my head is shaking, but the ground is not

Eighteen-year-old Genevieve Blain says that after the earthquake, she prayed every day for New York. She left Haiti a few weeks after the January 12 earthquake—her family had tourist visas to the United States—but there are still times when she feels like the earth is shaking. “My head is shaking, but the ground is not,” she says.

I met Genevieve at the Haiti Earthquake Family Support Center, an operation supported by a triad of church-based programs in New York City. The center, which opened just six days after the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, offers a variety of legal and social services to Haitians throughout the city.

Genevieve and her parents visited the center to continue their application for deferred action status, which essentially guarantees a stay from deportation while petitioners file for residency, work, or citizenship benefits in the United States. While this program is generally restricted to extreme cases, in July, US Citizen & Immigration Control announced that it would consider applications from Haitians who arrived in the country after the January 12 earthquake. Temporary protected status (TPS), a separate program granting temporary immigration status, is limited to Haitians living in the United States prior to the earthquake.

There are many, like the Blains, who arrived on tourist visas or as a guardian for a U.S. citizen child. Unable to work or, in some cases, attend school legally, they often rely on friends and family for lodging and financial support—a difficultly compounded by the challenges of life in New York and its small apartments, thin paychecks, and $2.25 bus and subway fares.

Genevieve wants to study medicine, maybe at The King’s College, but she first needs to study English so she can pass her TOFEL exam. She spent her last semester of high school in Miami, where she got her first C. She was bored, she said—the classes were so much easier than in Haiti, so she stopped paying attention. Equally astounding was that many of her classmates knew Creole—“my Creole!” she exclaims.

“I wasn’t like this in Haiti,” she says, looking down at her jeans, which are tighter than she would like. Her mother and father go out, but she doesn’t have a key to the house they share with her uncle and his family, so she mainly just sits inside, “watching SpongeBob.”

In Haiti, Genevieve’s father taught music at the National School of Art. He plays violin and piano, and was joyfully reunited with his violin after a friend brought it from Port-au-Prince earlier this summer. “For days, it was, ‘Oh, my violin! My violin!’” says Genevieve. Still, says her father, he cannot play. “I am not ready,” he tells me. “I feel too bad.”