A Return to Haiti, and Broadway via Edmonton: The Canada Letter
By Jan Austin, Dec 15, 2017 – NYT - Many of you may know that Catherine Porter, our Toronto bureau chief, was in Haiti immediately after the 2010 earthquake and returned there several times afterward.
She has gone back to produce a moving, richly reported look at the people who bring dignity to the dead in a country where even death offers no escape from poverty.
It’s part of The End, a series of articles looking at what our deaths tell us about how we live. Those stories include Ms. Porter’s similarly in-depth reporting on assisted death in Canada that appeared earlier this year.
Ms. Porter shared some thoughts about her latest visit to Haiti:
A few weeks before I started this job as The New York Times’s Toronto bureau chief in February, I went to my second home — Haiti.
I was finishing research for a memoir I’m writing about my relationship with a Haitian girl named Lovely and her family, and I was saying goodbye.
I didn’t think I’d be back for a while. I was heavy-hearted.
My first trip to Haiti was on an aid flight, 11 days after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The first story I wrote was about a 2-year-old miracle girl who survived six days beneath the rubble. That was Lovely.
I returned to Haiti a second time, three months later, to find that Lovely wasn’t orphaned, as all the medical workers had assumed. Her parents and younger brother had survived. But they were living in a tin shed that leaked every time it rained. Her story captured readers and drew me back to Haiti repeatedly.
By the time I joined The Times, I’d been to Haiti 18 times. On one of those trips, I brought my then 6-year-old daughter Lyla with me to meet Lovely and her family. Then, in 2015, I came for the baptism of Lovely’s cousin, Lala — named after my daughter. I am her godmother.
Clearly, Haiti was no longer just a story for me.
In some ways, I feel very comfortable there. I speak enough Kreyòl to hold a conversation on the street, know my way around the capital despite few street signs, and have a fat stack of contacts and some very close friends.
In other ways, Haiti is a very uncomfortable place for me. The thing that upsets me the most is the poverty — kids who are so malnourished their hair has turned orange, people dying from simple illnesses because they can’t afford treatment, the lack of basic education because parents can’t afford the school fees.
So when my editors asked me to find a story on death from Haiti, I was thrilled for two reasons. I’d get to see Lovely and Lyla again this year — not just once, but three more times.
And I could shine a huge spotlight onto the gruesome face of Haiti’s poverty — which, ironically, makes the dead faceless — and share my heartache with Times readers.
Ms. Porter’s book about Haiti, “A Girl Named Lovely,” will be published in early 2019 by Simon & Schuster.
The Citadel Theatre in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, is giving another chance to something it last attempted more than 30 years ago: developing plays for Broadway. Our theater reporter Michael Paulson went to see its production of “Hadestown,” a musical he described as a “folk-and-politics-infused riff on an enduring Greek myth.”
So far everyone seems happy. Actors at the Citadel get to work with Broadway talent and the audience gets to see a production it otherwise couldn’t. For the producers, the value of the Canadian dollar and Edmonton’s comparative isolation from New York have both been attractions.
If you caught “Hadestown” during its run in Edmonton, I’d like to hear what you thought about the collaboration:
Students with ties to Haiti reflect on TPS program while end looms
Miami Hurricane - Emmy Petit’s story is similar to that of many other young people in South Florida. Petit was born to Haitian immigrants and raised in Miami. Her parents, like many immigrants, came to the United States looking for better opportunities than their home country could offer, such as employment and education.
More than 200,000 Haitian immigrants reside in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, accounting for the largest concentration of Haitian immigrants in the country, according to data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015.
Petit has family members still in Haiti who she hopes will be able to come to the United States one day, she said. But that possibility seems bleak now.
The Trump Administration announced in late November the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians looking to leave the island. TPS is a humanitarian program that was signed into law by George H. W. Bush in 1990. The program grants temporary residency to nationals of countries affected by ongoing conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” TPS was extended to include Haitian refugees after an earthquake devastated the island in 2010.
Approximately 60,000 Haitians have been allowed to work and live legally in the United States since 2010 and have been immune to removal under TPS, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The program is set to expire on July 22, 2019.
“The Haitians that are here, they see a possibility of creating a life,” Petit said, a graduate student in the School of Communication. “But when they think of going back, they don’t.”
Petit’s uncle and three of her cousins reside in the United States on the TPS program. The program has allowed her family members to live in the United States without fear of deportation. However, with the termination of the program for Haitians, TPS recipients must make plans to return to Haiti by July 2019. Otherwise, they will risk deportation.
A recent statement issued by the Department of Homeland Security declared that Haiti is “able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens.”
However, Petit said Haiti still has “a lot of work to do to create a stable environment for its citizens.” Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, with 60 percent of its population living in poverty, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.
Junior Diane Petit-Frere voiced similar concerns about the ability of Haitian refugees to return to a stable Haiti. Petit-Frere, who last visited Haiti in 2014 and still has family members there, said that the lingering effects of the 2010 earthquake are still visible on the island.
“There are still people living in tents who lost their houses; there are still roads that haven’t been constructed yet,” said Petit-Frere, a double major in political science and English.
Mirza Tanis, a junior majoring in finance from Port-Au-Prince, last returned to Haiti in 2015. For Tanis, the Trump Administration’s decision is a blow to those on the program, but also to the economy of the island nation, since so many Haitian-Americans and Haitians living in the United States were sending resources to their families on the island.
“You are taking away the ability for Haitian refugees on the TPS program to provide for their families back in Haiti, and also for them to take care of themselves,” Tanis said.
Remittances account for 29.4 percent of Haiti’s GDP, meaning that the deportation of Haitian individuals in the United States would likely strike another blow to the world’s 18th-poorest economy in terms of GDP per capita.
Even so, a common theme among the Haitian community at UM is the ability to persevere, along with the dream that one day all of their family members will be able to come to the United States legally.
“On our flag, what it says is, ‘l’union fait la force,’ which means, ‘unity creates force” Tanis said. “So at the end of the day, we still have to pick ourselves up.”
For Petit’s cousins, earning full U.S. citizenship is a dream that may never become a reality. Petit’s cousins have exhausted the legal channels to citizenship, applying for residency but spending years waiting for their applications to be processed, a wait that continues to this day. For her family members who were not born in the United States, “residency would be a dream,” Petit said.
“The majority of immigrants that I know from Haiti are hardworking,” Petit said. “They see themselves having a future here.”
December 11, 2017
Finding a sensible policy for Haitian immigrants
Published December 11. 2017 5:11PM
By The Day Editorial Board
There should be room in immigration policy for special situations, such as those confronting Haitian immigrants who have put down roots in this country and whose forced return to a struggling nation would do no one any good.
When a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, creating a humanitarian crisis for a nation already struggling as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, the Obama administration granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians legally living in the United States.
The policy was both benevolent and practical. Why return these individuals, when their legal status in the United States expired, to a country struggling to deal with the devastation, deaths and disruptions caused by the disaster? The problem, of course, is that eight years later Haiti, while experiencing some recovery, remains a nation beset with momentous problems. It has seen new disasters from hurricanes and crushing poverty persists.
The U.S. has repeatedly extended the TPS designation, but now the Department of Homeland Security is taking a harder line. Pointing to the temporary nature of the rule, the DHS states that it will end in July 2019 and the Haitians must return to their homeland.
About 1,200 Haitians in Connecticut and 60,000 nationwide would face a return to the country.
Southeastern Connecticut has a special relationship with Haiti and its people, with the Catholic Diocese of Norwich and other religious and charitable groups providing relief efforts there and helping the immigrant population here.
In this region many of these immigrants have jobs, children in local schools, and some of those children were born here, making them U.S. citizens. Many of these marriages include a spouse with legal status.
One might argue that allowing these individuals to remain in the country could take jobs from American citizens, but the reality is that most are working in unskilled positions not popular with the general populace and which employers are having difficulty filling given the current low unemployment numbers.
In many instances, these workers return some of their salaries to family in Haiti.
The better approach would be to look at these cases individually. If the individual has been a contributing member of our society, has strong family support and connections and is abiding by our laws, provide him or her permanent legal status.