died, and so did their teachers. Throughout Haiti, tens of thousands of children died or were left without parents. Already approved to adopt two children, the Bentrotts found a sick little girl, Valancia, and made an on-the-spot decision to bring her home as Solomon’s sister. Two weeks after the quake, the U.S. government agreed to grant “humanitarian parole” to 1,200 orphans, and the Bentrotts flew out on a military cargo jet as escorts for 85 children, including Solomon and Valancia. “We thought we’d go home, get citizenship for our children, regroup, come back and resume work in Haiti,” he says. It didn’t happen. Acquiring citizenship—for Bentrott’s children and other orphans--stretched into a long, tortuous process. Unable to return to Haiti with his new family, he took a job in Denver as branch head of a Haitian adoption agency. He and his wife started a blog to chronicle their time in Haiti, and Bentrott shared those experiences with the Elmhurst College community during an April 2010 campus visit and also at an Elmhurst-sponsored pizza party for high school students. “He absolutely mesmerized them,” says Kim Whisler, coordinator of United Church of Christ relations in the Elmhurst Chaplain’s office, who arranged the gathering. “He has such a profound knowledge of the country. I was amazed by his ability to engage younger kids and bridge generations.” One of the high school students who attended the pizza party was so impressed that she applied to Elmhurst so she could get involved in service work. One can only imagine that Bentrott, had he been exposed to such an influence in high school, might have been moved to start his own journey sooner. But some things just take time.
Haiti is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the world. On the positive side, these are the most loving, resilient, beautiful people I've ever encountered.
At left from top, Bentrott’s neighborhood in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake, with a little girl at an orphanage and with an orphanage worker displaced by the quake. Bottom, an orphanage nanny holds Bentrott’s daughter Valancia in the back of a moving truck. At right from top, a baby sleeps in a laundry basket, a group of orphanage children and Bentrott with a little girl. Bottom, the family as they were being evacuated two weeks after the quake.
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