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by Colleen Pepper
"People laughed at me and told me I'd never make it," Eleanor recalls. "I was 51 at the time and everyone thought I was too old to make a difference." 'You've come to late,' they said."
Undaunted, Eleanor persevered. She left her home, her country and 35 years of singing and choir directing to go and care for the poor in Haiti. No sooner had she arrived than she started a school. On a five-acre property outside Port-au-Prince, Eleanor took a sharp rock and drew an A in the dirt. Then she drew a B.
"We taught 20 children the alphabet that way," she explains. "We had no blackboard, no chalk and no walls - only the shade of a tree." Nevertheless, the school grew quickly. The 20 students became 50, then 100. Today, more than 600 children, too poor to attend classes anywhere else, receive schooling at Eleanor's Mariani compound. But education wasn't the children's only need, nor was it their greatest.
"Some of the students were so poor, they would go for days without eating," she says. "Others would find scraps of food in the city dump, often with bugs crawling on every bite. Many suffered from worms and fever. They were often too sick to concentrate and had no desire to learn."
So Eleanor and her staff began feeding the children. Each morning, she would purchase and prepare food for the students. Eventually, she hired a cook to take over the task. There were just too many other things waiting to be done.
Grieved by the number of abandoned and orphaned babies in Port-au-Prince, Eleanor contacted Haiti's Social Welfare Department. "Don't give those children to the voodoo priests for sacrifices," she begged. "Give them to me." Before long, the officials took her up on the offer.
"They told me they had fourteen sick, abandoned babies at the hospital," she recalls. "But when I went to get them, the nurse informed me that all fourteen had died during the night." In shock, Eleanor questioned the nurse.
"How could this happen?" she asked.
"That's easy," the nurse replied. "They were laying on the concrete down there. It rained last night and the window was open."
Appalled, Eleanor demanded to see the other babies. The nurse refused. They were invalids - children deemed too deformed and too sick to have any hope. Eleanor disagreed, insiting that she knew another physician. After much haggling, Eleanor left the hospital with ten infants.
Some of the infants had contagious skin diseases. One had no tailbone. Another lacked muscles around his eyes. Though none was expected to survive the night, all of them did. Over a period of two years, all but one was restored to full health - largely, says Eleanor, through prayer.
And so her work with orphans began.
For almost 30 years now, Eleanor has been caring for Haiti's poor. The conditions are difficult at best: electricity comes on for an hour at a time - almost always after midnight; rats try to climb into the orphanage's cribs; embargoes limit food supplies. Still, Eleanor refuses to give up.
"Half of the children in Haiti die by the time they are five years old," she told an audience in Miami. "They die of starvation. They die of malnutrition. They die from exposure. The things you send me - the cardboard boxes of clothes and shoes - when those boxes get to Haiti, people beg for the cardboard. ‘Mom, please. You promised me the cardboard.' So we cut the box in two and it becomes beds for their children."
Criss-crossing North America several times a year, Eleanor does everything she can to make Haiti's plight known. At the age of 81, she remains a tireless fundraiser. Drawing on her strong voice, she sings about Jesus and urges people to follow his compassionate example. During these concerts, she appeals not only for finances and supplies, but for adoptive parents as well. To date, more than 130 children from her orphanage have been placed with families in the United States and Canada.
While every adoption story is unique, some are absolutely incredible. One pair of six-week old twins - a boy and a girl - came to Eleanor's orphanage covered in axle grease. Adopted by a family in New Jersey, the children received music lessons when they were five. The little boy turned out to be a child prodigy. Though abandoned in the slums of Port-au-Prince as an infant, he'll soon attend the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York City.
But while some of the children in Eleanor's care go on to live with caring families around the world, others will never leave the orphanage. Still, Eleanor and her staff are adamant that each child experience love - pure, genuine and unrestrained. Rising at 5 a.m. every morning, Eleanor prays for the children by name. In the afternoons, she visits the younger ones in the nursery, cradling them in the crook of her arm and asking God to bless them.
"She cares for every child like it is her own," says friend Cathy Klassen, who adopted her son, Andy, from Eleanor's orphanage. Her husband Larry agrees. "She becomes like a mother to everyone she meets," he says. "People call her Mom for that reason." Hardly anyone in Haiti knows her as Eleanor. She's just Mom - provider of everything from hugs to shoes to wedding clothes. She has even been known to take money out of her pension fund to buy school supplies for the children.
Each July, her arms stretch wider still when 500 people from Haiti's mountain villages descend on the compound for a week-long conference. "Mom will have spent weeks sorting clothes, getting the beds prepared and finding extra food to send back with them," says Glenda Reimer, another adoptive parent. "Sometimes she negotiates for things at the depot because she doesn't have enough money. Meanwhile, she'll be praying the whole time that someone will send the money right then or that the vendors will extend credit. I mean, every day she steps out in faith to make a go of it."
To understand Mom Workman is to understand her deep, abiding trust in God. "She's like Mother Teresa," says Cathy reflectively. "A lot of people ask, ‘Are there still people like her left?' I think there are - but few are as devoted. Mom Workman has given up everything to help those children and we know she won't stop working until she dies. She just won't."
What about you? Have you felt too old, too weak, or just too ordinary to make a difference? God wants to be our leverage in living, empowering us to feel better about ourselves, more excited about our future, more grateful for those we love and more enthusiastic about our faith.
If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, God has given you His Holy Spirit to help you live life according to His perfect plan. Why not pray this simple prayer and by faith invite Him to fill you with His Spirit:
Dear Father, I need you. I acknowledge that I have sinned against you by directing my own life. I thank You that You have forgiven my sins through Christ's death on the cross for me. I now invite Christ to again take His place on the throne of my life. Fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled, and as You promised in Your Word that You would do if I asked in faith. I pray this in the name of Jesus. As an expression of my faith, I thank You for directing my life and for filling me with the Holy Spirit. Amen.
For more information on the orphanages in Haiti. write to:
Eleanor Workman
Christian Haitian Outreach
PO Box 934545
Margate, Florida, 33093
Phone: 954-972-3674