Finding Parents in Haitis Rubble Was Easy Part for Chicagoan
Jean Paul Coffy arrived in the dark three-story house, grew up in the neighborhood Bold Port-au-Prince, cement and tin house where his parents still live and have visited every year.
It ‘been six days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and Mr. Coffy, a Chicago musician and teacher, had not heard from their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and friends. Thus, the wife of Mr. Coffy, daughter of Haitian immigrants, convinced him to go.
“I came with a candle,” said Mr. Coffy. “And I’m calling their names, and answered!
His mother thought it was a ghost. “Oh, my God, my God, because God is punishing me?” It reminds me that my son is here, and I know that can not happen here, “recalls crying at night. “And I said:” It’s me. I’m here, I’m here ‘. ”
Mr. Coffy found his parents in a back room – the only part of the house still standing – who survived the sale of chocolates, a pirate, like crackers Haiti.
In the three weeks that followed, traveled eight hours on the dusty streets of Haiti and slept in the corridors of hospitals in the neighboring Dominican Republic, and Mr. Coffy has spent thousands of dollars to obtain government documents, and that the seizure, housing, food and transportation of waste, trying to get permission from their parents to return with him to Chicago.
Mr. Coffy shared his suffering – not unlike that of many other residents of the United States in Haiti, trying to help the family members – in a series of interviews by telephone from the Dominican Republic.
His father, Reserve Coffy, 68, was not injured in the earthquake, but his mother, Zilan Joacin, 67, a diabetic who has recently undergone hip surgery, broke the leg, which was “so swollen that could not touch “Mr. Coffy said.
That first night together, the three stayed outside, afraid to stay in the room of the house survived. In the morning, Mr. Coffy understand why no one had heard the calls from their parents for help. His group was filled with rubble and the smell of death.
After hours of walking and scrambling through the rubble, he found a job yet in a pharmacy store with medication for blood pressure of her mother needed, one with insulin and the third with analgesics. He paid three times the normal cost.
A brother and sister died in the earthquake, and another brother is still missing. Of his surviving brothers and sisters in Haiti, we have two daughters who broke his leg in the earthquake, and the others are poor and dispersed in the countryside. So Mr. Coffy decided to take their parents to Santo Domingo, where he thought it would be easier to get help.
However, Caribbean Tours, the bus company who have been in Haiti for the Dominican Republic because he had flown from Chicago that his parents are on board, without a passport, which were lost in the earthquake, had paid $ 2000 for Haiti — about U.S. $ 250 – to fight against a shadow truck known as a tap-tap to bring them to the border town of Las Caobas, his mother, lying on a mattress, moaning at every bump in the road.
He succeeded in obtaining the documents give parents a month’s stay in the Dominican Republic to pay about $ 500 a fixative. Another $ 58 bought the entire back seat of an air-conditioned bus to Santo Domingo, the capital.
Here Mr. Coffy and her parents have visited four hospitals. At a private clinic, X-rays showed that Mrs. Joacin would need a hip replacement, but because the leg is infected will have to wait three months.
Father and son were left in the evening on a stool beside his bed. “It ‘was the first time I actually slept, Mr. Coffy memory.” It’ was three days. ”
Admission of one night is $ 359, Mr. Coffy depleting bankroll, so that his wife had $ 3,600 in cable in Chicago. Mr. Coffy, the sixth of nine children, had been sending about $ 500 a month to his parents before the earthquake, “he said.
Ms. Joacin was given a leg cast and a bed in a corridor at Dario Contreras, a public hospital full of survivors of the earthquake. Ministry of Health of the Dominican Republic said that hospitals in the country are treated nearly 7,000 Haitians on Tuesday. Fearing that the hospital food – oatmeal, white rice, spaghetti – may aggravate the mother’s diabetes, Mr. Coffy hidden in food from outside for her and hid under a table. He also sent a small sign next to his head: “Do not think anyway.”
After more than two weeks in hospital, she spent most of the corridor, Mr. Coffy and her parents moved to Monday night in a room with two beds in the structures of the church. Last Tuesday, Mr. Coffy received new passports to parents at the Embassy of Haiti, had an appointment scheduled for Thursday with the U.S. consulate in Santo Domingo to request a temporary visa to come to Chicago. Another possibility would be the humanitarian parole, a special category of temporary migration is rarely granted.
His case will be particularly difficult, experts on immigration, for instance, because Mr. Coffy, while a legal resident of a green card, not a citizen of the United States.
“You can imagine the number of Haitians have harmed their relatives in the states that want to come here,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the nonprofit Florida immigrants Advocacy Center.
Mr. Coffy lives in Kenwood, a suburb of South Side of Chicago with his wife, Yakin Ajanaku-Coffy, and his 10 year old son and 14-year-daughter. The couple met in 1994 when Chicago was cultural attache in Haiti and was the keyboardist for a band of Haiti Eksperyans Boukman, returns to Chicago in 2002, after living for years in Haiti, the couple ’s preschool now back The musical theme called big family.
Having determined that Mr. Coffy travel to Haiti to visit his family, the couple pulled supplies, such as cereal bars and water purification tablets, and 1,500 dollars in cash, including $ 1000 from his best friend’s mother son (as others have donated more than $ 7000 through a blog). The couple sold the phones, since they have a BlackBerry to get e-mail. A few hours later, they were in O’Hare International Airport with his son, Akin, who was crying.
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