‘I can’t do anything; just pray’
By: Vanessa Brown
CCC and Ashtonbee Editor
Micheline Beauvais’s eyes remain glued to the TV screen every night when she returns home from school. She scans the countless faces and bodies with the faint hope she’ll recognize someone she‘s related to. She regrets the dead won’t have a proper funeral.
“There’s no place for the body … They put them in fire to burn,” Beauvais says. “We’re not the garbage. We’re human beings.”
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the island nation of Haiti on Tuesday, Jan. 12, destroying nearly everything in its path. The death toll is estimated around 200,000 people. Now a week later, international attention is focused on delivering aid to the impoverished nation and sifting through the rubble in hopes of finding those still clinging to life.
Beauvais, 31, studies social work at College Boreal, located inside the Centre for Creative Communications. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, she came with her father, brother and step-mother to Canada when she was 15. Another brother, Nickson, still lives in Port-au-Prince. She knows he’s alive, but fears for his health now that he’s homeless because of the earthquake.
“He’s OK, but his wife and baby, no,” she says. “I can tell you. Died.”
Beauvais planned to go back to Haiti this summer to meet her new niece or nephew. Her brother’s wife is pregnant and currently unaccounted for, as are her grandparents. She assumes they’re dead.
“For Haitian people like me, we die,” Beauvais said. “I watch TV and I die in my heart because I can’t do anything; just pray.”
This sense of emotional paralysis is common among Beauvais’s Haitian classmates. She said they don’t talk much about their missing relatives and friends in Haiti. They’re too angry right now; angry their country was devastated by the earthquake, that aid is taking so long to filter through the streets and that the Canadian government is preoccupied with finding Canadian survivors.
“Canadians do a lot. Every country do a lot,” she said. “I say thank you everyday.”
“But why the army Canadian do everything it can do to find the missing Canadian people?” she wonders. “The kids are missing. Not a Canadian, but still a human being.”
Mimosa Tulina, a counsellor at College Boreal, notices how Haitian students are in a state of shock. She said three or four aren’t yet ready to talk to her about their grief.
“Most of them are frozen at the moment. They don’t express their emotions,” Tulina says. “For the moment, I feel like they are blocked. Some of them express their emotions by doing. They’re very involved in helping Haitians back home.”
However frustrated Beauvais feels at the moment, she remains positive Haiti will rebuild itself for future prosperity.
“Everything happen for a reason,” she insists. “Maybe now my country’s down … Later it’s going to be better.”
