Running out of time in Haiti, one family's struggle

On the night of Jan. 12, as unthinkable images flashed on the television screen in her Elmont living room, Fabiola Pierre-Paul dialed dozens of friends and relatives in Haiti, over and over, and got no answer.

More than 1,500 miles away, her mother-in-law, Lécianne Lermithe, lay awake under the stars. In a courtyard near her crumbled Port-au-Prince home, she held Pierre-Paul's daughter Brianna Dacius to her chest and checked, again and again, that the child was breathing.

Her 2-year-old granddaughter slept, oblivious to the grief of a broken city.

Pierre-Paul's efforts to reach her mother-in-law - and bring Brianna home - were rewarded when the toddler returned on a commercial flight two months later. But Pierre-Paul and her husband, Jean Dacius, want desperately to bring Lermithe to Long Island, too. So far, those efforts have been unsuccessful.

And Lermithe, 62, remains in Port-au-Prince, one of  Haiti's 1.3 million homeless, with no safe place to sleep. "That kills me," said Pierre-Paul, a Haitian-American whose State Department application to have Lermithe accompany Brianna was rejected. "Every time I see family in Haiti calling me, I'm afraid something's happened to her."

Yearning to bring family here Pierre-Paul is one of hundreds of Long Islanders who have contacted members of Long Island's congressional delegation looking for help in moving Haitian relatives here. Their efforts have taken on added urgency with the start of the rainy season, which has made intolerable living conditions even worse.

Pierre-Paul, 29, is a medication technician at a group home for the elderly in Westbury. Dacius, 34, is a dietary aide at a nursing home in Whitestone. They live in Elmont with Pierre-Paul's mother, Nicole Pierre-Paul, who took the couple's three children - Adly, 11, Donia, 4 and Brianna - for a visit to Haiti in July.

They stayed in the two-story home where Lermithe lived with a daughter and three grandchildren: two apartments over their family-run restaurant, the Rhum Snack Bar,

in a residential neighborhood called La Plaine. Lermithe often cooked and served: Heineken beer and Barbancourt rum, mushroom-scented rice and beans, chicken, pork and fish.

Brianna and her grandmother were instantly enamored of each other.

"Why not let her stay a few months?" Fabiola Pierre-Paul suggested to her husband. So in August, Brianna stayed with her doting Mami Lécianne when Nicole Pierre-Paul flew back to Long Island with Adly and Donia.

The day the city fell
At 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, Lermithe was shopping for food at a sidewalk market, Brianna hooked in her arm, when the world suddenly, violently, shook. She crouched with Brianna in the street as around them buildings tumbled.

Her home was flattened, a staircase and the Rhum Snack Bar Restaurant sign the only recognizable pieces in a pile of pulverized concrete. None of her family had been home. The two employees in the restaurant escaped unhurt.

It took three or four days - it's a blur to her now - before Pierre-Paul could get a call through to one of Lermithe's neighbors, who put the phone in her hand. Yes, she and Brianna were all right, Lermithe told her daughter-in-law, weeping.

"God is good," Pierre-Paul replied.

For seven nights, Lermithe and Brianna slept under the stars with a handful of other relatives. Then, fearing for the children's safety, the family moved into an empty home belonging to Lermithe's sister. But it, too, posed uncertainty: Cracks snaked down the walls and splayed across a supporting column.

Two months to the day after the quake, Brianna returned on a commercial plane ticket paid for personally by their state senator, Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington), to whom the family had appealed for help. Jean Dacius had flown to Haiti to retrieve her.

The State Department would not allow Lermithe to accompany her granddaughter, and a spokesman would not comment beyond saying that Haitians can make an appointment to apply for a visa at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.

But Lermithe has not tried to schedule an appointment. The application calls for documents she does not have: a passport, a birth certificate, property and business records to prove she intends to return.

The State Department would not address whether those requirements can be overridden.

The earthquake killed an estimated 230,000 people, and in its immediate aftermath - as the U.S. was airlifting hundreds of Haitians to the United States for lifesaving medical treatment - the State Department expedited visa applications already in process, said Jack Pratt, chief of staff for Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington). The office received calls from some 100 constituents wanting to bring loved ones to live with them, Pratt said.

The visa process "can generally take a very long time," he said, noting that applications filed in January still are being processed.

Time is something many Haitians don't have. For months, international observers have warned that hundreds of thousands of the homeless would be in grave danger without sturdier shelter during back-to-back rainy and hurricane seasons. Mud slides, high winds and pelting rains threaten to wipe out tents and topple unstable buildings. Hurricane season begins June 1.

After the disaster
In a hilltop camp on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, residents use hammers and machetes to reinforce the improvised structures of wood, tin and tarps torn down by a storm the night before. And as the nearly nightly deluges of the rainy season wash over the city, camps fill with cloying, shoe-snatching mud, leaving children and adults to slog barefoot through ankle-deep ooze.

Latrines overflow. Standing water increases the risk of malaria. With inadequate lighting and few, if any, security patrols, women and girls have become victims of sexual violence, according to UNICEF and Amnesty International.

The city itself remains a patchwork of blue and gray tarpaulins. Tents are everywhere: on the medians of chaotic avenues, in courtyards and plazas, steep hillsides and leafy schoolyards. Some 900 spontaneous camps blanket Port-au-Prince alone, according to United Nations estimates. "Some of the tented encampments are exposed to very heavy winds and they will blow down," former president Bill Clinton cautioned at a donors conference in Manhattan on March 31. "We still don't have adequate sanitation for the concentrated living that we have there and this is very dangerous for the children."

And as Haitian and UN officials scrambled last month to begin the relocation of 7,500 people deemed most at risk, the downpours already had begun.

Still sleeping outdoors

In the camps, some residents have intact homes, but are too afraid -- or traumatized -- to enter them. Others are using damaged homes to store their belongings, but sleep elsewhere: a friend's house,

a tent, a car.

For Lermithe, the dangers of sleeping outdoors outweigh her fear of sleeping inside, despite the fissures that creep down the walls. So each night she settles down, with five relatives, in a tangle of sheets on a concrete floor.

"I risk my life to live in this house," she said in Creole through an interpreter. "It could crash if there were another earthquake. So I close my eyes inside."

She's a trim woman with a quiet but determined voice. Since the earthquake, a rash has spread across her body.

She has never visited her son and daughter-in-law on Long Island, despite their invitations. She has told them she's too old for the colder climate.

Now, compelled every day to visit rubble of the home she built, she says she has no reason to stay in Haiti.

"Haiti is my life, but I am living in inhumane conditions," she said as goats foraged in a garbage pile for discarded pea shells and parishioners in skirts and heels picked their way past the crumpled Rhum Snack Bar, humming Sunday hymns.

A world away, Brianna, a playful toddler with wide eyes and a headful of brightly beaded braids, peers behind doors in her parents' Elmont home and calls out "Mami Lécianne?"

Her mother, frustrated by the response of her government, now plans to turn to Haiti for help. She is exploring how she can assist Lermithe with an application for a Haitian passport.

She has no idea how long that process will take.