THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 25, 1994 TAG: 9406250220
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940625 LENGTH: NORFOLK
But in a radio transmission Friday afternoon from Leogane, Haiti, Dr. Richard Brown told his wife, Judith, that the situation seemed amazingly normal.
{REST} ``He says it's very, very calm,'' Judith said in her Norfolk home. ``There have been some threatened demonstrations and strikes, but they haven't happened.''
Haitians still were selling shaved ice from pushcarts, Richard said. Haitians still were going to market. There were no signs of panic or anarchy, though tensions were high.
Haitians were ready and willing to suffer during the near-total U.N. economic embargo, Judith said, if the situation could be made better. Their fear, she said, was that they would suffer for nothing.
The U.S.-led ban on commercial air travel is the Clinton administration's latest effort to force Haiti's military rulers to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was elected late in 1990 with two-thirds of the votes and deposed by the military in September 1991.
Judith, 51, who has a doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University, and Richard, 58, a medical doctor, have been international medical workers since 1966. Since January 1993, they have served in Haiti as Presbyterian medical missionaries. Typically they spend about a month each year at their home in Colonial Place.
Judith left Haiti last week, after the State Department issued a statement that Americans not involved in relief or refuge work should get out. She advises a Haitian team that trains community health workers.
Richard, medical director of the only general hospital in Leogane, decided to stay. The 130-bed hospital, serving a population of 108,000, would become all the more essential if fighting broke out. Leogane is about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Haitians the Browns know are ambivalent about increased American intervention.
``We have not felt any anti-American feeling,'' Judith said, ``except for occasional comments by young people on the street.''
Haitians, however, do not consider the U.S. occupation of their country from 1915 to 1934 one of the high points in their history, she said.
She is optimistic that the embargo on nearly everything except basic foods and medicine will cause business leaders to pressure the military regime to step down.
At a last team meeting before Judith Brown returned to Norfolk, she asked for prayer requests. Several team members asked that divisions in the nation would cease and the uncertainty would end.
Finally, Judith recalled, ``a nurse said, almost apologetically, `And then there's our fear.' ''
by CNB