Protector
Ginette Gauvreau

by Lisa Fitterman

Sometimes you’re too late, no matter how fast you’re trying to get somewhere. Ginette Gauvreau learned this in 1979, on the eve of a trip from Trois-Rivières, Que., to Haiti, where she and her husband were going to finally take home the baby they had adopted. The luggage was mostly packed, when she called the orphanage to inquire if there was anything the little girl needed.

“Did no one call you?” the orphanage’s director asked. “Your little girl passed into the arms of Our Father 10 days ago.”

Devastated, Gauvreau never forgot that lesson. A former piano teacher who knows that practice makes one, if not perfect, at least more efficient, she turned her tragedy into determination to help Haiti’s abandoned children. For over 25 years, she has travelled there frequently (the past five years, she has gone one week out of every five), working with an orphanage in Port-au-Prince to make sure the children are cared for and helping Canadian couples negotiate the country’s often byzantine adoption system. Along the way, Gauvreau and her husband raised their son and the two daughters they eventually adopted from Haiti.

Much of her travel was as a volunteer for Soleil des Nations, an adoption agency based in Quebec; more recently, she became the organization’s part-time director of Haitian operations. She began small, expediting about 10 adoptions a year, but quickly increased to more than 75 annually. (At press time, the number was about half that, due to the volatile political situation.)

It’s often frustrating work, but Gauvreau, now a widow, wouldn’t have it any other way. Consider the desperate Haitian mother who called her hotel one day to say that if Gauvreau didn’t come within two hours for her infant twin girls, they were going to be tossed to the pigs. The mother had no milk to feed them, and she couldn’t bear their crying.

Determined, Gauvreau and a doctor made their way through rough terrain and forded a river, balancing on stones. They made it in just over two hours, tardy enough for the mother to have already thrown one baby to the pigs. Gauvreau rushed into the pen and grabbed the child in her arms. She says: “Sometimes you’re just in time, even when you’re a bit late.”

Chosen charity:
Soleil des Nations
(soleildesnations.org)