I met a Haitian orphan on a 2010 relief mission. Sixteen years later we met again at a B.C. hockey rink

ABBOTSFORD, B.C. — In January 2010, a catastrophic earthquake upended Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, the capital, thousands of bodies piled up in a morgue. In Canada, people scrambled to help. Ten days after the disaster, Air Canada personnel volunteered to fill one of the airline’s Airbus A330 jets with antibiotics, generators, food, plus 15 doctors and nurses organized through Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, and fly to Haiti.

I joined the flight on Jan. 23, 2010, as a National Post journalist. In the sultry Caribbean pitch-black night, on the tarmac of destroyed Toussaint L’Ouverture airport, we welcomed on board 24 orphans and flew to Ottawa. The National Post published two stories from me about the mission, and five of my photographs.

Over the years since, I thought not much more about that event. Then, late last fall, I received a curious email.

Hi Mr. Kuitenbrouwer, 

My name is Maddox Bentley, and I’m 17 years old. I recently stumbled upon an article you wrote for the National Post in January 2010 about Haitian children being brought to Canada after the earthquake. 

The article mentions a two-year-old boy named Kendy Joseph — that was me. Reading it was surreal, as I never knew much about the flight or those specific moments, and I’ve had lots of questions about my early life ever since. 

Maddox wanted to see any photos from that night. An editor at the Post discovered that the former Haitian orphan now plays hockey at an elite level in British Columbia. It sounded like time for a followup story. I met the orphan as a baby; where is he now, I wondered.

This is the story of one baby from Flight 2151, whom I photographed and identified by name (the orphans wore plastic hospital wristbands). It’s a story of Haiti and hockey. More than that, the story of Kendy Joseph, now Maddox Bentley, illustrates the potential of humanity and showcases Canada as a country of sanctuary and opportunity. This stands against the backdrop of violence-plagued Haiti, a place now far more chaotic than it was in 2010. Canada, meanwhile, with concerns about housing shortages and affordability, is today less welcoming to immigrants than the nation that plucked orphans from the rubble of Haiti in the year of the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

This boy’s odyssey reminds us of another time, a more compassionate time, and how we’ve all changed.

Twenty years before the relief mission, I visited Haiti in 1990, to report for The Gazette of Montreal on the enslavement of young Haitian men in the sugar cane plantations of the neighbouring Dominican Republic. In the Dominican cane fields, a fellow journalist and I met a teen from Haiti named Ternois Brisma. He slept in a hut without a mattress or toilet. Brisma told us he worked from 4 a.m. to 5 p.m., barefoot. The day we met, a machete he had cut half a ton of cane and earned $1. A production manager told us that the workers might never leave. Our reporting noted that, even at that time, Montreal had more Haitian-born nurses and doctors than Haiti itself.

Brisma, 19, remained optimistic. “I’m going to work for six months and fill my pockets with money,” he told us. “Then I’ll get to Port-au-Prince and I’ll give you a phone call.”

A Dominican supervisor overheard him and laughed. “I doubt it,” he said.

Having visited Haiti twice, I keep an eye on the country, even as life has pulled me in a different direction. In 2017, I left the Post and full-time journalism and enrolled in the Master of Forest Conservation at the University of Toronto. As a registered professional forester, I now teach forestry at the University of Toronto. But journalism hasn’t left me. I teach journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, I edit a forest magazine, and I wrote a book on the history of maple syrup in Canada.

Maddox Bentley’s email took my mind back to Haiti, a place that lives in my memory for warm tropical breezes, vibrant colours of the paintings crammed into countless tiny art galleries in Port-au-Prince, the communal culture of Haiti’s overcrowded buses, and the pearl-white beaches of Cap-Haitien in the north.

The 2010 earthquake wrecked the country’s presidential palace, national assembly building and cathedral in Port au Prince. Some estimates put the death toll at over 200,000 — the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century. More than a million others lost their homes. The earthquake dramatically worsened an already bleak situation: by one estimate, half of Haitians today are undernourished.

Canada has long played a lead role in Haiti , the only other francophone country in the Western Hemisphere. That role has two faces. First, Haiti has been the largest recipient of Canadian assistance in the Americas, with aid from both government and private donors. We have also sent troops and police to train local law enforcement. But all this foreign aid has not made life better. When I visited, Haiti had an elected government; today, Haiti lives in a kind of anarchy. A transitional presidential council struggles to maintain order; criminal gangs control up to 90 per cent of the capital. Canada’s airlines do not serve Haiti. The government of Canada warns “avoid all travel to Haiti due to the threat posed by kidnappings, gang violence and the potential for civil unrest.” Air, land and sea borders between Haiti and neighbouring Dominican Republic remain closed. These days, Haitians cannot even work for nearly nothing in their neighbour’s sugar cane plantations.

Many Haitians seek to leave. Close to 180,000 Haitians have emigrated to Canada. Most settled in Quebec. In January 2010, on Flight 2151, as so many before him, the little boy headed north to a big, cold country.

Even before the flight left Haiti that night in 2010, the baby now known as Maddox Bentley expressed an opinion. I wrote:

“As flight attendants demonstrated the safety features of Air Canada’s Airbus A330 jet on the tarmac in Port-au-Prince early this morning, a two-year-old boy identified by his wristband as Kendy Joseph, and cradled in the arms of a ticket agent, let out a wail that stood in for the heartbreak of all Haiti.”

During Flight 2151 to Canada, I photographed the baby boy as he slept in the arms of Louise Thériault, an Air Canada employee volunteering on the relief mission. I reached out to her recently for her memories of that night.

Thériault worked for Air Canada for 35 years, in St. John’s and Montreal — in customer relations, then lost baggage, reservations, and later the airport help desk. In 2010, a co-worker at what is now Trudeau Airport in Montreal sought volunteers to go to Haiti.

“It was after the big earthquake,” recalled Thériault, who retired from the airline in 2020 and lives in Montreal. “Everything we heard was negative, with all the damage they had there. It’s a little positive thing in my life that I did. It was an experience, to help people — to know that we had a chance to bring back some children to some families in Canada. The adoptions were done more quickly than usual. They jumped through some red tape.

“What stays with me is that, when we got on the plane with the kids, they also let on some (Haitian) passengers. These older women and men were all dressed as though for church. They are very proud people, and they always dress well, and often the women wear three or four hats on their heads, because they are used to going to church with their hats. So as not to take up too much space in their suitcases, they put all their hats on their heads. But if you looked closer, the women still had mud on their legs. This was a last-minute trip: they had a nice dress, but had not had time to wipe the mud off their legs. They did the best they could, but you could see the atrocity that had taken place, the damage that it caused.”

On the four-hour flight, Thériault looked at ease cradling a baby. She is the eldest of five children.

“It was not the first time I have held a baby,” she said. “I don’t have kids, but it was not difficult. He was very calm. There were other kids on the flight who moved around a lot, who were older, but mine was no trouble at all during the flight. He did not even urinate, because he was so dehydrated, and that’s why they took him to the hospital when we got to Ottawa.”

The plane from Haiti landed in Ottawa on a cold, clear January morning. After treatment for dehydration at the hospital, the baby boy was passed into the arms of his adoptive parents: Leanne and Gord Bentley of Kelowna, B.C.

Leanne and Gord Bentley grew up in Abbotsford, B.C. Gord’s father, Mike, started a power-line contracting company, Pacific Electrical Installations, later taken over by his sons, Gord, Chad and Ryan. Gord and Leanne married in 1995 and moved to Kelowna, about 400 kilometres east of Vancouver.

The couple wanted kids. Leanne’s family has a tradition of adoptions. Her brother has adopted three kids from Haiti and two from the United States, and her sister has two kids from Haiti. In 1995, Leanne and Gord Bentley travelled to the Haiti Childrens’ Home orphanage in Mirebalais, Haiti, and adopted a son, Jesse. At the orphanage, they met a four-year-old girl, Martiana. They returned 18 months later and adopted her, too.

Eight years after the first adoption, unexpectedly, Leanne learned she was expecting; she gave birth to a daughter, Tessa, in 2003. Two years later, Leanne had another daughter, Siara. In 2009, the orphanage contacted the Bentleys and said Martiana’s half-brother Kendy (now Maddox) was available for adoption.

“For us, it was a no-brainer,” Leanne said. Their hearts and home were big enough to welcome a fifth child. They planned to go to Haiti to pick up the little boy and were waiting for Haiti to stamp their application when the earthquake hit. The earthquake buried the baby’s paperwork, but prompted Canada to speed his adoption.

Sixteen years later, I left Toronto for B.C., to see what had become of the little boy rescued from the earthquake. In line at Pearson International Airport, I chatted with a woman boarding a flight to Kelowna, B.C. Her grandchild was expecting a child and had an issue with diabetes. “The whole family is here in the east. She’s out west. I am not doing anything. So, I said, ‘I’ll go out and help her and stay as long as she needs me.’”

As we all stuffed our coats and bags and laptops into plastic bins to slide through the X-ray machines, I thought of the woman’s generosity, about how the success of any child depends on the support they get from the adults around them. The life of the boy I was heading out to see changed in dramatic fashion when a B.C. family adopted him. Plucked from the grinding poverty and chaos of Haiti, Kendy Joseph landed in the warm embrace of the Bentley family. They, like my travel companion, had the time, the stability, the resources and the affection that the little boy needed to thrive.

The next day, with photographer Ethan Cairns, I took Highway 1 east from Vancouver to Abbotsford to meet Maddox. He attends Yale Hockey Academy, developed at Abbotsford’s Yale Secondary School, part of the 129-team Canadian Sports School Hockey League at 38 accredited programs across the country.

As the rising sun lit snow-covered mountain peaks, at 8 a.m. Maddox Bentley walked into The Rinks at Summit Centre, a kind of brutalist four-storey concrete building with a round central atrium that leads off to two ice pads, a Montessori school and daycare, a skate shop, a restaurant, a mortgage broker, a travel agency and an auto glass repair company. Boys trickled past, lugging beat-up Bauer-branded hockey bags bigger than they were, and headed to the change room.

Maddox has grown since I saw him last: he’s now six-foot-two and 205 pounds. Dressed in a hoodie, sweatpants and a baseball cap, he stopped and smiled, a bit shyly, shook my hand and headed straight for the dressing room. The photographer followed him in to take some pictures and soon emerged. “They’re chirping him pretty hard in there,” he said.

Before coming to B.C., I spoke with Maddox and suggested that he prepare his team for the arrival of journalists. He did not. So, I went into the change room, where teen boys sat taping their socks to their knee pads and attaching the Velcro of their elbow pads. Nothing prepares you for the acrid, pungent stench of a hockey dressing room — an olfactory punishment with few parallels in the western world. I told the boys the story of my first meeting with Maddox, on the flight from Haiti. Later, he thanked me; he hadn’t told his origin story, and said his teammates relaxed once they understood our presence.

Maddox and the other Yale Lions flew onto the fresh ice, and began the warm-up, firing pucks that smacked the thick curved glass as their skates sprayed ice shavings and chewed the frozen surface. Maddox wore a red practice jersey; white type on the back read, “Dreams Begin Here.” Then the players stopped and bent, one padded knee on the ice, to listen to their coach, Chris Shaw.

Gord Bentley, Maddox’s dad, had travelled from Kelowna to meet me. We watched the practice; Gord’s in the company of thousands of parents across Canada who spend way too much of their lives in the cold air of hockey rinks watching their kids skate. Gord played hockey, as have his five children. Dressed in a down vest and jeans, he said, with a wry smile, “I haven’t kept track of the money I have spent on hockey sticks over the years.” But he praised the Yale Hockey Academy for its costs, about $17,000 a year. “In Kelowna, we were paying $40,000 a year.”

He added, “It’s nice to have a good-news story about hockey with all the bad news that’s come out about Hockey Canada.” He mentioned the trial of the former junior hockey players, accused (and acquitted) of sexual assault in London, Ont.

But on that Tuesday morning, the coach got mad. He’d given his team Family Day off, and Shaw felt his boys lacked competitive drive. He told them to move both nets to within a few hockey sticks of each other. Small teams fought for puck possession in a cartoonish jumble of legs and arms and sticks and sprays of ice, on just a quarter of the rink surface. Maddox was the tallest boy on the ice, and fast, but seemed to hold back a bit compared with some other players. His father, Gord, called that a “one-off.” After the practice, I asked Billy Wilms, the hockey academy’s director of player personnel, to describe Maddox. “When he came out here last year to try out, what caught our eye was his physicality,” he said. “His compete level.”

“Oh, he was giving us crap and stuff,” Maddox reported later of his coach. “He was saying how, ’I guess I shouldn’t have given you the day off because you didn’t take advantage of it’ or whatever. He said he knows that there’s distractions, with Maddox’s camera crew, so don’t focus on that. He was pretty mad. And then we went to small-area games. He just wanted to compete, and then if we lost, you saw, we did the suicides. That was tough.”

A “suicide” requires a hockey player to skate, at breakneck speed, the length of the ice to the furthest red line, then back, then skate to the opposite blue line, and back, and so on, touching each of the five lines that bisect a hockey rink.

After the game, Shaw told me, “Our touches weren’t clean. I wasn’t happy with how ready the guys were, so I gave them battle drills — emphasis on puck protection.” He added about Maddox, “He’s a power forward. A physical player.”

Once off the ice, the boys have just a few minutes to change into matching Academy shorts and T-shirts, and head up three flights of stairs to the gym. They pass banners that list the 25 draft picks for the National Hockey League who, since 2004, have come out of this hockey program, including, last year, two players to the Edmonton Oilers, one to the Pittsburgh Penguins, one to the Los Angeles Kings and one to the Vancouver Canucks. The training coach shuts the gym doors at 9:30 a.m. Any latecomer must do a jog around the neighbourhood, Maddox said.

On the gym’s black rubber floors, the boys pedalled stationary bicycles and waddled like penguins with elastic resistance bands holding together their thighs or dragged heavy sleds across the floor. As the playlist — Rediscovering the 1990s hip-hop, starting with Warren G, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg — pounded through the speakers, I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows from four stories up and saw the morning sun lighting the prim rows of identical three-storey townhouses and thought: We are a long way from Haiti.

Antonio Domingo, the strength trainer, yelled at them to work harder. He ordered Maddox to jump on and off a padded black cube, perhaps a metre high. As a photographer snapped photos, Domingo yelled, “You do everything they say! And you smile while you do it!”

Domingo later added, “I am tough on them because the world isn’t nice. If they can handle the stress here in the gym, they can handle anything in life.”

Domingo, who has Filipino heritage, told the team the story of his immigrant parents, and how he had to work harder than most to succeed. He said, “Maddox, you want to share your story as well?”

The Maddox I met is a tall young man with a shy smile, who spoke few words. That quiet exterior hides a boy with a contagious work ethic, said Mark Lindsay, a firefighter in West Kelowna who played junior hockey and now coaches youth hockey. Lindsay met Maddox when the boy, then 10, tried out for spring hockey. He was the weakest boy in the tryouts.

“It was quite noticeable that if we were to take Maddox he would be more of a project. His dad told me, ‘Hey, I know it isn’t pretty, but I’ll tell you one thing—this kid just does not stop working and he wants to become better every day. You won’t regret this.’“

Lindsay did not regret it.

“I have coached hockey for 15 years, I have never seen a kid come off the ice that exhausted, because he worked that hard.”

Maddox idolized PK Subban, a rare Black professional hockey player, and got permission from his coach to wear Subban’s number, 76.

A few years ago, Gord Bentley’s parents, Jane and Mike Bentley, remodelled and then moved into a spacious brick home on a street called Panorama Drive in Abbotsford, placing a stone “B” for Bentley in a circle of red bricks above the main entrance. Winter in eastern Canada, where I live, has been long; I ogled the Bentleys’ sculpted hedges and emerald lawns. “It is called Beautiful B.C. for a reason,” Leanne said.

Maddox, who recently got his driver’s licence, pulled up to his grandparents’ house in a 2008 Mazda 3, Tessa’s old car. “A hand-me-down,” he said. “But it’s good.” Inside, we met Gord and Leanne, Gord’s parents, and weathered an assault from their three bouncy French bulldogs: Boujee, the mom, Ozzy, the dad, and their baby, Roxy. Their fourth dog, a little red fluffy creature named Bella, fills out the pack.

We settled in the Bentleys’ living room. I asked Maddox to describe his dream.

“Short-term dream is probably get on a WHL roster, or BCHL … You work your way up. It’s really hard to get drafted and that’s not going to happen, but I know this guy, he got a camp invite to the Dallas Stars. They put him on a contract. It’s pretty big. I think it was $975,000 a year entry-level.”

Gord asked his son: “What happens if you get injured tomorrow and you can’t play anymore?”

This question prompted a long silence. Replaying my recording of the interview, I can hear the dogs snoring. Leanne calls them house hippos.

Leanne: “In other words, what’s your backup plan?” More snoring.

Finally, Maddox spoke. “Be good in school,” he said. Maddox had straight As through middle school; these days, he reports, “my grades are mostly in the B-range, with some higher Bs and a couple of As.”

During hockey season, Maddox lives in Abbotsford in a rented house with his sister, Tessa, and her boyfriend. She cooks, but sometimes he makes his own supper: rice and meatballs and avocado, which he calls a taco bowl. “It does the trick,” he said.

The pair seem closer than some siblings. She helped him write the letter that he sent to me. Tessa praises her brother’s work ethic. Though he was very quiet when he met me, she said at home, “he’s still super annoying. Talks a lot.” And then there is the matter of the hockey equipment. Both Maddox and Tessa’s boyfriend (who lives with them) play competitive hockey and bring their hockey bags home to air out their gear. The stench got so bad that they got permission to put the gear in their landlord’s garage. But that attracted mice, so Maddox brought his equipment back into the apartment.

Tessa said her plug-in Febreze air fresheners “can’t keep up. It’s gross. It really does putridly stink, and then it lingers up to the bedroom and up to the kitchen when you’re cooking.”

Maddox in many ways is a typical teen, and more privileged than some. In summer in Kelowna, he spends his downtime wakesurfing and playing golf. Next month, Gord and Leanne will take their five children and significant others on a holiday to Palm Springs to celebrate a family birthday.

Since 2010 when the Bentleys adopted Maddox, Canada has become a less welcoming place. Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who studies immigration policy, noted in an email that, “Canada has reduced its overall annual immigration levels, which affects permanent resident admissions across most streams, including family and humanitarian categories.” Canada has also suspended all adoptions from Haiti. I thought of the young cane cutter I’d met in Haiti in 1990. Without even that wretched job, Haitian youth are forced into violent gangs.

This puts Maddox’s life in perspective. If doing “suicides” at practice or finding a place to air his hockey gear that doesn’t upset his sister — and doesn’t entice the mice — are his worst challenges, he is doing OK.

You can’t say this to Maddox, but it doesn’t matter whether he makes the playoffs or wins his next game or gets drafted to a hockey team. He’s already won. Sure, he faces challenges: In the team photos, he’s the only Black guy in a sea of white faces. He’s dealt with racism in hockey. He has many questions about Haiti, and about his childhood that perhaps no one can answer.

Maddox would like to visit Haiti. Tessa said to him, “I don’t know if you will ever be able to go there. Now the gangs have taken over the government.” Maddox holds out hope: “Yeah, it’s true, but they are probably working on getting it better. In the next few years maybe.”

I wrote a book years ago called Seven Secrets of Highly Successful Kids. The secrets include: Choose a Good Role Model, Be a Team Player and Make the Most of What You’ve Got. There was one secret I left out, because no kid can control this one, which is Have a Good Home. And in that category, Maddox Bentley has already scored the goal that wins the Stanley Cup.

Before Christmas, the Yale Lions travelled to Collège Bourget, a private school in Rigaud, Que., west of Montreal. Maddox’s team won the eight-team tournament; he got two goals and one assist, and led the tournament in penalty minutes with 21.

Maddox Bentley has become a real Canadian.

Main image: Maddox Bentley — at his grandparents’ home in Abbotsford, B.C., in mid-February — hopes to one day visit Haiti, despite the upheaval there. Ethan Cairns/National Post