"Bound for home, healed, heartsick; Four grievously injured Haitian children were flown here for treatment, but on one condition: They would go back. Yesterday was the reunion; the feelings were bittersweet" by Stephen Smith, Globe Staff | May 1, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — They landed on New England soil battered and bruised, some with shattered legs held together by metal pins and rods. They were among the fortunate few to escape the devastation of their homeland, delivered to America to treat their grievous wounds. Now, after 11 weeks of care at Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield, and a flight aboard a plush private jet, four Haitian children severely injured in the January earthquake — the youngest 3, the oldest 13 — are back home, their recovery almost complete.
But the two boys and two girls arrived under the unforgiving midday sun yesterday in a country that is, itself, far from healed. Most of their families, among the 1.3 million people left homeless by the quake, are living in tents or lean-tos cobbled together from wood beams and corrugated metal, shielded by tarps.
Yeah, nothing has been rebuilt; that is why the MSM stories stopped.
Global government failed, and now the rains are coming.
So where did all that aid money Bush and Clinton were was overseeing because it never reached the Haitians.
I'd say downright sour, but that's me.
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And what of those left behind, 'eh?
"Catastrophe’s child; She felt she had to risk it. Lynda Maurice’s visa to leave Haiti for Boston had finally come through, but not her little Abby’s. So she briefly left the child with relatives. Then came the terrible news" by Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | April 25, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A narrow alley carpeted with broken glass and draped with dangling wires unfolds onto the rubble-strewn patio where Abby Emile lives. Ten of her relatives are there, too, crammed into tents behind a barricade of dining room chairs.
Abby, 3, sleeps on a bed that is steps from a crumbling house propped up by rusty pipes. Rats scurry among chunks of concrete. A bare light bulb, powered by a rumbling generator, illuminates the night.
Each day is a grinding routine of staving off worry and boredom. Abby clutches at her cousins in fear when she hears loud noises. She has had an infection, possibly from the dirt she plays in. There is no running water or reliable electricity. All of them worry about Abby missing her mother, 1,600 miles away in Boston.
Are you sure she wasn't making cookies?
Playing with the dirt, huh?
Related: Israel, Judaism, and Anti-Semitism
“I don’t understand why she is still here,’’ a cousin said one day.
Abby is still here, and not with her parents, because of a mystifying immigration bureaucracy, a father’s error, and a mother’s heartbreaking choice.
Just months before, her mother, Lynda Maurice, had reluctantly boarded a plane with a temporary visa she had been seeking for more than four years. Because of missing paperwork, she was not allowed to bring her daughter with her.
Leaving Abby behind at first seemed inconceivable. But when America calls, Lynda’s cousin had gravely told her, you can’t say no. The girl would be safe with them until her own visa came through.
Go, they said.
And so she did. Two weeks later, on Jan. 12, a phone rang in the Hyde Park house that Lynda and her husband, Harry Emile, shared with other family members. Lynda felt a rising panic as her sister-in-law came into the bedroom and began to speak.
Something terrible had happened in Haiti....
Lynda and Harry rushed to the living room and turned on the news. They watched in stunned silence as the first reports of the massive earthquake flickered on the television screen. Harry scrolled the Internet, desperate for information....
At Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where Harry worked as a medical technician, he wept quietly in the locker room. At home, Lynda obsessively, and fruitlessly, dialed her cousins. And she thought bitterly of her long-nurtured dream of being together as a family in America.
She and Harry had talked of it countless times since they started dating at a party in Haiti in late 2003. He had been struck by her luminous eyes and sweet spirit; she liked that he was kind, educated, and ambitious. Soon they married, and laid plans for their future.
Harry would be the first to leave, in 2004, after waiting a decade for a visa. In Boston, where his mother and several other relatives had already settled, he filed papers for Lynda’s visa and became a US citizen. That could help speed her application.
Even so, they knew it would be a long, daunting process. Applicants routinely waited years, sometimes decades. They confronted a mammoth federal bureaucracy with a bewildering array of forms, deadlines, and hundreds of dollars in fees. Harry needed money — enough to prove to federal authorities that he could support Lynda. And so, to save, he moved into the house in Hyde Park. He worked days at the hospital, and, at night, took classes at Cambridge College.
A year ground by, and they decided to start a family. He visited her when he could. But Lynda endured a painful miscarriage and Abby’s birth in 2007 without him. To bear it, she leaned hard on the dream that one day they would be able to build a life together....
**********
It turns out there was much Harry did not know, federal officials say. Lynda did not have to leave Haiti right away, as she believed. She could have stayed with Abby and requested a replacement visa, which probably would have been granted within weeks, a US official said.
“She did not have to leave her child behind,’’ said Charles Oppenheim, chief of the immigrant visa control and reporting division at the Department of State. “She and her husband made a conscious choice to leave that daughter behind. The US government did not do that. That was their choice and unfortunately now they’re paying the price for that.’’
After the earthquake, Harry also could have applied for humanitarian parole, a discretionary tool used sparingly in emergency cases. But he did not believe that it would work. He had tried for parole to get Lynda out of Haiti in 2007 when she miscarried Abby’s twin sister, but could not. After the earthquake, the consulate did not advertise that option. Some 1,300 people received it, most of them orphans.
At Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Harry’s co-workers rallied around him. Nurses and techs raised money for Abby’s visa. A receptionist wrote a letter to President Obama on his behalf. They searched the Internet for numbers he could call....
The cousins and aunts worried about how the dust from upcoming demolition work in the city would affect Abby's asthma. They worried about disease. They worried especially about the hidden impact on Abby of her mother’s absence.
Abby had lately refused to speak to Lynda, who called several times a day. One of the girl’s aunts, Lynda’s sister Sabrina, answered when the phone rang one day. “Abby?’’ Sabrina said to the girl, pointing to the phone. “It’s mommy.’’
Abby frowned, covered her ears with her hands, and shook her head.
Lynda had fretted to Sabrina about it, worried that her daughter was forgetting her. Abby was already calling the Daguilhs, “Mommy’’ and “Daddy.’’
Sabrina had tried to reassure her sister over the phone, saying that a mother is irreplaceable....
That is certainly true (and today of all days)!!
In Haiti, Abby cried as her aunt Marlyne Maurice tried to get her to brush her teeth. (Bill Greene/ Globe Staff)
Hundreds of Haitians who fled to Massachusetts after the earthquake devastated their nation are stuck in legal limbo — unable to work or get a driver’s license — their advocates said yesterday at a Boston meeting with a top US immigration official.
The advocates implored Alejandro Mayorkas, director of Washington-based US Citizenship and Immigration Services, to help them....
After the Jan. 12 earthquake, the Obama administration declared that Haitians who were already in the United States illegally could seek temporary protected status, allowing them to live and work here legally for 18 months if they applied and paid the proper fees. That protection, however, did not extend to the panicked masses who fled the devastation on visitor visas, many of which will expire after six months, in the middle of Haiti’s hurricane season.
Advocates estimated that 500 to 1,000 people fled to Massachusetts, which has the third-largest Haitian and Haitian-American population in the United States....
Good luck finding work around here unless you want to work the fields.
Actually, when you think about it, not much has changed in 200 years.
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Update:
The play is the thing!
"Lexington High drama teacher Steve Bogart read of cruise ships docking outside Port-au-Prince. According to news stories, some tourists felt bad about enjoying themselves with so much suffering going on nearby. Others seemed intent on revelry as usual, though.
Couldn't have read those stories in the Globe.
I would have remembered them.
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