Whatever Happened To ... ... the family missing, then found, in Haiti
by Wil Haygood On Jan. 12, 2010, William Saint-Hilaire slipped into profound darkness. His wife and six children were among the missing in the 7.0 earthquake that had devastated Haiti, killing thousands. He had nightmares. He wondered, while sitting and pacing in his small basement apartment in Silver Spring, what part of Port-au-Prince they might be entombed in. But after several days of silence, the Saint-Hilaires emerged from the rubble, having escaped their home in the Petionville neighborhood and moved to a makeshift camp. Saint-Hilaire, 46, called his family’s survival through the earthquake and its immediate aftermath — chronicled along with Saint-Hilaire’s vigil in a Jan. 21 story on the front page of The Washington Post — “a miracle.” Since then, donations and other aid
have poured into the devastated country. After months of living in tents, the family was able to move to a small home near its old one. “But my wife is very depressed,”
Saint-Hilaire says. “I was unable to get them out on humanitarian visas.” Saint-Hilaire says immigration
officials denied him the visas because there were too many people with severe injuries who needed assistance first. Some had lost limbs; others needed life- saving surgery. Saint-Hilaire's family — his wife, Lissa; Billy, 16; Bella, 15; Bello, 14; Benedict, 13; and 8-year-old twins Belline and Bellinda — suffered
William
Saint-Hilaire's tears of relief in January.
who accused the then- president and his cronies of human rights abuses. Saint-Hilaire’s wife feared he would not survive, given the political dynamics, so he left for New York, then made his way to Maryland. He worked hard to improve his English and joined the ministerial staff at Eglise Baptiste du Calvaire church in Adelphi, rising
From the U.S. GeoloGical SUrvey
42 // Number of aſtershocks following the Haiti earthquake, as of March 10
scratches and little more, save for the trauma of seeing buildings collapse and encountering dead bodies everywhere. Lately, Saint-Hilaire has started to
worry about Benedict and the twins. “They all have eye infections that keep coming back after they go away for a little while. We think the infections are from all the days they spent sleeping on the ground and the bacteria.” Saint-Hilaire first came to America
in 2003. In Haiti, he had been a teacher. He was outspoken against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, joining others
to become assistant pastor. He got work installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda. All along, he dreamed of the day he could bring his family to America. Saint-Hilaire was recently laid
off from his job in Bethesda. But he’s grateful to still have work at the church. His dream now is more modest, but it keeps him going forward: “My kids really want me to come back. … I only want to go visit them, even if I can’t get them out right now.”
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the accumulations, the piles weighing people down. You see how difficult it is to divest yourself of all that stuff. I went into the business to sell
antiques and perhaps serve a little tea. But I’ve been selling a lot more lawn mowers than anything else. Everything gets a price tag, from the remainder of tinfoil in the kitchen drawer to the $25,000 painting. With the economy, more customers are shopping for necessities — the cleaning supplies, the tools, the appliances — than are
looking for true treasures. Even people who’d have never thought about buying someone else’s things are coming to estate sales rather than paying retail. It can be traumatic. I tell [family members], especially when it’s a daughter or a son whose parent has died, to walk into every room, and if something draws you to it, go back again. If it’s still speaking to you, keep it. But you should not load your basement with a box full of stuff just because you think your mother would
want you to. If you do, you’re going to be calling me — or your kids are going to be calling someone — to get rid of all this junk that nobody cares about. If I keep something, it has to be
extremely sentimental. Everything I own has a story: It may not have started out as my story, but when I chose to bring it into my life, it became part of it. We all write our own history, and our stuff is often the only thing left to tell that story. I don’t want my story to be a bunch of junk that doesn’t mean anything.
OctOber 17, 2010 | THe WaSHingTOn POST Magazine 7
PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA DAVIDSON
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