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TechnoratiA year to the day after she buried her son, Joanie Halgrim rode in a minivan down a rocky dirt road not far from the airport in Nairobi, Kenya. Her stomach turned from the stench of rotting garbage and raw sewage mingling with exhaust fumes and the acrid smoke from sizzling meat peddled by street vendors.
(Photo: AP Images / Sayyid Azim)Joanie Halgrim, left, high fives one of the children who will live in the orphanage named after her son John Halgrim on Nov. 19, 2008 in Nairobi, Kenya.
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 thought about the many times she had prayed for a miracle when her son, John, was sick.
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 become 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.
He also believed that he would eventually be healed, that this thing in his brain was put there so he could do something important.
And this, he decided, was important.
___
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. Continue »
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