This isn’t supposed to be happening. An infant wailing, me lifting her over my shoulder, just above a small towel, and tapping her back until she — happily for her, not so great for me — burps out a glob of goo.

This isn’t supposed to be happening, but it is, to my wife and myself, a baby girl, with all the squeals, shrieks, coos, hiccups, big eyes, soft breathing, and happily waving hands and feet of an infant, who has no idea how she got here and no idea why.

Here is the how and why: Her name is Nadie, and she was brought to the orphanage we operate in Port Au Prince, Haiti, from a village outside Miragoane. We were told she had been fed little beyond sugar water for the first six months of her life. She weighed just 7 pounds, was lethargic, barely responsive, and had conjunctivitis that was swelling her eyelids and filling her eyes with fluid.

We immediately took her to the hospital, where blood work confirmed malnourishment and anemia. After conferring with doctors in the U.S., we decided the best thing would be to get her here for a few months and try and address her serious, potentially life-threatening issues.

That explains how she ended up in Michigan, and our house.

It doesn’t explain everything else.

A baby? At our age?

Like the feeling my wife and I suddenly have when we wake up, where the first thought is “How’s the baby doing?” Like the sudden evaporation of time as we stare for hours at her incredibly expressive face. Like the sinking of our vocabulary into a series of repeated infantile sentences, like “You’re a hungry little girl, aren’t you? Yes! You’re a hungry little girl, aren’t you?…”

We sound like dolls who have their “talk” button permanently pushed.

Those of you who have raised children no doubt recognize this behavior. For us, it is a first. Although we have overseen more than 70 kids through the doors of the Have Faith Haiti Mission & Orphanage since taking it over in 2010, we have never had a child so young.

And never at our ages. I remember as a kid asking my parents how old you had to be to have kids, and they said they had theirs in their 20s.I defiantly proclaimed, “I’m going to wait until I’m 30!”

Nobody mentioned 60.

But here we are, well into that decade, buying Huggies, pack and plays, bottle warmers. Here we are, strapping Nadie into a car seat, pulling a little shade over top so the sun doesn’t make her squint and cry. Here we are, undressing her in the doctor’s office, placing her on the scale, and rooting for a higher number.

By the way, about that doctor thing. I need to salute a Bingham Farms physician named Marty Levinson, who, without as much as a glance at his busy schedule, immediately agreed to see Nadie when I emailed him from Haiti, and has overseen her comeback ever since. His staff literally cheers out loud as Nadie’s weight has risen from 7 pounds, to 8 pounds, to nearly 10 pounds.

Her anemia, with iron drops, has gone away. Her blood levels have risen into normal territory. Her head size (therefore her brain) has increased dramatically. Levinson calls her “a miracle.”

No argument here.

It truly does take a village … 

Which explains why we now spend hours chronicling Nadie’s attempts at rolling over, or pointing as she kicks the little plastic shapes that hang from a mobile, or making noises to elicit the toothless smile that lights up her face and all the faces looking back at her.

Her curiosity fascinates us. Her tiny grip fascinates us. Her sleeping fascinates us. We have quickly devolved into those people who go on endlessly about “the baby” and it is only through the grace of our family and friends that we are not told to shut up already.

Instead, our family and friends have joined in the nurturing of this little miracle, watching, feeding and changing her right alongside us. They put in countless hours. They sleep over. The transformation of our world has been total, complete and almost instantaneous. In less than a month, the house has become a nursery.

I shouldn’t be surprised. This past week marked the 25th anniversary of a book I wrote called “Tuesdays With Morrie,” which led me to reread parts of those conversations with my old college professor, who was dying from ALS. In one, I asked him what he would tell people about having children (I was in my late 30s by that point, freshly married) and Morrie said, while he wouldn’t tell anyone to have or not have kids, he would say that “there’s no other experience that can substitute for it.

“If you want to know complete responsibility for another human being, and to know how to love and bond with another in the deepest way, that’s the way you do it.

“And I would not want to have missed that experience.”

Now, thanks to life’s crazy timing, we are getting our crack at it. It doesn’t matter that this is temporary, that in time, Nadie will return to the orphanage and grow up there. It doesn’t matter that she is not ours. I learned long ago that love for children has nothing to do with your blood and everything to do with your heart.

She is not ours, but we are hers, totally and devotedly, every goo-goo, ga-ga, poopy moment. This isn’t supposed to be happening, not at our age. But how blessed we are. It is.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.

What must they be feeling inside a locked room, as their captors yell, threaten or even beat them, as captors have done with others? How are they coping if they’re being denied food or water? What do they make of nameless men scrolling through their cell phones randomly calling numbers and demanding outlandish sums of money?

It’s hard to imagine. I know. Because I imagine it myself. As someone who goes to Haiti all the time to oversee an orphanage, much as the members of that charity group were doing, I have thought about the scenario many times.

Kidnapping is not a new worry in Haiti. It has been going on for a while — especially after the United Nations forces left in 2017 and the streets grew increasingly dangerous. This year, with the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, kidnapping has become easier for gangs like 400 Mowozo, who reportedly abducted the missionary group. They pull up to a vehicle or an unsuspecting pedestrian, block passage, wave a gun and demand the victim go with them.

It’s easy to tell yourself such things only happen to others, and while that will almost always be true, it isn’t always.

There are precautions you can take. We take them all. Don’t go out if it’s not necessary. Don’t let people know you’re with a foreign organization. Travel with security. Avoid the known dangerous areas.

Sadly, the members of the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries who were abducted over the weekend were traveling in a noted bad zone, where gangs have asserted control of the streets. That doesn’t make them at fault.

It just increased the odds of something bad happening.

What are you even doing there?

But bad things happen all the time in Haiti. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Violent protests. Corrupt governments.

So why do people like me keep going back? What was that group from Christian Aid Ministries doing here? Why have people continued to flock to Haiti despite endless State Department warnings?

The answer is easy. At least for me. It’s the face of every child that smiles at being given a real meal. It’s the small body that curls into your lap, pulling your arms down for security. It’s the laughter. The singing. The abject joy at blowing bubbles or shaking bodies to a catchy song. The purity of childhoods unpolluted by iPhones, computers, TV, or overindulgent toys.

People aren’t foolish. They don’t risk safety for no reason. They do it because there is something bigger to be gained, something worth a risk.

They do it because not to do it means children like those at the orphanage those missionaries were visiting, or the ones we care for at the Have Faith Haiti Mission, might go without food, education, clean water, might even die from something completely avoidable.

They do it because they see — and this is the most important point — that the risk they face is tiny compared to what the average Haitian has to deal with every single day.

Everyone is at risk

These kidnappings aren’t reserved for visiting do-gooders. More often than not, the victims are average Haitians, street vendors or students, or locals going to work.

Of the 628 kidnappings recorded since January, only around 30 are foreigners. The rest are Haitians who are already amongst the poorest people in the world. When they are plucked off the street, the kidnappers tell them to call their families and sell the refrigerator, or the cellphone, and bring them the paltry sum it fetches.

Understand, these gang members aren’t making a political statement. They have no cause. They just want money. Fast money. And with a collapsed government and a depleted, weary, overmatched police force, they can get that money almost as quickly as they want.

It’s the reason people like myself, and others who make Haiti a regular stop, wish outside international forces would get more involved. The security of the years the UN forces were in Haiti now seems like Shangri-La. A relatively small American presence could surely deter the gangs and their reign of terror, allowing the country to try and find its footing after an assassination and another earthquake.

Time for the world to lend a hand

As for those who say, “Why the heck should we get involved with Haiti, it’s got nothing to do with us?”, well, read a little history. From 1915 until 1934 the U.S. occupied Haiti. We held its money. Franklin Roosevelt, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, oversaw the writing of Haiti’s constitution. We are part of Haiti’s fabric, like it or not.

It’s an hour and a half from Miami. It’s a neighbor with a shared history. It’s a country with an amazing backstory, and a love of freedom that rivals our own. We threw off the yoke of the British. They threw off the yoke of the French — only they started as slaves and still did it.

They’ve been paying a price ever since.

It’s bad enough that people have to live in abject poverty. They shouldn’t have to live in terror. The U.S. and international community should step in and save this crumbling situation, before any more busloads of visitors are taken, before any more average citizens just trying to shop for food are snatched and held at gunpoint.

Until that happens, regular folks from around the world, like me, will continue to go there. Because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s hard to imagine what those poor captives are thinking in captivity. But it’s not hard to imagine what they were thinking just moments before, when they departed that orphanage and were heading home.

They thought they were making a difference. That idea deserves to be honored. And it deserves to be protected.

Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Download “The Sports Reporters” podcast each Monday and Thursday on-demand through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify and more. Follow him on Twitter @mitchalbom.