MIAMI — Almost every day, it seems, a parishioner comes to Father Reginald Jean-Mary with the same plea: Pray for us, we’re scared. We can’t go back, not now.
They live in fear of a forced return to Haiti, a country where they were born and that they love, but one that’s been paralyzed by poverty, violent protests and a debilitating cholera epidemic.
They fear even more for their American-born children, who, unlike them, would be eligible to remain in the only country they’ve ever known. For many Haitian immigrants, the idea of uprooting preteens to live for the first time in a deeply impoverished country seems out of the question.
“Haiti will always be my home by birth, but this is my new home,” said Luce Janvier, a parishioner at the church. “It’s not safe in Haiti — not now, maybe never.”
Here in the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti — along the asphalt streets where chickens run wild and Creole is the predominant language — Jean-Mary’s cream-colored Catholic church serves as a refuge for Haitians from across the city.
After a magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and crippling infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, the capital, tens of thousands of survivors fled to south Florida.