Haitian Americans frustrated in attempts to return to their homeland

Reporting from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — 

South Florida remains on alert for the masses who may soon want out of Haiti. But many Haitian Americans here are busy looking for a way back in.

One of them, 27-year-old poet and filmmaker Maeva Renaud, was waiting at a tiny Broward County airstrip Wednesday. She arrived in the predawn darkness in a Dodge Neon stuffed to the roof with medical supplies, cans of tuna, power bars and tents.

With commercial flights to Haiti canceled, Renaud had found a pilot -- a friend of a friend -- who had been making humanitarian cargo hauls since the Jan. 12 earthquake, and she had persuaded him to fly her, along with a nurse, a social worker, and the gear, into the teeming mess of Port-au-Prince, where they hoped to set up a makeshift medical clinic.

Dressed in jeans, a knit cap and hip rectangular glasses, Renaud could have been headed to a poetry slam. She has no experience with disaster relief. She has never even been camping. But she had to get to Haiti.

“Because we’re Haitian, we want to be involved,” she said. “We have to be involved.”

Many Haitian Americans are helping with the recovery, but others who lack affiliation with aid groups or government agencies have been left out of the official response, leaving them to improvise ways to get back to their homeland. Renaud and a friend, for example, raised $5,000 on Facebook.

Getting to Port-au-Prince is not easy. It helps, like Renaud, to know a pilot with clearance to land. But even she had days of delays before finally taking off Friday. The other option is a commercial flight to the Dominican Republic, and a long bus ride to the Haitian border.

Haitian Americans are making the trip despite a warning from the State Department urging Americans not to travel to Haiti -- and despite concerns that well-meaning volunteers could complicate the relief effort.

“There are literally millions of people around the world who would love to just parachute into Haiti,” said Peter Bell, a former president of the aid group CARE and a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “But they need to make sure they’re doing more good than harm.”

Haitian Americans argue that their fluency in Creole and knowledge of the country can help recovery efforts.

They also note that Haitians on the island are for the most part barred from fleeing the misery: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said that any Haitians caught sailing toward the U.S. will be repatriated.

It is for those reasons that Marleine Bastien, executive director of the nonprofit Haitian Women of Miami Inc., wants to see the U.S. government and the private sector help send Haitian Americans -- who tend to be more prosperous than islanders -- into Haiti.

“Who best to provide that guidance than the people who know the country?” she asked.

Bastien said many Haitian Americans were frustrated that the airport remained closed, and were wondering whether it was a ploy to keep them out.

State Department officials noted the control tower was destroyed, but in an interview Friday, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, said the airport would open to commercial traffic within days -- “not weeks or months.”

When travel becomes easier, few here doubt that the diaspora will descend upon Haiti: A poll of 400 Haitian Americans released Thursday by New America Media showed that 68% of them planned to move back, even temporarily, to help.

For those who want to help now, however, the wait is excruciating.

On Jan. 26, the frustration was palpable in an impromptu meeting of about two dozen Haitian American law enforcement officers, most of them from the Miami Police Department. They had crowded into a small room in a Little Haiti community center, trying to figure out how they could get into the country as a group.

Their faces were hard, eager and urgent -- the universal demeanor of officers when their clan has suffered a loss. But this drama was unfolding in a sovereign country, which meant they couldn’t respond with their uniforms and weapons.

Officer Mariline Nelson wondered, given those restrictions, how they could contribute at all. “Right now, I don’t see how we could be utilized there,” she said.

Lt. Franzia Brea-Burden acknowledged the frustration. “I know a lot of you guys are hurting emotionally,” she said. “I’m diligently looking for an organization that we can be part of.”

She said she didn’t understand why no one had approached the officers to help this time. In the early 1990s, she said, she and other Creole speakers had helped the federal government process large numbers of Haitian “boat people” in custody on a military ship off Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Wesner Moise, an officer for the state transportation department, thought they might serve as liaisons to U.S. military units, to help cool tempers that he feared would soon ignite.

Renaud, the poet, returned from Haiti on Sunday night, distressed by what she had seen.

Her mother’s three sisters and 10 other family members were living in tents improvised out of sticks and sheets in the yard of a cracked and worthless house.

She gave them the tents, the food and the medicine. There wasn’t enough time to set up the clinic, but the nurses brought the medical supplies to a nearby school.

“If I hadn’t gone,” she said, “who knows how long it would have been before my family got any aid?”

Renaud said she was already trying to figure out a way to get back.

richard.fausset@

latimes.com