Haiti immigration in news brings to mind 2010 trip after earthquake

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I figure I’ve written more than 2,000 columns for the Times-Union. There are times when someone will say they liked, or didn’t like, my last column — and I’ll have to think long and hard to even recall what my last column was about.

But some I will never forget.

Many involve people and places right here in Northeast Florida. But a few involve other places, like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I thought about that as Hurricane Helene was hitting Florida.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about going to Haiti in 2010, shortly after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook the country — probably because Haiti and, in particular, Haitian immigrants have been in the news a lot lately. And while that news has focused on other parts of the country, Florida is home to the largest population of Haitian immigrants in America, estimated at about 500,000.

As it has often been in American history, immigration is a hot topic. How many people who weren’t born here should we allow to come here? Stay here? And how should we decide which people?

I don’t know. And I’m not even going to attempt to answer those questions in this column. But I do know I feel for Haitians who in recent years have seen their country shaken again, this time by gang violence.

There are others in our area who have spent much more time in Haiti. People who go there often. People who came from there. I was only there one week, nearly 15 years ago. And yet that week stuck with me like few others.

Not-so-random acts of kindness Days after the earthquake, John Lovejoy Jr., a retired orthopedic surgeon from Jacksonville, made a hastily arranged trip to Milot, a small town in northern Haiti where volunteers with the U.S.-based CRUDEM Foundation work at Hopital Sacre Couer.

A few weeks later, he returned with a 22-person orthopedic team for a trip that had been scheduled for months but took on new meaning and urgency. I tagged along on that one.

Milot, about 75 miles north of Port-au-Prince, is far enough from the epicenter of the earthquake that it was relatively undamaged. But it was far from unaffected.

It quickly became a destination for earthquake victims.

A soccer field became a landing area for helicopters. And Hopital Sacre Coeur went from a hospital with 73 beds to one with several makeshift additions – M*A*S*H-like tents and a nearby school with a tin roof and sheets covering open windows — filled with hundreds of earthquake victims.

Some of what stuck with me involved the Americans who traveled from Jacksonville and the Haitians who ended up in the hospital and tents. But some of it involved the residents of Milot.

Like many of the people in one of the poorest countries on earth, the Milot residents didn’t have much, at least by how we typically judge such things. And yet I remember what a Catholic nun, part of the team from the U.S., pointed out.

When some locals ended up with odd jobs on the grounds, they took some of their small paychecks and used the money to buy food for the strangers who had ended up in their midst.

And it wasn’t just that. As the earthquake victims arrived, the locals cooked for them, clothed them, sang to them.

These were acts of kindness — and of faith.

I have memories of Ash Wednesday in Haiti. Of watching a long processession of people wearing sparkling white clothing coming down the dusty dirt road. Of hearing their songs. Of going into the tents and seeing ashes smeared on the foreheads of people who’d lost homes, limbs and loved ones.

They were living in one of the poorest countries on earth. That country got hit by a massive earthquake. And yet they said their faith was not shaken.

A mother and baby girl I sometimes wondered what has happened to some of the Haitian people I met. The kids I played soccer with in the street. The artist who made paintings of, among other things, The Citadelle, a massive fort that was built in the early 1800s by 200,000 enslaved people and now is a UNESCO World Heritage site. And, of course, the people who ended up in the hospital after the earthquake.

There was this baby girl, with big bright eyes and a bandage around her head.

Her mother, a woman from Port-au-Prince, lost her home and, she thought, her entire family. When they started pulling bodies out of the rubble, they found her husband, 5-year-old son and baby. All dead. Or so she was told.

But when she asked to hold her baby, she saw signs of life.

A few weeks later, after undergoing surgery on the USNS Comfort, the baby was released from the hospital.

Through a translator, the mother told me their story. At the end of the interview, she asked if she could ask me a question. Of course, I said. She said she was grateful. But also scared for herself and her child. She wanted to work, to start a new life somewhere. But she didn't know where.

She asked about coming to America.

I didn’t know what to tell her, other than, yes, there are ways to do that legally, but I didn’t know how one goes about it. I didn’t say this, I’d never had to think much about it.

Born in the USA One day Jon Fletcher, then a Times-Union photographer, and I hopped in a van heading into Cap-Haitien, a large city about 10 miles from Milot. It was a bone-jarring ride that took much longer than you’d think for that distance. And once we made it into the city, it was a different kind of jarring experience.

I’d spent some time in some of the most impoverished places in America, from urban areas to Appalachia. But I’d never seen poverty quite like this. It was overwhelming and omnipresent. And while I could envision a path out of poverty in America — not an easy path, but a possible one — I had trouble even picturing one there.

As we rode through the muddy, rutted streets, looking at the chaotic scenes around us, we were quiet for a long time. And then Jon said something that stuck with me, “It makes you wonder why you were born where you were born.”

When I got back home, that was one of the things that kept hitting me.

The regulars on the team from Jacksonville had a running joke about the Fort Lauderdale hotel where they typically stayed on their way to Haiti. They said it was a one-star motel on the way down and a five-star hotel on the way back.

Once I returned, I truly appreciated that. I told myself I’d hang onto that perspective, that I wouldn’t go back to taking things for granted, or complaining about trivial things. But of course I quickly did.

So the news of late, from Haiti to Hurricane Helene, didn’t just bring back some memories of past stories. It brought to mind that perspective.

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212

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