Building a Village to Raise a Child
so today i want to talk to you about the
african proverb that it takes a village
to raise a child
i’m sure you’re familiar with what that
means raising kids
is hard work and our kids need outside
influences beyond their parents to
thrive and
us parents well we need all the help
that we can get
but in today’s globalized transient
world villages no longer look like they
once did
and i’m absolutely positive that not
everybody feels like they have a village
at all
take me for example i grew up in a small
town in alaska
being the travel oriented person that i
am i left just as soon as i had my high
school diploma
in my hand my husband’s french and
pretty much did the same thing
neither of us as adults have ever lived
in the towns that we were raised in
and therefore we’ve never been in a
position to just drop the kids off at
grandma’s house because grandma
both of their grandmothers quite
literally live on opposite ends of the
world from each other
and us i mean i don’t know if you’ve
ever had to take your kids to your
annual exam
but let me tell you it’s quite a feat
trying to hold still on that table with
your feet up in those stirrups
while simultaneously raining in your
toddler and your preschooler from
from roaming the room i’m telling you
that raising kids
in the absence of a village is tough
so what do you do if you don’t have a
village well i’ll tell you what we and
all of our vagbon
nomad non-village people lifestyle did
we simply
added another child to our lives
my family met jonas in the spring of
2017
shining shoes on the streets of the
dominican republic jonas is originally
from haiti
he didn’t know how old he was he’d never
been to school
but most shocking for this mama was that
jonas had walked by himself
to the dominican republic sometime
between the ages of 10
and 12 in search of a life that involved
regular meals
but despite that jonas received so many
hardships in life
he was so incredibly wonderful that my
family fell in love with him pretty
quickly
pretty soon after our first meeting we
were actively seeking him out
looking for him at the beach or playing
at the park sharing a meal
or buying him much-needed clothing to
replace the ones that he wore that were
a couple sizes too big
and then one day jonas’s mama showed up
at my front door with a small bag of
clothes and a toothbrush
begging me to take her child in of
course i did the only thing that i
thought was appropriate at the time
i told her no way i didn’t know the
first thing about raising a child from
the street and
i didn’t know how long i was going to be
in the dominican republic and
i certainly could never take him with me
when i left
but then jonas’s mother did something
amazing that i’ll never forget
she grasped my hand and looked me so
deeply in my eyes
that there was no escaping the gravity
of her mother’s plea
please she said to me take him you can
teach them things i can’t
you can teach them how to read you can
teach them how to write
you can show them how to be a man with a
future
jonas moved in with my family that same
day we put him in school for the first
time in his life
and very soon he was thriving he would
live with us on the weekdays where he
would attend school
and then on the weekends he would go
back and visit his mama
but all too soon that day came when it
was time for us to return to colorado
which meant leaving jonas behind i vowed
to his tear stained face that i would do
whatever
it took to try to help him continue his
education
being an immigration attorney i know a
variety of ways that somebody from a
foreign country can come to the united
states
but i also know that getting a very poor
child
out of a very poor country and into the
united states was a very difficult task
and every immigration attorney i
consulted felt the exact same way
fortunately for jonas and i both there
was another group of people that had
something different to say
they reminded me that actually
anything’s possible
if you’re willing to work hard enough
and then they went above and beyond
they asked me how they could help so
with their support
i created a step-by-step get jonas to
america plan
you know being one of those people
that’s kind of anal and actually enjoys
filling out forms in the doctor’s office
creating that plan with all of its
bullet points and fonts and multiple
colors
that was easy but when i took a step
back
and actually looked at what
accomplishing each step would entail
i had to admit something that was pretty
difficult for me to face
you see i spent most of my adult life
trying to ever avoid asking for help
but if i was gonna have any shot at
getting jonas to the united states
i was gonna have to ask for help and at
times i was gonna have to beg for it in
short
if i was going to have any chance of
success i was either going to have to
find a village to join
or i’d have to build one so with that
goal in mind i got started
ring ring ring ring yeah hello hi
hi hi uh super elite expensive private
school
yeah i was calling to see how you felt
about accepting a child who can’t speak
english
actually can’t read or write at all also
i don’t know how old he
is um maybe 12 14 he’s 14.
and um i can afford your tuition so if
you could just go ahead and give him a
scholarship that’d be great
thank you click was pretty much how i
envisioned my call to the peak school
located right here in beautiful summit
county but since it was the only school
in our area that had the accreditation
to sponsor jonas’s visa
it was my absolute only option it took
me
a little bit to get up the nerve to make
the phone call because
i didn’t want to be rejected but once i
did
something amazing happened the
admissions director didn’t hang up on me
she invited me in for a meeting with her
and the head of the school
and within two weeks of making that
initial phone call i was holding jonas’s
acceptance letter and we’d added an
entire school to our village
step two jonas and his mother had to go
back to haiti
so i’m just going to come out and tell
you that this next step
scared the stuffing out of me i had no
idea how to get jonas and his mom from
the dominican republic
back to haiti but i knew that dangerous
the journey would probably be dangerous
so i didn’t like it
but fortunately i knew somebody who
lived in the dominican republic a lot
longer than i had
and one phone call one phone call to her
and she was in
working with a local church she arranged
the entire trip
and within just a couple more weeks from
getting that acceptance letter
jonas and his mama were on their way
back to haiti and we had new residents
for our village
step three jonas has to get a passport
so things work a lot differently in
haiti than they do in the united states
and i didn’t know how to get a passport
and since no one in jonas’s immediate
family had ever had a
passport they didn’t know either
fortunately i was put in touch with a
local pastor who agreed to help us
now i’m not going to sugarcoat this next
step because there were hurdles that we
had to jump that we had
no idea were ever going to be in front
of us but what’s important for you to
know
is that those hurdles just required us
to ask for more help
and eventually jonas was holding that
passport and we had new residents for
our village
step four visa application and interview
so as i may have mentioned i’m a
paperwork pro so that part wasn’t
difficult find that application
done but actually figuring out how to
get jonas and his mother
from their hometown to the embassy which
was about eight hour bus ride away was
pretty difficult
and we had to do it twice because his
first visa got denied
this step took a really long time but
fortunately
there were people willing to help us
once we asked including a colorado
senator
and a congressman but there were also
those wine and cord bread laid angels
that would show up at my house on those
super tough days when
i was pretty sure had gone crazy and
this scheme would never work
and they not only held my hand why i
cried but they sat there and they cried
with me
and eventually you guessed it jonas had
that visa
and we had new residents for our village
step five
i really really love this next step
because it brought somebody into my life
that i never knew i was missing jonas’s
big sister she jumped at the chance to
help her let a
little brother obtain this incredible
opportunity she not only took him to the
airport
but she also gave him a mani pedi so
he’d look his best when he arrived in
america
so in the end we did it jonas finished
his freshman year with a 3.0 and he
just started his sophomore year a couple
weeks ago but what’s amazing
is our village membership didn’t stop
with jonas’s arrival in the united
states
because people continued to join it they
read about us in the local paper and
dropped off snow gear at my house
people had never met asked me how they
could sponsor jonas for scholarship or
contribute to his educational fun
and i’ve had so many people reach out
and give me advice on what it’s like to
raise a teenager because
let’s face it i am very much in over my
head here sometimes
so to circle back to my original
question
what do you do if you don’t have a
village you build one
you get out there and you ask for help
and you create relationships based on
mutual trust
love respect and understanding and for
those of you who are watching this and
thinking
i already have a village well lucky you
then your job is to look for people who
need a village and ask how you can best
help them
you know jonas’s mother asked me to take
in her child
so that i could teach him things but
what she didn’t realize
was how much she was about to teach me
that by following her lead she was
seemed to be vulnerable
and asking for help i would finally get
that village that i’ve been missing all
of these years
and now that i have one i am never ever
ever taking my kids to my annual exam
again
thank you
you