LAKOU SHILOH
A Home for Every Season of Life
Lakou Shiloh is a family-centered home in Hayti providing lifelong care, stability, and belonging for orphaned children and isolated elders.
A lakou is the traditional Haytian family compound, where generations live together on shared ground and no one is raised apart from family. That is the model we follow. Children who come to Lakou Shiloh are legally adopted, and they stay for life. There is no aging out at eighteen.
Inspired by the ancient biblical city of Shiloh, where the children of Israel gathered, dwelled, and found rest after their years of wandering, Lakou Shiloh offers what many have lost or never had: a safe home, a loving family, and the assurance that they are no longer alone.
Why a Family, Not an Institution
Roughly 30,000 children live in about 750 orphanages across Hayti. The Haitian government estimates that 80% of these children have at least one living parent, and nearly all have family somewhere. Only 25% of those institutions are licensed.
Poverty fills them, not abandonment, and once a child is inside, years can pass without the one thing every child needs most: someone to call family.
Institutional care in Hayti has a documented history of abuse, neglect, and trafficking. We were not willing to replicate that broken system.
We were also not willing to look away. Children living on the street in Hayti go hungry. They suffer violence and sexual abuse, they are recruited by gangs, and some do not live to grow up. Doing nothing is not neutral. It makes us part of the problem. Institutions fail children and the street destroys them, and in both cases children pay for choices adults made.
So we chose a third answer. Not an institution, and not the street, but a family. At Lakou Shiloh, there are no shifts, no dormitories, and no aging out. There is a mother, a father, siblings, meals at the same table, and a home no child has to leave.
How It Works:
Family First
Whenever it is safe and in the child’s best interest, our first goal is to keep children with their own families. We work to reunite children with biological relatives and support them through reintegration, because a child’s roots matter. Lakou Shiloh exists for the children for whom that is not possible.
For Children
Orphaned children, and children for whom family reintegration is not safe or possible, are welcomed into a permanent, family-style home. We secure legal documentation for every child, including the official birth certificate many have never had. Each child becomes a full part of the household, receiving love, structure, and stability, and remains family for life.
For Elders
Lakou Shiloh will welcome elders with no surviving family or stable home into the same household, integrated into family life alongside the children, so that no season of life is spent alone.