Word: petitions
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...other Haitians had set out with a desperate sense of hope aboard a leaking sloop called Dieu Veut (God Wants). For two days they rolled and pitched across the rough stretch of sea between Haiti and Cuba that sailors call the Windward Passage. They had left their homes in Petit-Trou-de-Nippes, a town of 1,000 perched on the shore of Haiti's impoverished southern claw, provisioned with only two bags of rice and a single 50-gal. barrel of water. Even at sea they continued to take on new passengers -- some arriving in dugout canoes, others...
...refugees had left Petit-Trou in the first place four months after the coup that deposed Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991, when soldiers began arriving in trucks to round up suspected supporters of the exiled President. They hunted in particular for a group of 65 young men who were organizing a peasant co-op. Desperate not to lose the best of its youth, the community elected to pour its savings, its hopes and its most promising citizens into a single boat to America. Selling everything but their beds, the town cobbled together $1,650 and persuaded its wealthiest resident...
After the venture failed, those who made their way back to Petit-Trou found a very different village from the one they left. Before the expedition the town was tense, fearful, expectant. Today it is hollow and listless, its surviving residents thin with despair. In the past three months no mail has been delivered and no trucks have arrived with supplies. There are no stores, no cars, no doctors. There are no books in the schools, which doesn't matter because most parents can no longer afford to send their children. The hospital has ceased to function, and the only...
Having gambled everything in the hope that their relatives and friends would be able to find work in the U.S. and send money home, the residents of Petit- Trou are discovering that the refugees' return did more than demolish expectations; it has also robbed the town of all vitality. In a community already knocked flat by poverty, the returnees have come to make up a separate and uniquely destitute class, devoid of land, possessions and hope. Having sold everything but what they could carry, they own nothing. Farmers can no longer till because someone else has title to their land...
...were kind of resigned entering the petit final," Brooks said. "But we had to do well, otherwise we would have been mad at ourselves. We knew that if we relaxed, this could be ours...