About Walker
Times Picayune: Haitians in N.O. wait in agony for news of home
Haitians in N.O. wait in agony for news of home
New Orleanians, especially, know this how this particular emotional torture goes: Television beams hours of horrifying images of the destruction of your city. You can't stop watching, but watching eats your heart. You quit, but are compelled to return again and again.
For Matine Fremont in Algiers, for Fenelle Guillaume in eastern New Orleans and for many of an estimated 4,000 Haitians living in New Orleans, Wednesday and Thursday were days of helpless anxiety, dominated by images out of their ruined home, Port-au-Prince, the impoverished Haitian capital hammered flat by a massive earthquake Tuesday night.
"I watch until I can watch no more. Then I cry. Then I watch again," said Fremont, a Haitian-born translator who assists 14 Haitian students at O. Perry Walker High School in Algiers. "It's like Katrina and 9/11 put together, but two times worse.
"All my uncles are homeless. My aunt with seven children, they are all homeless. They are in the streets with nothing to eat."
Nephtalie Remy, a senior at Walker, has a brother and sister in Haiti. She cannot get through to them and has no idea of their situation, she said through Fremont's assistance.
Guillaume, who is part of a Catholic Haitian community centered at Katharine Drexel parish in New Orleans, said many of New Orleans' Haitians live on the West Bank. Most make modest livings driving cabs or working in hotels and in other nontechnical jobs.
For many of them, the past two days have been a kind of agony. "You can't watch too much, because you're seeing your people, your own blood. And you're really helpless."
In eastern New Orleans, Guillaume, who left Haiti as a teenager, seeks word on the fate of two uncles. All she knows is that their apartment building collapsed. A cousin told her of fleeing with her children into the street after their dinner table began to rock and heave as the earthquake struck. Her husband reported walking on bodies in the street, Guillaume said.
Some get a measure of good news. New Orleans Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma reportedly learned his two grandmothers and an aunt and uncle are alive outside Port-au-Prince.
But, as Fremont said, alive in Haiti may not mean safe.
"Now it's not going to be the earthquake or the aftershocks that kill, it's going to be the lack of food, of water. There are babies wandering the streets with no one to look after them. People are dying on the ground. Mothers are having babies in the middle of all this, because life does not stop."
As the pictures out of Port-au-Prince bore witness to an epic humanitarian disaster, dozens of charitable nonprofits mobilized donation centers on their Web sites.
Some local institutions spread word they would soon undertake local collections for Haitian relief.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans announced that a special collection for Haiti will be taken up at more than 100 churches this weekend; Xavier University announced a special collection for a newly formed "Haiti Cherie" fund among students today. A Baptist church Uptown posted on Facebook that a Haiti collection would be made Sunday.
Fremont said she hoped the United States would help by granting quick entry to thousands of Haitians who applied years ago for permission to emigrate and have been waiting ever since.
At Walker, 14 Haitian students work through the curriculum with the assistance of Fremont and two other translators. She said that since Tuesday other students, many with their own Katrina memories, have tried to comfort them.
Emotionally, they need to be in school, in their routines and among friends, said Fremont.
"The other kids are telling them how sorry they are, telling them they're praying for them, that they're not alone."
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Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3344.