Our Mission is to provide a home and education for abandoned children in Jacmel. As our resources allow, to provide emergency aid to the community of Jacmel.
Our History
After a lifetime of software development, culminating in recent dot-com fortune, Martin Schmitt and his wife Sue decided to delve deeper into their philanthropy. In 2006, after a visit to Haiti, they founded an orphanage in the coastal community of Jacmel on the southern shore of Haiti.
Hi Everybody,
We are all alive and none of us is injured, by a miracle, mere timing kept us alive, a few minutes earlier or later and most of our kids and me would have been dead. But………. we are homeless, The orphanage is still standing, but totally unsafe.
A recap of Tuesday 12 January 2010:
At 4 PM me and Eliane, 1 of our nannies had taken 5 of our kids: Youseline, Estania, Melinda, Yakime, Luckson and Chidlie our little neighbor friend to the playground at La Place (townsquare). The kids were having a great time.
At around 5 PM I was just about to wrap up all the kids to go back home, when suddenly I felt like I was standing on a rocking boat. I could not move, I could hardly stay standing up, and in front of me all the kids are calling out my name in panic Lia, Lia……
The whole world was spinning, all the buildings around La Place were swinging and above Hotel de la Place a huge cloud of smoke and dust. There were screams everywhere, and lots of noise from buildings collapsing. The air was filled with dust, and then I saw the roof ornament of the school next to Hotel de la Place,( see the green building in the photograph below), falling down right on top of my car.
We are sooo lucky we were not yet sitting in the car, we all would have been dead.
Lia finally got through to us this morning and confirmed what we read in a short email last night, that they are all fine.
When the earthquake hit, she was at the park at the Town Square with five children. Just before 5PM she decided to head back to the orphanage. “That’s when everything turned upside down,” she tells us.
Timing was everything. Had she left five minutes earlier she would have been getting the kids in the car. Her car is no more, as the quake landed the Hotel La Place on top of it. She and the kids walked safely through the streets back home.
Jesula was born on April 11th, 2007. At about nine months old her mother passed away from AIDS and Jesula was left at an orphanage. The nuns prayed very hard for Jesula but against their prayers, she tested positive for HIV. 
Thursday, April 8, 2010
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