Guilaine Salomon and her brother Philippe were born in Haiti and are of Haitian heritage. The children of diplomats, they lived there until Guilaine was 8, when the family moved to Latin America where their parents continued their diplomatic work. Eventually they came to the U.S., and Philippe later returned to Haiti while Guilaine settled in Sonoma.
With Haiti’s grinding poverty and social and political upheaval, Philippe was disheartened to witness the neglect of children in Port-au-Prince. But one occurrence shook him to the core. Seven years ago, he saw a man leading a group of children, perhaps 7 to 13 years old, down the street. They stopped at a car, where another man opened the trunk, and Philippe saw that it was full of guns. Big guns. These the men proceeded to hand out to the children.
At that moment, Philippe knew that if this was the destiny of Haiti’s children, he had to act. So he did something he never dreamed he would do: He started an orphanage. “I had to get these children off of the street,” he said. He had raised his own 10 children in a sturdy old one-story house in a large mango grove in Port-au-Prince. It was quietly empty now, and Philippe thought, why not fill it with children again? And so La Maison des Petits de Diquini (House of the Young Children of Diquini) was born.
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In December, 2009, Guilaine, her husband, and her two teenaged daughters headed to Haiti after Christmas, loaded down with supplies from Costco ranging from toys to turkeys to take to the orphanage. Guilaine worried about the frozen turkeys in their carry-on bags, as hard and heavy as bowling balls, getting detained by security or falling on someone’s head from the overhead bins, but the turkeys, and the passengers, made it safely to Port-au-Prince along with the family.
Guilaine and her daughters were gathered with the children and staff of the orphanage watching a James Bond movie on TV when the earthquake struck. First came a distant thunder, then a massive shaking, then silence, then screams. While those at the orphanage were not physically hurt and the building remained standing, it was only when Guilaine went outside and across the street towards the nearby Hôpital Adventiste de Diquini that the magnitude of the disaster began to set in.
Tumbled buildings, shocked and injured people, and devastation were all around. And Guilaine did not know the fate of her husband, who had gone downtown before the earthquake. Determined to maintain a calm demeanor for her daughters and the children, she hurried back to the orphanage and told staff to gather as many mangoes as they could from the grove out back to give to the people she knew would descend seeking help.
Thankfully, Guilaine’s husband showed up the next day, having walked back to the orphanage. Philippe’s girlfriend and her 7-year-old daughter were pulled from the rubble of their apartment the next day as well, due only to the determination of a friend who insisted that people keep digging for them.
Haitian citizen rescuers assumed that officials would soon arrive to help with rescues and dispose of bodies, but there was no help forthcoming. Philippe was among those who said, “We have to take them to the cemetery and bury them.” Haitians anxiously awaited word over the radio from their government leaders, but there was silence. There was no leadership at all from the devastated government, even though some of its members had survived.
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Philippe came to Sonoma in April to attend a fundraiser for the orphanage and for another school sponsored by Sonoma’s Patty Westerbeke. La Maison, with a capacity for 22 children, had only 11 in residence at the time of the earthquake. Several months later, they are stretched with 35 children and counting.
Philippe shakes his head at his own audacity for even starting the orphanage, something for which he had no formal background and no particular forethought until that day with the guns. Yet he has found his calling. The children call him “Papa,” run to greet him with hugs, and follow him around the grounds like little ducks. He is as determined as ever to give these children a home, an education, love, and a future of hope.
To learn more about La Maison des Petits de Diquini, and to help, visit http://www.wix.com/slim_839/diquini
