Haitian children start over in Florida schools

Fifth-grader Madjany Mouscardy was playing a “Hannah Montana” computer game when the walls of the second-floor office in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she sat began “shaking like a swing,” she said.

Moments later she had fallen into a hole and was buried in concrete.

“I couldn’t breathe. But I said to myself, ‘Madjany, you are not going to die,’ ” recalled the lanky 11-year-old. “And then I started to lift the bricks off me until I could see blue sky.”

Sharing a classroom with Madjany at Silver Shores Elementary School, in Miramar, Fla., is Garvey Fils-Amie, who survived the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti because he was outside his house, doing homework with a tutor, when his world began to crumble.

But his mother, Gina, 43, was inside, and though he tried, he could not reach her.

And second-grader Patrice Rameau, 8, begins his story this way: “My house broke.”

These three children are among 2,071 earthquake refugees now enrolled in schools across Florida.

Though most of the children have begun to adjust to the wrenching changes in their lives, each carries hellish memories of the earthquake and its aftermath that are likely to be indelible.

“He will never forget,” said Patricia Rameau, 31, of her son, Patrice, and the terror they shared.

Seconds after the temblor began to tear at the walls of their Port-au-Prince home, mother and son raced barefoot through the streets, joining thousands of other Haitians panicked by reports that a tsunami was coming. They ran for more than an hour, seeking higher ground.

The next night, when tsunami hysteria again swept the city, she awakened her only child and they ran again.

“He doesn’t want to talk about it. He cries, but he just says that his eye hurts,” Rameau said.

Aurora Francois, the Haitian-born principal of Barton Elementary School in Lake Worth, said not all of the six refugees there -- all younger than 6 -- were adjusting easily. For example, she said, one first-grader has felt abandoned since the child’s parents returned to Haiti.

“We have to address their emotional needs,” Francois said. “But I am confident we will. I will take them home myself if I have to.”

Madjany, Patrice and Garvey are three of 11 earthquake survivors enrolled at Silver Shores.

“We feel privileged to get a lot of these kids. We can help them,” said Angela Iudica, principal of the school, where about 130 of the 700 students are Haitian Americans with family or cultural ties to the island nation.

Many of the evacuees enrolled here already had U.S. connections. Many were born here and are citizens. Others have been here before, on summer visits to relatives.

“He associates being here with vacation. He thinks we should eat at Chuck E. Cheese’s every day,” said Rameau, who ran a kindergarten in Port-au-Prince. She and her son, who is a U.S. citizen, are staying with a cousin in Pembroke Pines.

Garvey, 11, now lives with his uncle Joseph Julien, a Miramar businessman.

“He was her only son, so they were very close,” said Julien of the relationship between his nephew and sister-in-law. “She would cook for him, spoil him. He was everything to her.” In his two weeks here, Julien said, his nephew has said little about his mother.

But he has left clues to his grief. The other day, Julien said he went into the bathroom after the child had showered and found that Garvey had written his mother’s name on the steamed-over mirror. Around it, he had drawn a heart.

mclary@sunsentinel.com