Three years ago, her daughter, then 25, was almost murdered by her boyfriend.

Douge came home from work one evening and found Charline and boyfriend, who everyone calls “Tiboy,” fighting in the living room.  Douge said it seemed like a normal fight and went on to make dinner for her other three children and her mother.

“They speak English fast,” Douge said of her daughter’s fight.  “I didn’t understand everything they said.  I understood that she said she was no longer going to be with him because she didn’t like men who talk behind her back.”

Tiboy, who was 21 at the time and is currently in jail, is from the Bahamas and was living in the United States illegally.  Charline said she would marry him to help with his immigrant papers and legal status in the United States.  When she broke up with him that evening, he tried to kill her.

Douge heard her daughter say she was going to the bathroom, and the boyfriend followed her.

“They were still fighting a lot,” Douge said.  “Then after, I didn’t hear her voice no more.  When I tried to go in the bathroom, the door was locked.  I called my daughter’s name, but she didn’t say nothing.  My mind told me to just call the police and tell them that he killed my daughter.  Then I did exactly what my mind told me to do.”

Douge’s son, whose name she prefers to keep private for fear of Tiboy’s retribution, broke down the door, looked behind Charline’s boyfriend and saw his sister lying on her stomach on the floor with blood around her head.

The doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital told her that her daughter had a 5 percent chance to live, a diagnosis Douge refused to believe.

“God blew on my daughter, and she is still with me today,” Douge said.

Charline is now in a wheelchair.

Marliene Bastien is the founder and executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami, a center founded in Little Haiti in 1991 to help low-income Haitian families in Miami, targeting women as a core service.

Bastien said domestic abuse is a problem in Haitian culture that women can help to eradicate.  Her organization is making the first steps to do so.

“It is up to us to change the culture of violence against these women,” Bastien said. “There should be an outrage right now among Haitian women.  We are the ones that raise these men.”

Solange Avreliene is a coordinator of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami’s domestic violence education classes where she and other members of the community are planning an education program to stop violence in the Haitian home.

“I don’t usually cry,” Avreliene said.  “But I always cry after hearing stories like the one Yvrose told me when she called and asked to join the group.”

Douge called Avreliene when she heard about Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami on a Sunday radio program.  She said she wanted to share her story, so more people did not end up like her daughter.

Bastien said that domestic abuse in the male-centric Haitian culture could worsen during the current economic recession if women do not try to put an end to it.

“Stopping [domestic violence] begins when men are little boys,” Bastien said.  “The more men feel powerless in the workplace, the more they try to gain that power somewhere else.  Men who cannot get a job, men who cannot get immigration papers, these are the men that hit their wives and children.”

Douge, who also has another daughter, 16, and a younger son, 19, recently had to deal with such situation at home.

“My son’s girlfriend called me and told me, ‘Your son slapped me.’  I almost died,” she said.  “I told my son, ‘Look at your sister.  If you do that, you don’t live in my house no more.’  He never did it again.”

A mural by Haitian-American artist Serge Toussaint on the corner of NE 2nd Ave. and 79th St. in Little Haiti. Photo by Daniela Dello Joio

The Haitian immigrant community in Miami is optimistic toward President Barack Obama but disappointed the new administration has not yet granted the long-awaited Temporary Protected Status.  TPS would allow Haitians to work in the United States legally and send money home to their families.

On a recent visit to Haiti to meet with Haitian President René Préval, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States will provide $287 million in aid this year to Haiti to fund the creation of jobs to build infrastructure and retire some of the country’s debt.  Hurricanes Gustav and Ike and two tropical storms swept through the Caribbean in less than a month in September 2008, destroying over 15 percent of Haiti’s GDP.

Regarding TPS, Clinton said that the new administration is looking carefully at the policy it inherited and is considering how best to help Haitians working in the United States and sending money back to their home countries.

“If we do make any changes in TPS status, it will go back to the beginning of the Obama administration,” Clinton said.  “People who were [in the United States] before President Obama became president would be eligible.  People who came after would not be.”  Secretary Clinton said no final decision has been made. 

Marlene Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami, a social advocacy program for Haitian families in Miami, said Haitians are looking to Obama to award them TPS.

 ”Justice delayed is justice denied,” Bastien said.  “President Bush denied TPS to Haitians twice despite the fact that Haiti qualifies more than any other country right now in light of the recent devastations caused by four hurricanes.”

 Clinton said that Obama has not yet granted TPS to Haitians because he and his advisors fear it will cause too many Haitians to immigrate to the United States.

 ”We don’t want to encourage other Haitians to make the dangerous journey across the water,” Clinton said.

 Bastien said the U.S. government’s assumption that TPS would cause a “mass exodus” of Haitians to the United States is “absurd.” 

 ”It makes strong economic, national security and humanitarian sense to help our closest and neediest neighbor - Haiti,” Bastien said.  “Every Haitian family that lives here supports 100 families in Haiti, so it actually makes more sense to allow them to stay here legally.”

 Jean-Robert Lafortune, chairman of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, an immigrant advocacy group founded in Miami in 1997, said it is still too early to effectively predict whether the situation for Haitians in the United States and in Haiti will improve under the Obama administration.

“For the time being, he [Obama] has not sent any signal yet that Haitians will get fair treatment relative to immigration policy,” Lafortune said, adding that Haitians in Miami still have high expectations toward this new administration.  “It can’t get worse [than] during the Bush era.”

Jean Sintjoi, a resident in the area of downtown Miami known as Little Haiti, is optimistic. 

“I hope Obama understands that we voted for him to make sure that he gives us what we need because the Haitian community needs plenty of things,” he said.  “I know, I hope and I believe he is going to do something for us.”

Professor Yves Colon at the University of Miami School of Communication said sentiment in Little Haiti is positive because plans for development in Haiti during the eight years under the Bush administration were almost nonexistent.

“The only times Haitians in Miami heard from the Bush administration was when the administration was conducting deportations or [dealing] with immigration or drugs,” Colon said.  “Any change is good. That’s how I see Haitians in Little Haiti thinking.” 

Colon said that the fact that the new president is black is also a positive factor for the Haitian community in Miami.

“Haitians think that someone with a parent who is from a minority group, someone with that kind of sensibility, will have better feeling toward them and better understand what their needs are,” he said.

Visual signs of optimism for the Obama administration are everywhere in Little Haiti.  Murals of the new president populate about 10 street corners.  The murals feature large-scale portraits of the new president with phrases like, “Yes We Can,” and “President Obama, Little Haiti Wishes You the Best.”

“If I could meet him, I would ask him to help my people,” said Serge Toussaint, a Haitian graffiti artist responsible for some of the Obama murals in the Little Haiti area.  “We need help.”

In 2000, pastor Jacques Saint-Louis, Little Haiti Housing Association’s housing director, conducted a weekly Haitian radio program that ran for a seven-month period that year. The program covered various housing issues pertaining to Haitian immigrants in and around the Little Haiti area. Among the topics Saint Louis discussed were the benefits of Little Haiti Housing Association, a non-profit organization founded in 1987, intended to help Haitians in the Miami area purchase a home. Saint-Louis informed the listeners of the types of housing available in Little Haiti and spoke about the house-shopping process.

“I heard about it [Little Haiti Housing Association] on the radio, and I qualified for the program and I buy the house,” Deshommes said. “Jacques spoke Creole, and he help me a lot to buy the house.”

When she first contacted Saint-Louis, he said she tried not to seem like she needed help, but he could see that she did.

“Altagrace needed the program,” he said.  “She was working two jobs and trying to take a daughter to school. Now she is so grateful about what she got here.”

He said Deshommes has told other people about the program and at least one family has purchased a house because of her recommendation.

Carl Juste, a photojournalist at the Miami Herald who emigrated from Haiti to New York and finally to Miami when he was a child, said Haitians had to face constant struggles since the first wave of immigrants arrived in the early 1980s.   Unlike the Cubans, who were supported by the United States government on a political front, Haitians were extremely unwelcome when they arrived in Miami, Juste said.

“Just recently, Haitians have stopped becoming the black sheep, literally,” he said.

Gepsie Metellus, founder and director of Sant La Haitian Community Center, agrees.
“The pride I feel now as a Haitian American was not the same for young people in the 80s and 90s,” she said.  “Being Haitian, simply being Haitian, until about 10 years ago, you were considered to be at a high risk for AIDS.”

This stigma, according to active members in the Haitian-American community like Juste and Metellus, is just now being lifted, giving Haitians more opportunities such as the ability to own a home.

Little Haiti Housing Association’s focus is to support Haitians primarily in the Little Haiti area, said Samuel Diller, executive director of LHHA.

Along with immigration and health, affordable housing is one of the most prevalent issues Haitians face when they move to the United States.

“Housing constitutes 33 percent of most of their income,” Metellus said. “That’s a big number if you only make $14,000 dollars a year.”

Single-family homes in Little Haiti constitute 75 percent of the housing stock, but many of those homes have been illegally subdivided into as many as four apartments, Diller said. The illegally converted units rent for roughly $400 to $500 monthly. Code violations abound, and code enforcement is nearly nonexistent.

A family of six, who asked to remain anonymous to conceal the decision to purchase a home through a housing program, is living in a dilapidated trailer off of NE 2nd Ave. in Little Haiti.  The family is paying more for the rent of the trailer than it would cost to purchase the home through Little Haiti Housing Association.

Saint-Louis, referred to as “Pastor Jacques” by most of his clients, said many Haitians are ashamed to ask for help.  He clearly remembers a woman who moved from Haiti, qualified for the program, purchased a home through with LHHA but did not tell her close siblings.

“Her sister came from Haiti a few years later to live with her, and she did not even tell her own sister she used a program to buy her home,” Saint-Louis said.  “She wanted her family to think she did it alone-with her own money.”

After financial issues have been resolved, qualifying families for home ownership then participate in LHHA’s Home Ownership Training Program, consisting of nine-hour classes taught in Haitian Creole about subsidized financing and other important information about homeownership.

Diller said families or individuals must graduate from this program before they can purchase a home. Since 2007, there has been a zero percent default rate on program graduates.

A recently established post-purchase program run by LHHA is the Homeowners’ Club. This offers new homeowners an opportunity to meet for social and educational activities in a clubhouse and to work together for positive change in their community. Membership is open to anyone who has purchased a home through LHHA.

“The club is probably the best part about LHHA,” Diller said. “Someone can come in with a bank statement they cannot read or understand, and we will help them.”

“There were only about two or three Haitian families living within several blocks in a predominantly white neighborhood,” said Juste’s son, Carl, now an award-winning photographer at the Miami Herald.

“It looked like a tropical paradise,” he said. “Each home was different-none of that cookie-cutter stuff you see today in South Florida.”

The political oppression and economic hardship of François Duvalier’s rise to the Haitian presidency in 1957 period drove many Haitians of all social classes from their home to seek greater opportunity in the United States.

Most of the upper and middle classes moved to New York where job opportunities seemed more available, said Dr. Alex Stepick, an expert on Haitian immigrant relations from Florida International University’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology and the director of FIU’s Immigration and Ethnicity Institute.

But when Viter Juste, called “The Father of Little Haiti” in the Haitian community, moved his family to Miami, many Haitians in New York followed suit.

Carl, 45, said his father encouraged many middle-class Haitians he knew in New York to move to Miami because of the opportunities he saw for the community in this area.

“Everywhere he went, my father was always connected to the Haitian community and people always respected him,” Carl said. “He was like a shepherd to the sheep.”

Viter Juste, now suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, founded Little Haiti’s first book and record shop, Les Cousins Books and Records, on Aug. 4, 1973.  He wrote for a small community journal called Bulletin de la Communaute Haitienne and published an article translated as “Let’s Have a Dream.” In the article, he referred to the community as “Little Port-au-Prince,” intended to allude to “Little Havana.” The area, known now as Little Haiti that spans nearly 200 blocks on NE 2nd Ave., was then officially “born.”

Carl said in the late ’70s and ’80s, when a large influx of lower class Haitians began immigrating to the United States by boat, his father did everything he could to keep the community of Little Haiti unified.  He even helped with immigration papers.

“He was not a preacher to the community,” Carl said. “He was literally the community’s father.”

He said his father saw opportunities early on, but it was not easy for Haitians to establish an economic credibility in Miami.

“Unlike the Cubans, Haitians had no chance here,” he said about their initial arrival in Miami. “We were black.”

Today, with the help of community pioneers like his father, there are organizations throughout Miami to help Haitians with health, tax forms, immigration and jobs.  One of them is Sant La, run by director Gepsie Metellus, a close friend of Viter’s.

Metellus founded Sant La in December 2000 to address the Haitian community’s lack of understanding and awareness about available resources in South Florida for immigrant families.

“Little Haiti has always been, and still is, a transient place,” Metellus said. “When Haitians come here, they go where there are other Haitians-where they feel most comfortable. Once they obtain a bit of economic stability and get their feet on the ground, they tend to move out of Little Haiti.”

Yves Colon, a Haitian journalism professor at the University of Miami School of Communication, agrees.  He said most middle and upper class Haitians do not live in Little Haiti anymore.

“The more economically and socially they move upward, the more they move geographically up,” said Colon, referring to the migration of Haitian families to the area above 125th St. on NE Second Ave. and Biscayne Blvd.

Viter Juste is now 85 years old and has recently lost his wife of 60 years, Maria.

“My mother was Cuban,” Carl said, adding that this was a factor that helped bridge the gap between the two feuding immigrant communities in Miami in the 1970s.

Maria and Viter met in Haiti, where she went to school, and the couple had six children together.

Carl knows that the Haitian community in Miami is still very much a part of his father’s life, despite his current health condition.

“My father would never retire,” Carl said. “You don’t retire from social justice work. It was something that chose him, he didn’t choose it.”