Meet Your Neighbors

One of the few things she feels deprived without is fresh juice, straight from the orange or grapefruit or pineapple. When she talks about such a luxury she seems to be inwardly licking her lips with pleasure. But the cost of even the cartons of fresh-from-concentrate juice at the supermarket is prohibitive. "Sometimes," Naomi acknowledges, "you'd like to buy real orange juice. But it costs $4 a gallon, so you buy powder and make a poor substitute for $2.50."

Naomi frowns, patting the coarse black hair that keeps trying to escape from her small ponytail. Yesterday was a depressing day. She went to several agencies to ask for help with her rent. Some of them had located food vouchers and rent assistance for her in the past. This time she got nowhere. Her eyes look reddened, as though she'd been squinting into the sun all day, which she had. "I was so tired," she recalls. "I didn't eat anything all day, and I felt weak. All week, every day, I take the jitney up to [the Center for Information and Orientation, a nonprofit agency affiliated with Notre Dame d'Haiti Catholic Church]. I spend two dollars [for the jitney] every day. Every day they tell me to bring documents, so I keep coming back with the papers they ask for. And yesterday I got there and she says we ran out of money; they told me that in 2003 they're going to have something."

Catholic Charities told her the same thing, as did other agencies whose names she can't remember. Now, say workers at Sant La, there just isn't any rent-assistance money anywhere. The county's Community Action Agency does pay some rent in emergencies, but only after the landlord has gone to court to obtain a three-day eviction notice. Ironically the reason Naomi wasn't able to have her rent paid this time was the fault of her landlord, who refused until it was too late to sign a notarized statement the organizations required before they would assist her.

Naomi dreams of a steady job with long hours. Many of her friends have become licensed as certified nursing assistants (CNA), and she knows her prospects would greatly improve if she did the same. CNAs don't make much more money than homemakers, but they're in demand at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. "I just need to take the state [CNA licensing] test," Naomi explains. "Then I'm going to work sixteen hours a day."

She has been taking classes to prepare her for the state-administered CNA licensing exam, but that costs $87. She'll just have to wait until other expenses are taken care of. Assuming they are. "We went last November, December, and January without a phone," Naomi admits. Her telephone service was cut off again a week ago. She lifts an index finger, taps at an eyebrow. "When the electric bill comes, I have to think who can I ask to give me twenty dollars to pay it. I go to different people. I guess I'll get twenty dollars from one, another fifteen dollars. It's humiliating but I accept it because I don't know what else to do."

Not that she isn't always mindful her life may have been saved by coming here when she did, in 1993, during the violent aftermath of the military coup that deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991. "When I was in my country I was [politically] involved," Naomi says. "I was a delegate for the electoral council to oversee the election, so after the coup everyone knew I was in danger. For three months I went into hiding in Jacmel, my mother's hometown. Then my family sent me and my son to Miami."

In Miami Naomi and Antoine stayed for a few weeks with a friend of the family, then moved into a Little Haiti apartment on NE Second Avenue not far from where they now live. In late 2000 her mother came to live with them, but Naomi finally sent Rosalia back to Haiti after less than a year, in July 2001. "Because I cannot support her," Naomi says. "If I could, maybe she wouldn't have died. She was nine months without medical care when we started looking for a doctor to see her. She could walk, but she was sick. Everywhere we went they ask if she has papers. They tell us we have to pay. Finally I realize it's impossible. My mother said, 'Why don't you just take me back home.'" Naomi adds: "Life is very hard for Haitians in this country."

Rosalia died almost a year later, at the same time Naomi was desperate to pay her rent for May and June. She recalled hearing Leonie Hermantin of Sant La speak at a neighborhood crime-watch meeting one night several weeks earlier, and she remembered Hermantin urging her listeners to call her if they didn't know where else to go for help. Naomi figured that described her exactly. "I could not go nowhere," says Naomi. "That's why I call Ms. Hermantin."