Hard search in Haiti

Sarah Kramer has an article about Haiti in The New York Times:

Jean-Paul Coffy arrived in darkness at the three-story house he grew up in, in the Nerette neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, a concrete-and-tin home where his parents still lived, and where he visited each year. It was six days after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and Mr. Coffy, a musician and teacher from Chicago, had not heard from his parents, siblings, uncles, cousins, or friends. So Mr. Coffy’s wife, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, persuaded him to go. “I came in with a candle in my hand,” Mr. Coffy said. “And I am screaming their names, and they are answering!”
His mother thought he was a ghost. “Oh my God, oh my God, why is God punishing me? Making me think my son is here, and I know he can’t get here,” he recalled her crying out that night. “And I said, ‘It’s really me. I’m here, I’m here.’” Mr. Coffy found his parents near a back room— the only part of the house still standing— having survived on bonbon salé, a Haitian cracker similar to Saltines.
In the three weeks since, they have traveled eight hours across Haiti’s dusty roads and slept in the hallways of hospitals in the neighboring Dominican Republic, and Mr. Coffy has spent thousands of dollars on securing government documents, as well as on fixers, housing, food, and patchwork transportation, as he tries to secure permission for his parents to return with him to Chicago.
Mr. Coffy shared his ordeal— not unlike that of countless other United States residents in Haiti trying to help family members— in a series of telephone interviews from the Dominican Republic. His father, Reserve Coffy, 68, was unharmed in the earthquake, but his mother, Zilania Joacin, 67, a diabetic who recently had a hip operation, broke the same leg, which was “so swollen you couldn’t touch it,” Mr. Coffy said.
That first night together the three of them slept in the open air, afraid to stay in the house’s surviving room. In the morning, Mr. Coffy realized why no one had heard his parents’ calls for help. Their block was filled with wreckage and the stench of the dead.
After hours of walking and picking his way through the debris, he found a working pharmacy still stocked with the blood pressure medicine his mother needed, another with insulin, and a third with painkillers. He paid three times the normal cost.
A brother and a sister died in the earthquake, and another brother is still missing. Of his surviving siblings in Haiti, one has two children who broke legs in the quake, and the others are poor and scattered through the countryside. So Mr. Coffy decided to take his parents to Santo Domingo, where he thought it would be easier to get help.
But Caribe Tours, the bus company he took to Haiti from the Dominican Republic when he flew in from Chicago, would not let his parents board without passports, which were lost in the earthquake; so he paid 2,000 Haitian dollars (about $250) to wrangle a shaded pickup truck known as a tap tap to take them to the border town of Las Caobas, his mother stretched out on a mattress, wailing at each bump in the road.
He managed to get papers granting his parents a one-month stay in the Dominican Republic, paying about $500 to a fixer. Another $58 bought the full back seat of an air-conditioned bus to Santo Domingo, the capital. It was there that Mr. Coffy and his parents visited four hospitals. At one, a private clinic, X-rays showed that Ms. Joacin would need a hip replacement, but because her leg was infected she would have to wait three months. Father and son held each other that night on a small bench beside her bed. “It was the first time that I actually slept,” Mr. Coffy remembered. “It had been three days.” The one-night hospital stay cost $359, depleting Mr. Coffy’s bankroll, so his wife has wired him $3,600 from Chicago. Mr. Coffy, the sixth of nine children, had been sending about $500 a month to his parents before the earthquake, he said.
Ms. Joacin was given a cast for her leg and a cot in a hallway at Darío Contreras, a large public hospital teeming with earthquake survivors. The Dominican Republic’s health ministry estimated that the country’s hospitals had cared for about 7,000 Haitians as of Tuesday. Worried that the hospital food— oatmeal, white rice, spaghetti— would worsen his mother’s diabetes, Mr. Coffy sneaked meals in from the outside for her and hid them under a table. He also posted a little sign near her head: “Do not feed her in any way.”
After more than two weeks in the hospital, spent mostly in the hallway, Mr. Coffy and his parents moved Monday night into a room with two beds at a church facility. On Tuesday, Mr. Coffy received new passports for his parents from the Haitian Embassy; he had an appointment scheduled for Thursday with the United States Consulate in Santo Domingo to apply for temporary visas to take them to Chicago. Another possibility would be humanitarian parole, a special temporary immigration category that is rarely granted. His case will be particularly difficult, immigration experts say, because Mr. Coffy, while a legal resident with a green card, is not a United States citizen. “You can imagine the number of injured Haitians who have loved ones in the States who want to get here,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the nonprofit Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.
Mr. Coffy lives in Kenwood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, with his wife, Yakini Ajanaku-Coffy, and their ten-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter. The couple met in 1994 when she was Chicago’s cultural attaché for Haiti and he was the keyboardist in a Haitian band, the Boukman Eksperyans; having returned to Chicago in 2002, after living for years in Haiti, the couple now run a music-themed preschool called La Grande Famille. After deciding that Mr. Coffy would travel to Haiti to look for his family, the couple pulled together supplies like cereal bars and water purification tablets, and $1,500 in cash, including $1,000 from the mother of his son’s best friend (others have donated more than $7,000 through a blog). The couple traded cellphones, since hers is a BlackBerry, so he could get e-mail messages. Hours later, they were at O’Hare International Airport with their son, Akin, who was crying. “He said, ‘Dad, you could die there,’” Mr. Coffy said. Mr. Coffy had promised Akin that he would return by 3 February, but now says it might be another month.
When Akin asked his mother last week when his father would be back, she told him: “When the job is done, baby, when the job is done. He didn’t go this far to turn back.”