Waiting to Hear From Haiti

New York City is home to one of largest Haitian population in the world, second only to Port-au-Prince. Brooklyn’s Flatbush-Caton Market, established in 2002, serves as a meeting place for New York’s thriving Caribbean community.

As of January 18, 2010, the earthquake has affected twenty of the Flatbush-Caton Market’s forty-seven Haitian vendors directly. They have lost either family members or close friends. Some have stopped coming into work, instead spending their days trying to contact family in Haiti.

Immediately following last Tuesday’s devastating earthquake, the market was overwhelmed with neighbors and patrons donating food and water and asking what they could do to help. The market will partner with New York City’s Caribbean Chamber of Commerce to organize volunteers, sort through the donations, and assemble care packages to send to Haiti by the end of the month.
 

Pictured are Ana Walker, interim director of Flatbush-Caton Market, and Rev. Jean-Claude Michel, the market's assistant director. Michel’s mother still lives in Carrefour, Haiti, where he grew up. He was only able to reach her on Jan. 17, calling his emotional state in the days since the earthquake “a paradoxical situation of calmness and anxiety at the same time.”
 

Marie Alexandre, 66, lost her house in the earthquake, but her immediate family has survived. Her son narrowly missed the quake after vacationing in the country. His flight back to New York departed just forty minutes before the earthquake hit.
 

In 1977, Henri Andre, 48, moved with his immediate family to New York from Delmas, Haiti, but the majority of his family remains in the country. He has been able to receive some news of their safety, but his nephew is still unaccounted for. “My family ran for their lives,” he says, recalling their story of running out of the family house. Andre has friends whose entire families have died, but he tries to remain hopeful for the country as a whole. “Whatever happen in life—there’s change,” he says. “Haiti will be better.”
 

Marie St. Fleur of Delmas, Haiti says her immediate family survived the earthquake, but many of her friends in her neighborhood have died. She has also lost one of her two distributors of Haitian goods to the quake. She, like the rest of the Haitian venders in the market, relies on selling these native spices and nuts to make a living. At this point it is unclear what will happen when they run out.
 

“It’s in God’s hands,” says Renette Raymond, 69, through translation, (pictured on the right with her cousin Anne Robert, 76) when asked what she’ll do once she sells out of goods. The market’s vendors, most of whom live nearby and work seven days a week, from 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. This past weekend, the place was packed with customers stocking up on Haitian goods, not sure when or if they’ll be able to buy them in the future.
 

“Today, tomorrow, they tell you someone die,” says Malize Joseph, 55, of Port-au-Prince. Joseph’s mother and sister have survived, but her husband lost his sister, two cousins, and two grandchildren in the quake. Joseph tells me that her family is sleeping outside because no one trusts the still standing buildings enough to go inside. “God don’t leave you because you’re good,” Joseph says when asked what her experience this past week has been. “Don’t expect you’re good because you’re alive. You’ll know what you’ll mean and what God mean to you.”

Madeleine Dubus is a staff writer for Campus Progress and a writing fellow at The New School.

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