It’s been just over a year since Fedner was welcomed into the Lighthouse. Some days, I still question the decision to bring him in, doubting my adequacy in making such a pivotal choice for his life.

At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, Adriano was the only student at the Lighthouse who failed his grade. His score made it obvious that he had hardly tried. He was, nonetheless, defeated as the other kids celebrated their passing scores.

Although the details of their first chapter are still unknown, I imagine it begins like this.

Her story begins in the town of Cabaret, just north of Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince. She spends the first several years of her life with her mother and her brother, who is just one year older. She attends Grace Emmanuel, a school that educates around 60 students when she starts kindergarten. Her mother works at the school as a cook. Daily she prepares the rice the students eat for lunch. Life is simple, just the three of them, and although her father is not around, Kimberly feels loved.

I can still picture him at the orphanage where he was just one of over 100 kids. He was 2 years old, covered in dirt, wearing a tattered T-shirt too big for his body. He wasn’t wearing a diaper, his nose was running, and no one seemed to care. His mother had brought him and his older brother to live at that orphanage, believing anyone else could give them a better life. It wasn’t because she didn’t love them—she must have felt inadequate to mother them. And so I imagine as she left Johnny and Peterson there, she gave them each a kiss on the cheek and felt both pain and hope in her heart for their future.

He is noticed in the crowd due to the number of hot dogs he manages to shovel into his mouth. Eight hot dogs. But it isn’t the hot dogs that sparks attention, it is the fact that this boy is hungry. This boy needs to be fed. This day, he leaves the incredibly impoverished village he has called home for most of his life and begins a new journey, one that is still weaving redemption and light into his story.