Article Image

IPFS News Link • Haiti

As Haiti's crisis worsens, a rising number flee by sea

• chron.com, Widlore Mérancourt and Paulina Villegas

"We are lost," the captain told four dozen men, women and children squeezed tightly together on a flimsy wooden boat somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. "There is no hope."

Jeff Pierre thought of the 2-year-old son he left back in Haiti. He imagined what it would be like for the boy to grow up without a father and started crying.

It had been four days since the boat set sail from Jérémie, a coastal city near the tip of Haiti's southern peninsula, in late September. All those aboard had managed to scrounge together $250 for the trip to the United States - a small fortune in a country where a majority of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

Frustrated by Haiti's rising gang violence, political turmoil and dire economy, they'd decided to take the ultimate risk: embarking on a perilous journey by sea that has claimed the lives of an untold number of migrants.

"I said to myself, 'I need to leave,'" Pierre said. "This country does not offer me anything."


Home Grown Food