Chicago Evacuee Desperate to Get Back to Haiti

CHICAGO (Jan. 22) – After losing an uncle and cousins in last week's 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti, Joseph Avril, 29, didn't have the courage to look at his wife when he and their two children left her behind as they embarked from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince for the airport.

Because she entered the United States illegally, Yvetha Avril, who spent two days at the embassy petitioning for a passport, wasn't permitted to join her family and about 70 others fleeing Haiti on a United Airlines flight bound for Chicago.

"It tore my heart to leave," said Avril, among 170 Haitian earthquake evacuees currently living in a shelter in Lawndale, a mostly African-American neighborhood on Chicago's west side.

Their journey began when a United Airlines plane took off from O'Hare Airport on Wednesday morning with 15,000 pounds of donated water, tents, communications equipment and relief workers. The plane returned late Wednesday with 77 evacuees, received and processed by the Red Cross in the basement of the Hilton Hotel attached to O'Hare. The evacuees were taken in city buses to the shelter in Lawndale. Another United flight Thursday evacuated 170 people, who were also brought to Lawndale.

At least half of the evacuees are now en route to Miami or New York, where relatives await them.

"It was a logistical nightmare," said Mark Mulroe, vice president of the Chicago-based nonprofit A Safe Haven Foundation, which manages the shelter. But many city departments lent support, pledging not to repeat the bungled Haiti evacuation to Pittsburgh, where 53 Haitian orphans arrived barefoot and injured. "The city of Chicago was determined not to let that happen," Mulroe said.

At least 75,000 people died, 200,000 were injured and about 1 million people were displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake, according to a Jan. 20 report by the U.N. Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. About 500,000 people in Haiti have received food, water and hygiene kits, according to USAID, which has spent $167 million to date on relief efforts. Jerome Oetgen, an official at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, said 11,399 U.S. citizens had been relocated from Haiti as of Saturday afternoon.

Avril, a Haiti native who moved to West Palm Beach, Fla., in 1990 and returned to his homeland in 2007, operates a charity for Haitian orphans and a grade school in Port-au-Prince. He was at his office in the city's Carrefour neighborhood when the earthquake hit. His family was in a hotel Avril was preparing to open for business this month in Clersine, a neighborhood close to the airport. "The earth started to shake from side to side, and all I heard was thwoop, thwoop, thwoop, thwoop!" Avril said, his arms swaying. He left his car and walked three hours through the buckled streets to get home. The Avrils slept in tents outside the remnants of their unfinished hotel. "I had to sleep with a gun in my hand," he said.

A Safe Haven is now arranging a way for Avril to board a commercial flight to Miami, where he will leave his children, 2 and 6 years old, with his mother before returning to Port-au-Prince for his wife. Once he has secured her evacuation to the United States, Avril, who harbors presidential ambitions, will get back to work. "It's time for me to step in," he says. "I will be apart from my family, but I might help save a nation."