It is stories like this that I use in my case that despite some of the problems here in America, this country is by far the best option for those that live in hopeless situations.
Sphere: Related Content(miamiherald.com) One by one they walked in: five girls in spring flower dresses with their hair neatly braided, nine boys in black slacks and white shirts. No one noticed the children — ages 10 to 17 — until the priest interrupted his homily.
”These are the kids from the boat,” the Rev. Reginald Jean-Mary told a packed Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church just as the children took their seats up front.
At their first visit to the Little Haiti church, the young survivors — who had remained nameless and faceless since they arrived from Haiti on a rickety wooden sailboat that washed up on Hallandale Beach March 28 — brought tears to Notre Dame’s parishioners.
Emotions ran deep at the Sunday services — just one day after 1,200 mourners had come to the same church to bury the one known man who didn’t survive among 102 who arrived on the trip: Lifaite Lully, 24.
The children didn’t speak but gave church members an insight into their harrowing journey through a song they asked to sing in their native Creole.
”Deliver me, oh Lord. I feel I am drowning,” the children sang, some choking back tears. “Water is getting to my neck. I feel like I am stuck in mud. I don’t have anywhere for me to rest my head. A lot of people are making me suffer, they turn me into an enemy. They put me in jail for nothing.”
As the Haitian children — all designated as ”unaccompanied minors” by immigration authorities — sang, parishioners joined in and teared up. Some in the crowded church wailed loudly as if they, too, were reliving the trip that Haitians on board said took 22 days — much of it without food or water, and at one point cooking rice with saltwater. (more…)
