Newspaper Page Text
PAGE16A
Sailing north only
way to escape for
some Haitians
By. Joe Mozingo (KRT)
Knight Ridder Newspapers
CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti —
He wanders the slums and
shipyards, listening for mur¬
murs of the next boat getting
ready to leave.
When Jude Bernardin’s
father died three years ago and
an uncle commandeered his
family's land, he went to the
city to find work. But with the
economy in ruins, he found
only mud and decay and people
like himself.
So he wagered what little
money he had on a chance to
climb aboard any rickety vessel
that could get him out of Haiti.
;He lost.
•A boat captain tricked him
an<J about 200 other passengers
out of their cash in July. It was
Bemardin’s third attempt to get
to the Turks and Caicos Islands
— the entry point in a 700-mile
archipelago of human migra¬
tion that leads to Miami.
Now, in mid-August, the
21-year-old is ready to go
again. And across the north
coast of Haiti, so are thousands
of others.
In this old French colonial
port, one sailor plans to smug¬
gle his own family out. A jour¬
nalist is fleeing political gangs.
An unemployed mechanic
hopes to be a better father from
afar. A single mother prays that
she can find a future for her
children in Miami, even as she
leaves them behind.
They are people whose
wrenching personal stories are
often lost under the categoiy of
“economic refugees.” They
drown, they get robbed, they
climb into the most wretched
of boat holds, packed body to
body in steaming heat, hoping
to go anywhere but here.
Haiti’s relentless poverty
has bred a paralyzing sense of
helplessness, with thousands of
people concluding that the only
way to take control of their
lives is to leave — no matter
what the risk.
They make news now and
then, as in the televised landing
of 220 Haitians on Miami’s
Rickenbacker Causeway in
2002 and the drownings of
three women whose bodies
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FORSYTH COUNTY NEWS — Thursday, November 24,2005
washed up in Pompano Beach
on Nov. 5. But mostly, they are
invisible.
Bemardin dreams of finding
work and returning to Haiti
someday with the money to
take care of his little sister and
show his uncle that he is a man.
But that scene, which bums so
brightly in his imagination,
dims every day he waits here.
He comes to a shack
propped over an open sewer,
down an alley barely wider
than his shoulders. When men
don’t use it to meet prostitutes,
he sleeps here, and on a shelf
above the fetid mattress, he
keeps one of his only points of
pride.
It is a secondhand trophy he
won in a soccer game — with a
gold figurine rubbed to gray
plastic and a placard celebrat
ing “the 22nd Annual City of
North Miami Gold Coast
Cheerleading Squad.
As the slum slowly grinds
away at his sense of self, it
reminds him that he has to
leave, no matter how.
“I have no life here,” he
said. “Even if I die at sea, I
have no choice. There is no life
for me in Haiti.
U.S. and Bahamian officials
stopped about 3,200 migrants
in the last fiscal year, fewer
than in some years, more than
in others. The Coast Guard has
clamped down since the 2002
incident, dramatically reducing
the number of migrant ships
sailing straight into Miami,
Smugglers have reacted
accordingly. They carry fewer
people at a time, charge more
and take a circuitous route.
nfff>n often make mat-p seveial TopmnK attempts
just to complete the first leg of
the journey, to Providenciales
in the British colony of Turks
and Caicos, 150 miles north of
Haiti. From there, they hope to
move into the Bahamas and
then try to slip into Florida on
speedboats.
In the north coast port of
Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second
largest city, handmade boats
with anywhere from 10 to 200
passengers sail into the pipeline
every week. Many more leave
from the northern town of Port
de-Paix and the offshore island
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uated from Pennsylvania State University and
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Jacqueline T. Pearson, M.D., M.S. Dr. Pearson
graduated with honors from the University of Florida
College of Medicine and is a diplomate of the
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also holds a Masters degree in exercise physiology.
She has great interest in the treatment of metabolic
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as faculty physician at the Emory Clinic and Emory
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Dr, Fatemi school graduated class and then in the very top 1% of her med¬
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in the care of those patients with obesity, high
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ofLaTortue.
Some make it to their desti
nation. Others don't.
Storms sink them or drive
them far off course. Winds die
and stall them for weeks as
passengers run out of food and
water. Coast Guard cutters
intercept them, destroy their
boats and send them home,
Smugglers deceptively loop
around and drop them back off
in Haiti, or leave them to perish
on uninhabited islands. Armed
bandits attack them,
Haiti is one of the poorest
nations in the world and getting
poorer. Only parts of sub¬
Saharan Africa are worse off.
The armed rebellion that ousted
former President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide early last year and the
continuing insecurity ever since
have steepened the decline,
Prices rose 15 percent this year,
while most incomes stand still
at less than a dollar a day. And
many Haitians fear that elec
tions later this year will erupt in
violence.
(t We will never let the elec
tion find us in Haiti,” said Jippy
Hamilton, a 29-year-old
mechanic,
For the past eight months,
Hamilton and his childhood
friend Ricardeau Felix have
been scouring the city for
scrap, building a 16-foot speed
boat for a rare direct shot at
Miami,
In mid-September, they
would go. About 25 passen
gers, including Felix’s wife and
five children, would take their
places on the crowded floor
boards,
would have no marine
radl °’ n ? charts ’ n0 llte vests ’
n o weather reports, no emer
gen cy flares. They would throw
their fate to God and the Vodou
spirits who stir the sea, motor¬
ing into the night for a destina¬
tion 700 miles away.
► » If I didn’t think I was
going to make it, I’d never take
my kids,” Felix said.
Felix is Air Florida’s cap
tain, a paunchy, baby-laced
man who grew up sailing in the
Windward Passage. His stepfa¬
ther captained commercial
freighters to the Bahamas.
Felix could find work only car¬
rying charcoal and migrants to
Nassau. He made enough
money that he once bought a
car, a used Daihatsu.
But those days are long
gone. His last boat, Air Florida
I, was confiscated by a
Bahamian patrol boat.
Now, he plans to smuggle
himself and his family out. He
is cocksure that he can slip by
the Coast Guard and survive
any storm. He has no second
thoughts, no desire to see
whether Haiti improves after
elections.
By the time Haiti changes,
me and my wife and kids will
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Photo/Peter Andrew Bosch/Miami Herald
Above, old advertising banners printed on canvas are put together for the sail of a
sailboat in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, in September. As the country’s economy falters,
Haitians are taking to fishing boats trying to reach Florida or the Bahamas. Below,
mechanic Jippy Hamilton works on the Air Florida in Cap-Haitien, K a ship H he and oth
orc erS hnno h ° pe t t0 eave Waiti Ha t ° n
’
be dead,” he said.
His friend Hamilton sees
Haiti’s future just as bleakly.
His family life is too strained to
take his children along. But he
hopes that he can be a better
father from Miami.
He has found no regular
W ork since 1999. The sense of
impotence he feels for not
being able to support his 3
year-old son and 4-year-old
daughter is a constant source of
shame.
He lives a three-hour trip
f rom them, but doesn’t visit
because he has nothing to bring
them.
M My son loves crackers. He
always asks me for crackers. If
j had something to buy him
some, it wouldn’t be so bad.
But I feel terrible every time I
see him.
Every plan that Hamilton
has come up with to make a
living as a car mechanic has
been thwarted at the start. He is
as thin as a reed and falls into
bouts of depression, sulking off
by himself. He sleeps on Air
Florida, occasionally dousing
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his sorrows with Barbancourt
mm, waiting to go to the place
where he hopes he can be a bet¬
ter man.
“God, my people are humil¬
iating me,” he said one day on
the dock, gazing off. “Even if I
get to the other world and they
mistreat me, I will have a better
life. There would have to be no
mechanics, no cars in America
for me not to survive there.
He won’t even think about
not making it to Miami. He is
at the end of his line in Haiti.
There is nothing left for him
here but time and shame.
By the end of August, their
boat is almost ready. Hamilton
still needs to fix the starter on
one of the outboards and find a
battery. Felix is haggling with
the passengers for money that
he says he needs to buy 200
gallons of gasoline.
Bernardin tries to get a
spot, but there is no room for
those who can’t pay. This
direct trip to Miami is a rare
endeavor and carries a high
fee. Felix is charging $800 to
all but family members and
close friends.
Air Florida is afloat and tied
to the remains of a fallen dock.
Men waiting for work in the
port sit in the meager shade of
some scraggly trees. Dozens of
fishing and coastal trading
sloops with splintered planks
and crooked masts bob and
creak in the harbor.
Marie Josee Germain, one
of Felix’s passengers, comes
down every day to check on Air
Florida’s progress.
If I don’t go looking for a .
life for us all, we’re all going to
die,” she says.
She hasn’t slept much since,
worrying about dying on the
ocean, orphaning her children.
Her brothers urge her not to
leave, saying the trip is too dan¬
gerous. She doesn’t know how
to swim. The deepest she has
ever been in water is up to her
waist. But now she is deter¬
mined to get to Miami by early *
September — so she can send
money back and get her boy .
into school.
“If I make it, I will be living
strictly for them. M