![]() ![]() The foundation has also started or taken over six schools that provide education up to the sixth grade. Numbers in the orphanages vary widely from month to month, with anywhere from 30 to 60 children at a given time. The foundation’s largest school has about 850 children, though the schools typically number between 200 and 250 students. Still another, Mercy House Orphanage II, was created for infants who overcame their medical conditions. A separate orphanage, Mercy House Orphanage I, was created to handle their unique needs. In many cases the infants are terminally ill. The foundation contracted with the hospital to work with recently abandoned or orphaned infants. Through necessity and opportunity the Mercy and Sharing Foundation began to grow. It’s hard to focus your attention,” Joe said. He made his first trip to Haiti about a year later and understood why Susie felt compelled to act. Susie hired a staff and discovered, on her return to Aspen, that Joe was already creating a nonprofit foundation to oversee the orphanage. The Krabachers purchased a $111,500 house in Port-au-Prince and moved 47 infants into it from the hospital. “God doesn’t give you anything you’re not tough enough to handle,” Susie said. They would figure out how to pay for it later.Ī foundation was born with a tremendous leap of faith. He told her to find property for an orphanage. Susie called Joe in Aspen and explained the situation to him. It was the first of many gut-wrenching ironies she and her husband have faced in Haiti. “I was causing the kids to live, and they didn’t have any room for them,” Krabacher said. They were used to the kids dying ” not living and consuming valuable space and resources. After a month, hospital administrators ordered her to stop caring for the infants or move them elsewhere. She started visiting the infant-care unit every day, feeding the kids, applying bandages and medicine to their open wounds and simply holding them. I had never seen so much pain,” Krabacher said. In some cases, live babies shared cribs with dead ones who hadn’t been removed. The heads of some of the babies were actually growing around the iron bars in the cribs because the children hadn’t moved in so long, according to Krabacher. Overwhelmed doctors and nurses had little time to do anything for the 200-or-so kids. Her first work was in the abandoned-infant-care unit at the only public hospital in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, where in fact “care” was a euphemism. “I can’t even tell you how deeply that changed me,” she said. Krabacher went to Haiti and was immediately hooked. He convinced her it made little sense to help children in Asia when such poverty existed just 500 miles off the Florida coast. With no children of her own, she was preparing to visit Mongolia and help children there when another member of the Aspen congregation implored her to visit Haiti with him. That application of the Bible indirectly led Susie to Haiti. They’re doing it because it is God’s will, he said. Joe said he and Susie aren’t building points for entry to heaven. Instead they try to apply the Bible as they understand it. They aren’t caught up in dogma, pomp and ceremony. Religion had been part of Susie’s childhood she and Joe are members of Aspen’s First Baptist Church congregation. Joe and Susie were married soon after they met, and they discovered a shared desire to do something meaningful with their lives. Krabacher landed in Aspen 15 years ago and hooked up with Joe when he handled her divorce from her first husband. She became a cover girl in March 1984 and continued as a model for several more years. At 17, a friend sent photos of her in a swimsuit to Playboy magazine, and Krabacher was invited to Hugh Hefner’s famed mansion in California. Starting at 12, she lied about her age to get jobs. School wasn’t a priority for Krabacher during childhood. A girl in the foster family was carrying the child of her own father, according to Krabacher. But other family issues landed her in a foster home by age 12.
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