Precious cargo from Haiti
It is stories like this that I use in my case that despite some of the problems here in America, this country is by far the best option for those that live in hopeless situations.
(miamiherald.com) One by one they walked in: five girls in spring flower dresses with their hair neatly braided, nine boys in black slacks and white shirts. No one noticed the children — ages 10 to 17 — until the priest interrupted his homily.
”These are the kids from the boat,” the Rev. Reginald Jean-Mary told a packed Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church just as the children took their seats up front.
At their first visit to the Little Haiti church, the young survivors — who had remained nameless and faceless since they arrived from Haiti on a rickety wooden sailboat that washed up on Hallandale Beach March 28 — brought tears to Notre Dame’s parishioners.
Emotions ran deep at the Sunday services — just one day after 1,200 mourners had come to the same church to bury the one known man who didn’t survive among 102 who arrived on the trip: Lifaite Lully, 24.
The children didn’t speak but gave church members an insight into their harrowing journey through a song they asked to sing in their native Creole.
”Deliver me, oh Lord. I feel I am drowning,” the children sang, some choking back tears. “Water is getting to my neck. I feel like I am stuck in mud. I don’t have anywhere for me to rest my head. A lot of people are making me suffer, they turn me into an enemy. They put me in jail for nothing.”
As the Haitian children — all designated as ”unaccompanied minors” by immigration authorities — sang, parishioners joined in and teared up. Some in the crowded church wailed loudly as if they, too, were reliving the trip that Haitians on board said took 22 days — much of it without food or water, and at one point cooking rice with saltwater. (more…)
