HIGHLAND | If all the red tape can be unsnarled, Michelle and Chuck O'Day and their four sons will welcome two young men from Haiti into their home later this month. It's a journey that began 18 months ago.
Michelle O'Day and her then-13-year-old son Oakley traveled to Haiti in August 2008 to help a friend at an orphanage he started in Source Matelas, about 20 minutes from Port-au-Prince. Outside the orphanage gates, the O'Days befriended two young men who were too old to be cared for in the facility.
Leon Laurent, then about 16, and Claudens Michaud, about 20, were living on the streets, scraping together whatever they could to survive, Michelle said.
"They told me ‘We prayed for a mom and here you are,' " she recalled. "That's what they call me, 'mom.' "
Leaving the two young men behind was difficult, Michelle said, so she bought them cell phones to enable texting. Those text messages arrived every day and were often disturbing, she said. Sometimes Leon and Claudens texted that they hadn't eaten in days, Michelle said.
The family sent money through friends to help the two young men.
When the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, the O'Days lost all contact with the pair.
"We knew they hadn't eaten since Thursday of the week before," Michelle said. "We finally got a text on Friday after the earthquake. They didn't have food or water."
It was 13 days after the earthquake that aid finally arrived in Source Matelas.
"We felt helpless," she said. "We had to get them out of there."
Adoption wasn't possible because the young men are older than 16.
The family was offered a number of illegal means for bringing Leon and Claudens to the United States, but declined to participate, Michelle said.
"Everything we tried through legal means went nowhere," she said.
"Out of the blue, we received a text message from a man named Bebe Dorsainval, who is a missionary in Haiti. He said he could get the boys passports in the Dominican Republic."
Those passports should be ready to pick up in the neighboring Dominican Republic on Friday, Michelle said. "Now the problem is getting a visa attached to the passports."
Leon, 18, and Claudens, 22, will need to take their new passports to the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince to apply for visas, she said. How long those visas will be valid is not clear, she said.
"We've heard they can stay only 30 days. Some people say the visas are good for three years," she said. "We've also heard the only way they can stay is to get married. We're putting that in God's hands, too."
Whatever the outcome, the O'Day family is already prepared for Leon and Claudens to join them, Michelle said.
"We have four boys ages 5 to 15. We moved into this house in Highland three years ago and the older boys finally got their own bedrooms. But they've given up their rooms to welcome the boys," she said.
"In our hearts, they're already our sons."
