The van stopped in the midst of some bleak gray apartment blocks, their balconies festooned with drying clothes flapping in the sun. She and the other travelers got out and entered an austere concrete block building. It didn’t look nearly finished, and yet in a week’s time it would be a home to unwanted children, a place where they would sleep in neat rows of new wooden bunk beds upstairs, the first real bed many of them would ever have.
As she walked around the dusty interior of the orphanage last month, deep feelings welled up inside Joanie. On the second floor, she found a balcony and walked outside to be by herself. And she started to cry.
She realized that maybe now she was getting it.
It was a year and a half before, in April 2007, when the two ladies came to the Halgrim house in Fort Myers, Fla.
“Think of me as your fairy godmother,” one of them, Sue Fenger, told 15-year-old John Halgrim.
He smiled. She was a volunteer from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the charity that helps dreams come true for children with life-threatening ailments. He was a boy with a time bomb in his brain.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” John told her.
He had considered a trip to the Bahamas after hearing about an opulent resort called Atlantis, where guests get to swim with dolphins. That sounded like the coolest thing ever, he thought. And he knew his two brothers and sister would like it, too.
But as John’s illness intensified, a wholly different idea came to mind.
Maybe the mission videos he’d seen at church planted the seed, the ones showing kids living in slums without running water. Or maybe it was the television program he once watched, where other kids who had lost their parents to AIDS were forced into slavery.
Whatever the reason, John became fixated on those children - and that place.
“I want to stop the hunger in Africa,” he told the wish-granter.
Fenger didn’t know what to say at first.
John went on: “I want to open an orphanage in Africa.”
That, of course, wasn’t what Fenger expected. Other kids ask to go to a movie premiere, visit the set of “American Idol” or even meet the president. That kind of wish can usually be granted. But this?
“John, that’s a really big wish,” she said. “I’m not sure Make-A-Wish can do a wish like that. Do you have a second wish?”
John got quiet. Then he made up his mind. “Nope,” he said, “that’s my only wish.”
“Are you sure there’s nobody you’d like to meet?” she pressed. “Soccer stars? Singers?”
“Nope,” he said again.
He was, in so many ways, an ordinary kid. He liked soccer and fishing with his brother Justin and had a crush on a girl at school named Katie. But John also believed steadfastly in God and faith and still, somehow, miracles.
The crushing headaches began more than a year before the wish-granters came calling, in early 2006, around the time John turned 14. On the soccer field, where he was used to being better than most other kids, he felt weird and off-balance. His mother started noticing that he looked too gangly and awkward out there, like a giraffe.
Doctors thought he might have allergies or migraines. One wanted to put him on antidepressants.
His mom insisted on an MRI.
The radiologist who performed the procedure in March 2006 knew right away what he was looking at.
He showed John’s parents the thing in the boy’s head, a black spot in the middle of the image of his skull. Joanie thought it looked like a little bomb had exploded in there.
“My mom came out 10 minutes later and gave me a big hug and kiss,” John wrote later in a journal he started keeping. “I was stumped. What was wrong? My mom told me I had a tumor then, and that is when my journey with God began.”
At first, John felt relieved. At least they knew what was wrong. Now, maybe, the headaches would stop.
Then he started to get scared. His Aunt Debbie, Joanie’s older sister, had a brain tumor - and she died.
“Am I going to die?” he asked his mother.
“No,” she tried assuring him. “You’re not going to die.”
But only a few weeks later, doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis took John’s parents into a room and delivered the unthinkable news: Their son had a malignant tumor on his brain stem that was impossible for surgeons to remove without damaging his brain or killing him.
Odds of survival were long. But John and his family believed he could beat it from the start. He spent six weeks at St. Jude with his mom for radiation and chemotherapy.
He also jotted down a Bible verse. Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see.”
John acknowledged that something happened to him when the cancer showed up. “I learned I needed to change my life,” he wrote in the journal. “I learned I needed to live my life through God’s eyes and not my own. I learned I had been asking him for so much more than I had been giving him.”
Back home in Fort Myers, he bugged his mother for months to call Make-A-Wish so he could tell someone about how he wanted to help the kids in Africa.
He thought the charity might help him raise money or even send him on a mission trip.
A doctor’s referral had put John on the Make-A-Wish radar. And that’s how it was that Fenger phoned and finally persuaded Joanie to let her come by to talk to John, who was eager to tell her about his wish.
As Fenger tried to figure out how the charity could help, John’s health got worse.
When people told John they would pray for him, he’d tell them right back that he would be praying for them, too.
One of those people praying was a young pastor named Orlando Cabrera, who came to the house to pray with John. The boy explained how he wanted to help kids in Africa somehow.
Naturally, Cabrera wanted to know why. John propped himself up on the couch so he could look at the 33-year-old pastor. “Orlando, God didn’t allow this to happen to me so I would get something out of it,” he said.
Cabrera knew that other people needed to know about this kid - and his wish. The pastor returned with a video camera.
“Hi, I’m John Halgrim. I’m 15 years old,” he began. He sat for more than an hour to talk about his cancer and God and the kids in Africa and his dreams for them.
“I know that he’s got something great planned for me,” John said. “And I know he wants me to do this.”
As word spread and more people found out about John’s wish, they gave more money to help build the orphanage for him. Eventually, John’s Uncle Ed visited John with a drawing, an architect’s rendering of the front of a building. In neat block letters across the top of the drawing was the name of the building: The John E. Halgrim Orphanage.
A few weeks later, surrounded by his family at a Fort Myers hospital, the 15-year-old died.
Joanie had promised her son she would be the shepherd of his wish. She and her mother went to Nairobi with other volunteers last month to paint the walls, buy supplies and help move the kids in.
She had T-shirts made for each of the orphans and volunteers that said, “Something Heavenly.”
At a ceremony to dedicate the building, Joanie sat in a plastic lawn chair in the front row, cradling a small boy in her arms. Lined up on rows of benches before her, the children waited quietly, their scrubbed faces looking up at this woman who lost her son and because of that came all the way to this place to give them better lives.
“I know John is watching this,” she said. “He should be here.”
Since he couldn’t, his mother opened his journal and started reading aloud. It was the part John wrote on that day in June last year when the pastor came to make the video.
“Today was hard, but so have been the last couple of weeks,” she read.
“But all you have to do is have faith and everything should be all right ...”
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kimando wrote on Jan 7, 2009 5:53 PM: