Disasters on minds of Haitians abroad
Bay Area community looks for ways to help homeland
On a chilly July morning, Rodolph Lapointe awoke in San Francisco to a deluge of WhatsApp messages — the president of Haiti had been assassinated. Then, one month later, more desperate messages arrived from loved ones after a 7.2 earthquake struck the Caribbean nation, killing more than 1,900 people. It was followed closely by Tropical Storm Grace, which dumped inches of rain, leaving an already exposed populace in even more perilous conditions.
The extreme hardship of the summer’s events compelled many Haitians to flee the country, and last week thousands gathered under the Del Rio International Bridge in Texas, waiting to gain entry to the United States. Border Patrol agents on horseback took a hard line to repel refugees’ attempts to cross the Rio Grande into the U.S., using their hands, reins and the horses themselves to block passage. It was a brutal display of force against people engulfed in a humanitarian crisis.
Lapointe says it’s “heartbreaking” to see his fellow Haitians in such dire circumstances, especially now that the U.S. has begun mass deportations. “It feels like the world is being really unfair to the Haitian community.”
Lapointe wonders how much his people can endure. He keeps reminding himself that Haitians were the first in the Caribbean to throw off the shackles of slavery. His people have overcome worse, he said, and he believes they will rise again.
It’s a reality that the Haitian community in the Bay Area has faced in the past, even as they endure it again — watching from afar as political instability and natural disasters wreak havoc, and wondering how to help loved ones in meaningful ways when the needs are so dire.
Lapointe is consumed with worry for his family in Portau-Prince. All the instability and chaos delayed his mother’s chemotherapy treatment and left her remembering the aftermath of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, when sleeping outside was safer, but traumatic. “She’s afraid that what happened in 2010 might happen again because a lot of people died not during the main earthquake, but during the aftershocks.”
When Haiti President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, Lapointe was weeks away from an exciting step toward realizing his childhood dreams of college education. He had come a long way from Martissant, the impoverished neighborhood where he grew up; he had been “a barefoot kid” who often went to bed hungry. After Haiti’s last big earthquake shattered buildings and lives, Lapointe had just graduated high school and his college dreams were buried under Haiti’s mounds of building rubble.
When he moved to the United States in 2015, he washed cars, drove a forklift and delivered pallets of beer, all the while pining for a college education. In 2018, his friends in San Francisco encouraged Lapointe to enroll at City College, and this year he was accepted as a transfer student to Stanford. Finally, at age 32, his college dreams were coming to fruition. Lapointe is the first in his entire community to get a higher education, and he will be completing it at one of the best universities in the world.
Yet his moments of excitement are fleeting. His people, his country, are in crisis. It feels like a split reality, one the Haitian diaspora knows all too well.
“When you’re outside the country like me, we look and wonder ‘what can we do right now?’ ” said Claude-Alix Bertrand, a longtime Bay Area resident and Haiti’s ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Sending money to prop up family members is one thing, but bigger projects that bring economic development and jobs to Haiti have been stalled just when the country needs them most, Bertrand said.
Always a cheerleader for Haiti to outside investors, Bertrand highlights the wonders of the country and its people. He is leading a multimillion-dollar project, funded in part by the U.N., to develop beach resorts to increase travel and foreign investment. Now he feels a “sense of shame” as he watches the political instability and gang violence.
“There’s no way for us to provide a guarantee to these financial investors who would help the country move forward,” Bertrand said. “Since there is no long-term plan, everyone is sort of frozen. It has a very stifling effect.”
Yet despite all the reasons to lose hope, Bertrand has not. “Haitian people are so resilient,” he said.
Novato resident Rosemond Jolissaint captures this Haitian resilience in his music. He came to fame as a teenager in 2007 when he won Haiti’s version of “American Idol.” His catchy, soulful songs speak to the joys and struggles of his people.
But the summer’s cascading crises in Haiti have left him despondent. “When I think of writing music about the situation in Haiti, sometimes it is just too much,” Jolissaint said.
One month after the latest natural disaster, the U.N. reports that half of those affected have still not received any aid. In the capital, political instability continues as Prime Minister Ariel Henry himself is under a cloud of suspicion in the assassination of Moïse. Amid all this, the U.S. government is deporting planeloads of Haitian refugees.
As the unsettling news keeps coming, Jolissaint finds himself having to defend his country. “People ask me all the time what is happening in Haiti, but it is something you can’t even explain,” he said. He wants to tell people the good things —“It’s a beautiful country and beautiful culture”— but it’s hard when all the news reports are about chaos and poverty, Jolissaint said.
The crises Haiti experienced this summer also propelled non-Haitians in the Bay Area to help. San Francisco entrepreneur Jim Chu has spent a lot of time in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, when he volunteered in the rebuilding effort. Aid and donations flowed into the country back then, but it wasn’t all good, Chu said. The well-intentioned help was temporary and caused Haitians to become dependent on outsiders, creating what he calls an “aid infrastructure.”
In the years after that earthquake, Chu chose a different path. He supported local Haitian entrepreneurs to start their own clean water company — building local water treatment and bottling plants, and employing many in delivery. Funding came from investors that Chu found around Silicon Valley.
In the past months, that local company was well-placed to shift gears and bring clean water to people who most needed it, Chu said. “When the earthquake hit, our entire team was on it right away delivering aid. Not me, not foreigners, but locals running things,” Chu said.
San Francisco artist and entrepreneur Kerry Rodgers also went to Haiti to volunteer after the 2010 earthquake, and saw exceptional small businesses emerging after the quake. When her friends began emailing this summer asking what they could do, she wrote a blog post spotlighting Haitian businesses in the hope that her friends would “contribute positively to helping Haiti’s economy.”
On that first trip to Haiti, Rodgers taught an art class to impoverished children and her translator was young Rodolph Lapointe. A decade-long friendship began. Now, he is part of her family in San Francisco.
Lapointe, meanwhile, is trying to stay focused as his classes at Stanford begin this week. He won the undergrad lottery for a place on a preorientation trip to hike and camp at Point Reyes. But he pulled out, deciding instead to concentrate on preparation for the school year. He’s spent a lot of time sleeping under the stars, and most of it wasn’t by choice. Camping, while relaxing and restorative to many, might have triggered memories of the last Haitian earthquake when it wasn’t safe to sleep inside, Lapointe worried privately.
Prior to deciding to forgo the trip, when he was meeting other students in the Point Reyes group, most of them 18 years old, he felt distinctly out of place. They asked him why he was there, and why he didn’t go to college when he was 18. “I just had to say, ‘I didn’t have the opportunity,’ ” Lapointe said. They didn’t really get it, and he didn’t feel like diving into a lecture about Haiti’s recent history.
But when he sees the privilege of his fellow students, even his own relative privilege, it motivates him. “I know thousands of young men and women in Haiti who would do so much if they had the same opportunity that I have today,” Lapointe said. “I feel a great sense of responsibility to make sure I get the most out of this opportunity.”
Lapointe is also acutely aware that most of his classmates likely have never met anyone from Haiti. He wants to explain to them that despite the terrible news they see about his country, Haiti provides him with a sense of freedom he has never felt in the United States.
“In Haiti, I do not have to worry about getting pulled over by the police just because I’m Black,” Lapointe said. He never feels less-than like he sometimes does in the United States. The freedom he feels in Haiti comes from the powerful history of his ancestors. “I grew up learning about my forefathers, who against all odds triumphed over the French in the most successful slave revolt in history,” Lapointe said.
When he feels overwhelmed by the enormity of what his country is enduring, or what lies ahead for him in the classrooms of an elite institution, he remembers what his mother taught him about his ancestors. “They demonstrated the power of unity for the greater good of all,” Lapointe said. So his time at Stanford will not just be to further himself. “I’m also doing this for my family and for my people.”