Haitians Suffer With No Answers On Residency
When the earth moved in Haiti two years ago, it brought more misery than people there could imagine. Many left their ruined country and headed for South Florida.Myrna Armamd was one of these people.
Today, she sits in a class in Little Haiti learning English. She's trying to put her life back together.
"My house fell over my children and I," said Armamd to CBS 4's Ted Scouten.
Her kids were trapped until neighbors pulled them free. She, like most in Port-au-Prince, lost her home, her belongings and her business- a bakery.
Now her kids are here trying to get an education while her husband is in Haiti trying to earn a living to send money to the family.
"It's hard when you're unemployed," Armamd explains. "I 'm unemployed here with my children and he's there trying to make ends meet and trying to pay for the courses here."
Marie Solange Gabriel is in the same class learning English. She traveled the Caribbean and Central America for business before the quake.
Today, she has nothing and is still trying to put aside the horror of searching the bodies for signs of her sister.
"The smell, I couldn't deal with it," she recalled. "I didn't even have gloves! I had to go through the dead to find my sister. I didn't have any gloves, can you imagine? It was horrible! It was horrible."
Gabriel did find her sister in a hospital days later, but she died, leaving Gabriel and her family still working to recover.
Now, a question looms over Gabriel, Armamd and the heads of many Haitian families who came to the U.S. after the quake. They are worried about their legal status here which expires in January of next year. Many hope they're granted some kind of residency or they'll be forced to go back to Haiti if conditions are good enough.
At this point, they just have no answers.
