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A SPECIAL SECTION:  Haiti since the January 12, 2010 Earthquake
                                                         
Posted July 1, 2010
                                       
nytlogo.gif (3067 bytes) New York Region
                                          
A PARISH TESTED

In First Summer After Quake, a Lost Haitian Ritual
 
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MICHAEL APPLETON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Soraya Martelly, 11, and her grandmother Eva Thebaud in Queens. Soraya's mother never cancelled summer in Haiti, even though landslides damaged the family's hometown.
 

By ANNE BARNARD
                                         
When she talks about summers in Haiti, Naila Zephyr's voice turns dreamy: The sea is "blue and clear and nice." The sun sets right over the water. On the way home from the beach, she buys stewed conch in paper cups from roadside vendors, an indelible taste of childhood. Family houses are full of aunts and cousins and food and love.

This year, though, Naila, 12, will not be going. On Jan. 12, in the huge earthquake, the house in the city collapsed, the one in the country cracked, and with them crumbled a routine that had brought Naila and her brother and sister a yearly idyll of freedom and security: a chance to run free in ancestral neighborhoods where everyone knew them, the way her parents did as children.

After the quake, the aunts scattered. One now lives with Naila's family in Elmont, N.Y., just over the county line from Queens; another dropped off her 3-year-old son and flew back to Haiti to try to repair their home.

The tales of ruin that have filtered back to Naila have only sharpened her wistfulness for her summer ritual, even if this year going to Haiti would mean confronting something painful.

"I wanted to see it myself," she said last week after coming home from her second-to-last day of seventh grade at SS. Joachim and Anne, a Roman Catholic parish school in Queens Village, one of New York's Haitian hubs. It was a steamy afternoon, a time of year that usually bustles with anticipation and packing and planning.

But this summer has brought uncertainty.

For parents of modest means, urban summers present pitfalls. Children who were safe and busy in school are suddenly idle. Camp and child care cost money, but leaving children alone exposes them to perils, from boredom to crime. In this parish, and other Haitian neighborhoods, one solution has lasted generations: sending children south to deepen bonds to friends and cousins and grandparents, to speak Creole and French, to steep in a more traditional culture as working mothers and fathers take a vacation of their own - from parenting.

Within days of the earthquake, which killed an estimated quarter-million people and leveled much of Haiti's capital, some of the New York area's 250,000 residents of Haitian descent began to wonder if the disaster might upend that routine, and how things might change for those who divide their lives, and often their families, between Haiti and the United States.

Haiti's relative proximity has long let immigrants shuttle easily between old country and new, vacationing, doing business or retiring in Haiti, comfortably keeping a dual identity. Now, the fear of losing or imperiling that relationship looms as parents decide what to do this first summer after the quake.

Shirley Thebaud, 40, said she never considered canceling her daughter Soraya's monthlong trip to Haiti this summer, even though landslides heavily damaged Grand-Gove, the family's hometown, in the quake.

That is because she believes her own summers there — eating mangoes right off the trees, visiting her grandmother's home in the mountains, soaking in a culture respectful of elders - shaped her into a successful and responsible adult.

Every summer as she arrived in Grand-Gove from Cambria Heights, Queens - where Soraya, too, is now growing up - her grandmother made her stop at every house to say hello.

"It was like the whole village was raising us," Ms. Thebaud said. "Whatever you did, it got home to mama, but we were able to run free. No matter what happens, earthquake or not, Soraya has to have the same upbringing that I had."

Soraya, 11, is well on the way: She is growing up in the same Tudor two-family house that her grandparents bought in 1977; her grandmother Eva Thebaud, a nurse, cares for her as her mother works as a police officer in Atlanta.

In Haiti, where her family is wealthy by local standards, she plays in a billowing green garden surrounded by white-columned walkways and roams the town with the daughter of a local fisherman - though recent security concerns mean an adult now trails them.

Soraya, a violinist with curly eyelashes, said that she was nervous at first about earthquakes, but that once her family reassured her, she focused on doing her usual favorite things: "See my friends, go to the park, go to the beach."

But the arithmetic is different for each family. The Thebauds' house was not badly damaged. They can afford to ship in all the food and water they need. In case of emergency, Grand-Gove is a fairly short drive from the capital.

Jomarie Almeus's family is not so confident. Jomarie, like Soraya and Naila, has her Proustian memories of Haiti: a house with a blue hallway, brushing her grandmother's hair - and, she shouts as she walks home from her second-grade class at SS. Joachim and Anne with a Hannah Montana backpack, "I got to eat spaghetti for breakfast!"
                                                          
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OZIER MOHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jomarie Almeus, 8, and her father, Jocel, who worried that his mother's home in Haiti was too isolated.
                                                           
But her father, Jocel, decided not to go this year. A world music star with the compas band Tabou Combo, he used to travel there many times a year to play, helping to support dozens of family members on his income. Now he worries about taking his family to visit his mother at the far end of Haiti's southern peninsula, a four-hour drive from the nearest airport. "If something happens, it's not like I can just grab them and go to Miami," he said.

Then there is Amanda Joseph, 8. Her family had planned a visit to Haiti, the first in several years; she was eager to see her grandmother. Her parents have not yet brought themselves to tell their daughter that her grandmother died in the quake. As for the practical problem, the children will spend the summer with an aunt in Connecticut.

The Zephyrs, with their family house destroyed, have fewer options.

Naila Zephyr's father and mother work full time; he is a parking-garage manager, she is a health aide. Two months of day camp or baby-sitting for their three children - plus their visiting nephew - could cost hundreds of dollars a week, far more than plane tickets, and more than they can comfortably afford.

For Alain Zephyr, 42, Naila's father, who said he was detained for scrawling anti-dictatorship graffiti as a young man, became a spokesman for a student democracy group that fought the Duvalier regime, and advised the populist president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the challenge is not only to his finances but also to his children's roots.

"I want them to keep ties - to know about Haiti, its history, its culture _ so later on they can go there to help," he said, adding that he invested years trying to push Haiti closer to democracy before falling out with Mr. Aristide and emigrating in 2002.

If his children are to inherit that passion, he believes, they need to know Haiti not just from parents' memories but from daily life, the way he did as a child.

"You experience real life," he said.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. Reprinted from The New York Times, New York Region (print version), of Thursday, July 1, 2010.
                                     

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