Couple plans return to Haiti

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This article was published 19/01/2010 (5849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FRESH from the earthquake zone and a harrowing trip home, a Winnipeg couple plans to go back to help Haiti rebuild.

Lucien Desmarais and Elaine St. Hilaire, two retired Winnipeggers who were volunteering for the Sisters of Holy Cross missions in Haiti, landed Monday evening at Richardson International Airport, greeted by friends, family and nuns.

"It’s worse than the pictures on television," Desmarais said of the destruction. "You can’t explain it."

The couple was in Cap-Haïtien on the country’s north coast, where St. Hilaire volunteered in an orphanage and Desmarais, a plumber by trade, was the nuns’ handyman, shuttling from mission to mission doing repairs.

They arrived in November and planned to stay for six months.

Desmarais was slated to go to Port-au-Prince on Tuesday — the day the capital was hit with the 7.0-magnitude earthquake — but the sister he was going with pushed the trip back a day. Desmarais thanked God for that.

Cap-Haïtien wasn’t badly hit by the tremors, but panic quickly set in as rumours of a tsunami circulated, the phone lines were cut, the roads blocked and Haitians tried desperately to get word about family in the quake’s epicentre.

With their kids growing worried back home in Canada, and fears of a food shortage in Cap-Haïtien, the couple decided to travel to the Canadian Embassy in the capital about 250 kilometres away.

The couple squeezed into a Jeep with four other people for the eight-hour ride to Port-au-Prince. About halfway there, they stopped in the city of Saint-Marc where the quake’s destruction could be seen.

Thanks to an expert Haitian driver, the couple were able to find the right detour around collapsed bridges and roads into the capital and to the embassy. By that time, violence had begun to erupt on the streets.

From the embassy, the couple boarded a Hercules to Montreal Sunday along with hundreds of other Canadian evacuees. They said embassy staff and Canadian Red Cross volunteers who greeted them in Montreal were wonderful.

But St. Hilaire said Haitians have suffered for so long that any solution to the quake’s destruction must be a permanent one.

She described immense poverty — children selling trinkets on tarps by the side of the road, heavily pregnant women toting pails of water, homes with no toilets.

"I don’t know how they survived prior to this," she said.

"They live in the moment. They support each other. They have faith. I’m not sure where that comes from, but they do."

St. Hilaire said she spent two months caring for orphans, 10 and 11-year-olds, who became very attached to her and she to them. She didn’t have a chance to say goodbye, a hard blow for kids already too used to abandonment.

"When things are calmer, we will go back," St. Hilaire said.

"We’re obliged," Desmarais said.

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca