Word: veut
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More than a year ago, Francois, his parents and 116 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...
...Clinton Administration argues that as a rule, Haitian boat people are fleeing poverty, not political persecution. When he debarked from Dieu Veut, Jonas Esterlin, 22, found it hard to feel that way. Spotted by police as soon as the Coast Guard cutter tied up, he was ordered to a separate area on the docks. There, he says, he was pistol-whipped in the head and jabbed with an electric cattle prod. "The police kept yelling that we had fled to show support for Aristide," Esterlin recalls, "and that we should all be killed." Terrified, he broke and ran. Police were...
...even more chilling reception awaited Obrin Ossou, a political activist who had spent weeks hiding in mangrove swamps along the coast before finally landing a berth on the Dieu Veut. According to his brother Miguel, Ossou was pulled from the line of refugees as he disembarked in Port-au-Prince. He has not been heard from since. For the past year, Miguel has paid radio stations to broadcast appeals for anyone who might know what happened to his brother. "I believe he is dead," he confesses. Local villagers are more certain of Ossou's fate. "He was beaten to death...
When Nichols Pierre, a cattle tender, boarded the Dieu Veut, he carried only a torn plastic satchel of clothes and a new pair of shoes that he hoped would bring him luck in America. In the course of selling everything else he had ever accumulated, Pierre discovered that at age 38, his net worth amounted to slightly less than $23. Now it is zero; he sleeps on the floor of friends' houses and begs or steals food to survive...
...protect its memories, such as they have become. Already bereft of a future, the town now finds itself without its past as well. Yet astonishingly, plans are already in the works for still another boat, whose keel is secretly being laid a few hundred yards from where the Dieu Veut was launched. Rumor has it that about 1,000 similar boats are under construction by neighboring communities up and down the coast. If the embargo continues and Aristide fails to return, the call for "leaving day" will be passed by word of mouth, and all the boats will embark...