Don’t send me back to HaitiBy Indarjit Seuraj and Sean Douglas Friday, March 5 2010
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Anelie Joseph ...
She lost her mother and father to the 7.0 magnitude earthquake which decimated Haiti just twelve days into the new year. And yesterday, 25-year-old Anelie Joseph, from Port-au-Prince, made a stirring appeal for help from the TT Government.
“I am here and I am asking the Government of Trinidad to help me to stay and work in Trinidad,” Joseph said during an interview yesterday.
Through an interpreter, a Ghanaian friend, Joseph said after the earthquake which claimed the lives of her father Victor Joseph, 55, a truck driver, and her mother Rochelle Loflume, 50, a seamstress, there was no reason for her to stay in Haiti again.
“I came here because I have nobody,” she said.
Joseph entered Trinidad on Tuesday after boarding a flight from the neighbouring Dominican Republic. She was detained by Immigration officers at the Piarco International Airport.
On the brink of being deported, she was rescued by the Traditional African National Association (TANA) and the Emancipation Support Committee.
She was booked for a Copa Airlines flight destined for Dominican Republic before TANA and Kafra Kambon stepped in.
She was released in the custody of a close friend following the intervention of TANA. She was also ordered to pay a $3,000 bond on her release.
This is yet to be paid and TANA also joined in the appeal for assistance for the Haitian.
“We are asking the State to waive the bond in light of the crisis in Haiti,” TANA official David Walcott said yesterday.
Joseph is now seeking asylum in Trinidad.
Asked if she wanted to return home, she replied, “No.”
“Right now I don’t think I can go back because there is nothing there,” she said.
UNC chairman Jack Warner yesterday said he would pay the $3,000 bond to help Joseph stay in Trinidad, as he chided Foreign Affairs Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon for not doing so herself.
Asked why he was helping her, Warner told Newsday he had personally visited Haiti and seen the devastating conditions. Further, he had last week hosted the president of the Haitian Football Federation.
Warner said Joseph had no family left in Haiti. “We must extend the milk of human kindness to her. I will give her a job at the Centre of Excellence. She can live with her sister nearby in St Augustine, so she can build her life anew,” he said.
He said Gopee-Scoon should have asked the Government to give Joseph shelter, but instead he had got the impression that the minister had been nonchalant towards her plight. “As Shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs, I shall do what Paula Gopee Scoon won’t do.”
At yesterday’s post-Cabinet news conference, Gopee-Scoon had given a business-as-usual impression when asked of the Government’s policy towards Haitians.
