At a money-transfer booth tucked into a dusty TV repair shop, Haitians carrying thin envelopes of US$5 and US$10 bills clamored to send funds to their devastated families back home. But the computer connection to the earthquake-stricken Haitian capital was down again.
“We are trying to help as best we can but now it won’t go through,” said Guerline Aden, who lost a 19-year-old niece in the Jan. 12 quake and still doesn’t know the fate of several other relatives.
It seems almost every Haitian in this village north of New York City — which is one-third Haitian, one of the largest percentages in any town in the US — has lost a loved one in the earthquake.
“Passing through Spring Valley you can feel the sadness, the quietness,” said Mayor Noramie Jasmin, whose husband was missing for the first two days.
At the Caribbean Village restaurant, Arinks Homicile said his wife lost seven relatives and didn’t know about it for five or six days.
“It is all we talk about now in Spring Valley,” he said. “What we see on the TV about the earthquake and what we hear about people’s families.”
But signs of support are everywhere. Cases of bottled water and cans of soup and stew are piled outside the entrance to the police department. Inside, a big plastic jug holds folded currency stuffed in by the cops themselves. The Salvation Army building displays a sign that says, “Praying for Haiti.”
Deputy Mayor Joseph Desmaret is in Haiti with a team of 15 area residents, including nurses and firefighters, dealing with the emergency. They got a ride on a military plane, but had to raise about US$3,000 to get to Chicago to meet it. The money was raised from Spring Valley merchants, most of them Hasidic Jews, said Aron Wieder, administrative assistant to the mayor.
The area’s Hasidic and other Orthodox Jews have not always meshed with other ethnic groups. There is some resentment of the fact that Orthodox Jews dominate the school board, although most don’t send their children to public school.
Wieder, who is Hasidic, said: “It’s unfortunate that it takes a tragedy like this to bring us together. You know, we have a lot of communities with different cultures. The Haitians have their culture and the Hasidim, especially, tend to be insular. But we are together on this. We are interacting like I’ve never seen before.”
Jasmin, who took office last month, is Haitian-American and her husband was in Port-au-Prince when the quake struck. For two tense days she did not know his fate.
“It was a miracle from God when I heard he was alive,” she said. “Thank God he’s OK. A lot of my neighbors tell me they still can’t find their loved ones.”
The mayor said she believes the cooperation and sympathy prompted by the disaster will be a silver lining.
“This will stick,” she said. “We won’t need a disaster to bring us together.”
People of Haitian descent make up more than a third of the population of 25,000 in Spring Valley, 40km north of New York City. The village had the highest concentration of Haitians in any US town outside Florida in the 2000 Census.
“Everyone here is grieving because they lost a family member,” said the Reverend Dessier Predelus, a Haiti-born priest at St Joseph’s Catholic Church.
Predelus said he was touched to find an envelope containing US$275 for Haiti from Spanish-speaking parishioners, most of them poor.
New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan joined Predelus at a special Creole Mass on Thursday night for earthquake victims, getting raucous cheers from more than 600 people jamming the church and an adjoining gymnasium.
“The language God, our Father, understands best is the language of tears,” the archbishop told the congregation.
Predelus said he fears one of the results of the earthquake is the loss of a lifetime dream for some Haitians in the US.
“A lot of Haitians come here with the hope of working, gathering money and going back to Haiti,” he said.
“But now that hope has been taken away from them. I don’t think they will be able to go back to a life there, not in their lifetimes,” he said.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country