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Home
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COMMENTARY

Haiti’s tragedy shows a cruel trick of luck for
girl

Hot Topics

Staff file photo by Bill
Reinke Roselor Joissaint, former
director at Emmanuel Christian Mission, is shown in 2004. Joissaint’s daughter,
Jousely, was killed in the collapse of a school building.

ENLARGE
PHOTO

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By Mary
McCarty, Staff Writer 3:29 AM Thursday,
January 21, 2010

Little Jousely is dead, crushed under the weight of her school building in
Leogane, Haiti.

She is one of at least 50,000 dead. Only one. But she is the one I knew.

She was 5 when I met her, the daughter of the girls’ orphanage director at
the Emmanuel Christian Mission in Leogane. And what a sprite she was, getting
into everything, playing with the other girls like another little sister, even
though she lived with her mother in an upstairs apartment.

“She is the lucky one,” I thought to myself many times during my June 2004
visit to the compound which has been supported for more than 20 years by
Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Kettering.

All of the orphans seemed well-nourished and surprisingly happy, given their
circumstances, but there was a difference to Jousely’s happiness, a certain
sunniness that perhaps can only come from the knowledge that you belong to
somebody in particular.

Jousely’s mother, Roselor Joissaint, understood that very well. At the age of
11, she was among the first group of girls who came to the orphanage when it
opened in 1987. During her years as the girls home director, Joissaint treated
all the girls as if they were her own daughters.

But several years ago, Jousely left the orphanage when her mother found
another job. The other girls must have looked at her with envy: one of the lucky
ones.

Yet if she had stayed at the orphanage, she probably would be alive.

The epicenter of last week’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake was about 12.5 miles
from the Emmanuel Christian Mission compound which includes a school, church and
two orphanages. Jousely’s school is not part of that compound, but is about that
same distance from the quake’s center.

The night of the quake, Wilson Cohoon of Bellbrook made contact with his
close friend, Joel Beaucejour, director of the Emmanuel Christian Mission, who
reassured him the children were safe.

Cohoon has been heavily involved with the mission, first getting involved
through Emmanuel Lutheran Church and eventually becoming Caribbean director for
the faith-based relief agency Children of Promise International.

I felt immense relief. Countless have died, but not the children I had come
to know and love. Or so I thought. Then Cohoon passed on the news about
Roselor’s daughter. “She was killed in the collapse of a school building in
Leogane,” he said. “She was such a brilliant child.”

Cohoon had hoped to visit Jousely and her family during his last trip to
Leogane a couple of months ago.

“Now I’ll see her in heaven,” he said.

Cohoon must tend to the needs of the dozens of orphans still in the care of
Emmanuel Christian Mission, who are sleeping outside because of the considerable
damage done to the buildings and the well-founded fear of another tremor.

“Our well is still working, and that’s really good news for our kids and the
whole community,” Cohoon said. “Now we need to rebuild walls and stock food and
get the buildings reinforced so we can get our kids back inside. But our kids
are safe and that makes everything else seem incidental. You can build walls and
reinforce buildings, but you can’t bring kids back from death.”

This is the measure of the human tragedy in Haiti: The orphans sleeping under
the stars — hungry, thirsty, fearful of the next tremor — are the lucky ones for
the sheer miracle of being alive.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or
[email-masked]

Contributions can be mailed to Children of Promise International, 6844 Loop
Road, Centerville, OH 45459. Indicate Haiti Relief in memo field.

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