to help need direction and supplies for their projects.
“It’s not like you can just go to Home Depot. I’ll go to six different hardware stores to find all the things I need,” she explains, “and each hardware store takes about an hour because the process is so messed up. You always wait in Haiti. It’s a country with no infrastructure, a lot of graft and corruption.”
Haiti’s electricity is intermittent, its poverty constant. Daily, Kathi is approached by desperate people in need of money whom she has to deny; donations must fund projects that will effect lasting change. The Juntunens’ new path is anything but easy, they both admit.
“As hard as it is, as hard as it is to be away from Craig and the kids, I don’t question it; I don’t have any doubts about it. This work is what I’m supposed to be doing. I have a calm about me; a peace. Now . . . some days I want to quit,” she says, laughing. “Don’t get me wrong . . .”
Craig admits, “Doing what we’re trying to do is very, very hard—surprisingly hard. There are days I feel like quitting, but how could I quit and not feel like a coward? I know there is a solution out there for these kids. I can’t tell you how many times I run into people and they say they read my book, or they saw
Stuck
, or they wanted to adopt but got discouraged. So, as I’ve gone down this path, I have so much information—and that’s the cursed part, because if I was to walk away from it, I would feel that I was a coward and I didn’t do something that I should be doing.”
Craig is now fifty-nine, Kathi fifty-six. Late in life, the Never Dad and his very accomplished wife went from realizing their dream together to living a life they never imagined in their wildest dreams.
“Our kids are such a cornerstone of our being now,” Craig says, “and that all came because we considered, we jumped in, and now we’re doing it. As humans, I think we have a tendency to hunker down within our comfort zone, and at times our heart tells us to cross that line and to be bold, but our mind tells us to play it safe—that if we venture out into the unknown there could be this enormous dose of pain, so we stay with what we know and is easy for us. But sometimes that doesn’t produce the most meaningful life experience, and that was a lesson that we really learned. We thought we were comfortable, but taking this risk put us into such a different place, which has opened up so many opportunities to learn and grow and evolve as humans. It’s given our life a much different dimension than had we just stayed playing golf every day and living in our own little bubble. Life would not have been nearly as meaningful as it is today.”
• • •
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