[Vision2020] Teen's Dying Wish Brings Hope for Orphans

[Tom Hansen]

The John E. Halgrim Orphanage
http://www.johnhalgrimorphanage.com/

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Courtesy of Salon.com at:

http://tinyurl.com/JohnHalgrim

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Teen's dying wish brings hope for orphans
By MITCH STACY Associated Press Writer

A 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.

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.

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 would lie down on a table while a machine swirled around him. He had to 
wear a mask to keep his head still, which he hated. They even sent him to 
get the braces off his teeth so it would fit tight on his face.

"When I went in, my mom always told me to imagine God zapping the tumor 
away," he wrote in his journal. "And you know what, I did. I did every 
day."

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."

Before he got sick, John went to church most Sundays with his family but 
wasn't what you would call religious. He 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."

John thought about that at St. Jude when he learned that every kid with 
cancer gets a wish from the Make-A-Wish people.

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.

But his parents didn't want to hear about it. The tumor was still there, 
slowly killing their son, and they were desperate to find some way to stop 
it.

Calling Make-A-Wish seemed like giving up.

"John, let's worry about you," his mother would say.

Joanie spent hours on the computer researching possible treatments. She 
called specialists all over the country. She and her son flew to Los 
Angeles to spend 15 minutes with a top pediatric brain cancer man. She 
even took John to a faith healer, who grabbed his head, pushed him down 
and said he was healed.

The tumor was still there, of course, but the radiation and chemo seemed 
to keep it in check as John started his freshman year at Fort Myers High 
School.

Then one day in April 2007, a year after the initial diagnosis, John sent 
a text message from school.

"Mom, I'm seeing these spots."

John soon started to get dizzy at school. A few months later, doctors 
determined that the tumor was growing again and spreading out in his brain.

"I almost lost all my faith when I heard this news," John confided in his 
journal. "But later on that night I sat down with God and had a long chat. 
I asked him are you testing my faith, is it my time and what did I do? All 
those questions, though, I learned were from the devil, and all I had to 
do was keep faith in the Lord and he would heal me."

Meanwhile, 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. But he never complained or moped or got mad. 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 for him was a young pastor named Orlando 
Cabrera. John's uncle attended the Summit Church, where Cabrera preached. 
John went there sometimes, and he liked Cabrera.

One day Cabrera asked if he could come to the house to pray with the boy. 
During the visit, Joanie urged her son to talk about his wish. John 
explained how he wanted to help kids in Africa somehow, maybe even go on a 
mission trip.

Naturally, Cabrera wanted to know why. Why wouldn't John want to take a 
vacation or do something else fun? The wish was supposed to be just for 
him, after all.

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 decided then that other people needed to know about this kid -- 
and his wish.

In early June, the pastor returned with a video camera. He thought he'd 
show the video to his congregation, then maybe appeal for donations to 
benefit the church's African missions and outreach.

John, as bad as he felt by then, liked the idea, too. This could work.

He sat down at the end of the dining room table and faced the camera.

"Hi, I'm John Halgrim. I'm 15 years old," he began.

His head pounded, he was dizzy and sick to his stomach, and his face was 
puffy from the steroids. Nevertheless, 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."

------

Doug Ballinger couldn't believe what he was seeing when a friend at Summit 
Church showed him the video. The 68-year-old retired businessman was moved 
by the boy's spiritual maturity and selflessness.

He also realized that he might be in a unique position to help.

Ballinger, who had moved to Fort Myers from Memphis, recently had taken 
his first mission trip to Nairobi, and he couldn't get out of his head the 
poverty and the suffering children he saw there. He and his son, J.D., 
who'd been doing African missions for years, formed a charity and called 
it Help the Least of These, the name taken from a verse in the book of 
Matthew.

Father and son had helped build a new church that doubled as a schoolhouse 
in a Nairobi slum. They decided their next project needed to be a small 
orphanage. So many children are parentless in a land where violence, 
starvation and disease kill most adults before they reach their mid-40s. 
But they needed to raise the money.

That's when Ballinger saw John's video. "It was like God did a certain 
thing," he said.

The video was shown during services at the Summit Church in October 2007. 
At the end, a pastor explained how the weekend's collection would be 
donated to Help the Least of These to build the orphanage and give John 
Halgrim his wish. Many who watched it were in tears. And they gave -- more 
than $13,000 that first weekend.

That was just the beginning. As word spread and more people found out 
about John's wish, they gave more money to help build the orphanage for 
him.

Plans for a larger orphanage were put to paper, a project costing around 
$90,000. Sixty children would eventually live there, and local residents 
would come for church in the ground floor common room on Sundays. The 
building was designed so more floors could be built on top if it needed to 
be expanded.

John never got to see the video. By the time it was shown at church that 
fall, the tumor was stealing his ability to function. He could hardly talk 
or see anymore, and had trouble getting up and down out of the brown 
recliner in the living room where he spent most days.

But soon afterward, John's Uncle Ed came over with a drawing, an 
architect's rendering of the front of a building. The boy's grandmother, 
Jackie Streit, sat down next to his chair and held it out in front of him 
so he could see.

"John, look," his grandmother said. "This is the orphanage that you 
wanted. It's going to happen.

"Most boys your age are infamous," she joked. "You're going to be famous."

In neat block letters across the top of the drawing was the name of the 
building: The John E. Halgrim Orphanage.

John smiled. Then he lifted an arm off the chair and gave them all a 
thumbs-up.

A few weeks later, surrounded by his family at a Fort Myers hospital, the 
15-year-old died.

At his funeral, Cabrera spoke and showed the video again as a tribute to 
the boy and his wish. Mourners donated another $15,000 for John's 
orphanage.

------

Joanie had promised her son over and over that she would be the shepherd 
of his wish.

That's why she and her mother went to Nairobi with other volunteers last 
month to paint the walls, buy supplies for the kitchen and help move the 
kids in, working amid poverty that was previously unfathomable to them.

She had T-shirts made for each of the orphans and volunteers that 
said, "Something Heavenly."

At a ceremony to dedicate the building a few days after they arrived, 
Joanie sat in a plastic lawn chair in the front row, cradling a small boy 
in her arms. She listened to people talk about John and his wish and how 
many obstacles had to be overcome to get to this day.

When it was her turn to stand and take the microphone, her emotions made 
it impossible even to speak at first. 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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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 

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