Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9412070034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Two weeks later the Pauls sighed when their baby was born healthy, a survivor of Haiti's violence and chaos, and a citizen of the United States.
They named him Russell Roanoke.
Russell, in honor of Anne Russell, the United Nations worker who rescued Prophete after he'd been beaten, tortured, shaved and left for dead in a Port-au-Prince ravine.
And Roanoke, to thank the city that has embraced the family in a way their homeland never could.
Prophete and Rosita Paul celebrate their first Thanksgiving today.
This is the story of a family and a church, of a distant political war and its Wasena Avenue survivors.
The story of a used Schwinn bicycle, a diaper drive, a chocolate bar, six hours of sleep and pudgy Russell Roanoke.
|n n| Saundria Plecity remembers clearly that rainy day in May when she first saw the Pauls. From Port-au-Prince to Miami to Atlanta to the Roanoke Regional Airport, the flight had left them exhausted. Dressed in formal clothes - the two girls wore pink frilly dresses - the family brought just one suitcase.
Prophete, 26, carried his crippled daughter Stephanie while Rosita, 81/2 months pregnant at the time, teetered down the stairs, holding twins Handy and Sandy by the hand.
Plecity, one of the family's sponsors from the Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church, stood there among a crowd of other church members and Roanoke Refugee and Immigration Services workers, including Haitian native Dieujuste Pierre, who would become the Pauls' caseworker, interpreter and best friend.
``It was just a very beautiful moment,'' Plecity recalls. ``Prophete had been holding Stephanie all day on the plane, and he was still carrying her as they got off the plane. Dieujuste just went right up to him with his big arms and took Stephanie like they'd known each other all along, like they were kindred spirits.''
The church and refugee office had been preparing for the family's arrival for weeks, finding them their Wasena Avenue apartment, soliciting donations for used furniture, buying food and arranging for a tutor.
They knew Prophete Paul was a political refugee, a supporter of exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They knew he'd been in and out of hiding since the coup of 1991, when the military took over, and terror and chaos reigned.
Prophete's visible scars - on his chest, face and arms - were a shock, though. So was the impending arrival of Russell Roanoke.
``We had no idea she was pregnant,'' Plecity recalls.
Sponsors inquired about prenatal care. There had been none in Haiti.
They asked whether Rosita had likewise been persecuted. She'd been pushed a few months earlier by thugs looking for Prophete - who escaped, climbing out a window of their house.
Sponsors took her to Community Hospital's OB/GYN Clinic, where tests showed the baby was fine.
They also arranged for quadriplegic Stephanie to undergo a one-day examination at the Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center at the University of Virginia. The first doctor who saw her said her case was so severe it would take more than a week to complete the evaluation.
Stephanie had been a normal little girl before she contracted measles at 18 months old. ``She say `Mama,' `Dada,' '' Prophete explains in broken English, before elaborating to Dieujuste in Creole.
``Because of the coup, when she started getting sick you couldn't find a doctor at the hospital,'' Dieujuste translates. ``Everything was upside down.''
Stephanie's measles turned into meningitis and encephalitis. She can no longer say Mama and Dada, and likely never will. Blind in one eye, she will never be able to sit up by herself, feed herself or process information. They hope she will one day be able to grasp a toy.
``They used to carry her everywhere,'' Plecity describes. ``To bathe her, Rosita used to stand in the shower holding her.''
The Kluge Center taught the Pauls a better way to feed her, using a special cup and spoon, and a thickening agent for her food. They also gave them a wheelchair and a bathing seat for the shower.
"The doctors were amazed at how well nourished and cared for she was, considering they'd had little medical help," Plecity explains.
Asked to describe his daughter's ordeal, Prophete answers in Creole to Dieujuste, then hangs his head. "He says that it is terrible because Stephanie has loved him so much," Dieujuste translates.
"He says to tell you he can't put it into words."
\ Sitting on his used couch, surrounded by four walls and the comfortable din of his two scrambling twins, Prophete tries to define the phrase "in and out of hiding."
"You can only understand it if you were in the situation," he says. "It was very scary. The first thing I did every morning is to thank God I'm still alive."
For three years, Prophete never slept more than an hour or two at a time. He dropped in on his family when he thought it was safe, giving Rosita money earned from odd jobs.
Sometimes people paid him for work with food and a place to sleep. Sometimes friends from a hospital where he'd done electrical work before the coup hid him out in their homes.
A secretary-general for a popular grassroots movement and a planning-department official under the Aristide administration, Prophete was frequently harassed by armed gunmen supporting the Raoul Cedras regime.
According to a transcript prepared by Anne Russell, the U.N. worker, Prophete was kidnapped for three days in March by three armed civilians. They put a cloth to his face that made him pass out. When he woke up, he was blindfolded, his hands and feet bound.
Gunmen interrogated him about other members of his group, stepped on him, then slammed his head on the floor. They made him sit up and eat ground corn meal, then kicked him in the stomach - telling him if he vomited, he would have to eat it.
The next day, they beat him with a whip, then crudely shaved his head, threatening to cut him with the razor. "The one shaving said he didn't need to do that because Prophete was going to die later," the transcript says.
When they dropped him off at the ravine that night, "Paul heard a gun being cocked and readied himself when another voice said to not do it. Then the men and the car left."
From the ravine where he awoke the next morning, Prophete shouted at a man walking by, convincing him to take a note to Rosita. She, in turn, visited Russell, who took him to a nurse and then documented the event for his political-asylum application.
"He was extremely lucky because most people who are taken die," explains Jean Baroulette, spokesman for the 100-member Haitian Association in Roanoke. "It was worse than a military state. Just to live with that constant fear for that long, it's very difficult for people here to understand it."
\ Prophete Paul no longer clutches his heart each morning, thankful to be alive. "I'm not scared any more," he says. "I sleep very well."
Melinda Edwards, another sponsor from the church, says the family attends church almost every Sunday, where "Prophete sings at the top of his lungs. He looks at the words and pronounces them phonetically. Then he'll ask me questions about what they mean."
When Edwards put the word out at Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church that Prophete needed a bicycle to ride to his job as a Cycle Systems trash-sorter, the congregation responded with not one bike, but seven.
When it was announced that the family had not one child in diapers - but four - the congregation launched a permanent diaper drive. "One night the deacons bring diapers, one night it's the elders," Edwards says. "Every time you come to the church, you see someone carrying diapers."
The kids in summer Bible school collected enough money to pay the twins' pre-school tuition. One family donated a clothes washer, and another baby-sits while the Pauls take English lessons two nights a week.
"I think people were afraid of Haitians at first," Edwards adds. "They thought of AIDS and scary people, but the Pauls are such a wonderful family, they've really brought our whole church together. We want to just hold them in our arms for as long as they need us."
When a new Haitian family arrived in town a few months ago and the refugee center hadn't yet found them a place to live, the Pauls eagerly offered their bed, sleeping on the floor between the twin beds - the toddlers in one bed, Stephanie in the other.
What Prophete Paul is most thankful for: his job, security and six hours of uninterrupted sleep.
On Election night, he reflected on the differences between U.S. and Haiti. "In Haiti, Robb and North would try to kill each other during the campaign,'' he says. "After the election, it would never be over with."
What 23-year-old Rosita is most thankful for: security and the telephone.
But she misses the sense of community in Haiti, where families share in the care of each other's children and where grandmothers help with newborns the first nine months of life.
She is dumbfounded by the availability of food at Kroger, delighted by the Mill Mountain Star and Mini-Graceland (she had never heard of Elvis Presley). And she can't get over how the mountain scenes from Roanoke to Washington, D.C., resemble the view from her native Jacmel to Port-au-Prince.
Dieujuste took the family to visit Russell in Washington recently. They went up and back in a day, stopping also for a tour of the White House, home of their favorite U.S. president. "Clinton is trying very hard to bring democracy to Haiti; we think he's very good," she says.
"The hardest thing for Rosita is being stuck in the house constantly," Edwards says. "She called us up once and said she didn't feel good, so we went flying over there. When we got there we realized she just wanted somebody to sit and talk to her.
"She said, 'I want some apples ... and some good fish ... and I want some chocolate.' "
As soon as the couple become fluent in English, Prophete hopes to study U.S. electrical wiring so he can continue his trade. Then he wants to get a car.
He'd like to go back to Haiti some day, but not until the country has stabilized. Not until he can be sure Russell Roanoke and his siblings will be safe.
"When I was in hiding I felt there was no future," he says. "But here I feel like good things happen.
"And for that, I can not tell you how deep in my heart there are thanks."
Roanoke's Refugee and Immigration Services needs other families, individuals and churches to help sponsor refugee families. Contact 342-7561 for more information.
by CNB