NORTH MIAMI, Fla. – South Florida’s Haitian community is pleading for international help as the country has been forced into a state of emergency amid ongoing violence and attacks.
Gepsie Metellus, the executive director of Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, an advocacy and outreach center in North Miami, said her organization is seeing an influx of people.
“We’re providing this pathway to sustainability, to prosperity, to stability for those who have been pushed out of Haiti,” said Metellus. “Those who have had to flee, run for their lives, those who found just no other way to survive. We want to be sure that we in this organization are the face of hope.”
Out of a situation, she says, that most people saw coming.
There have been no elections since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021, with conditions only deteriorating in the time since.
Currently, there is still no word on when the current Prime Minister Ariel Henry will return to the country following a trip to Kenya to ink a United Nations-backed deal to send troops in to try restoring order.
“He’s not managed to provide security for the country, he’s not even managed to govern,” Michelle Pamies, with the Haitian-American Foundation for Democracy, said of Henry.
Pamies, and others, believe it’s time for a new position, new policy, and new leadership to bring Haiti back from the brink.
“We need support, we need assistance, but we also need the U.S. to recognize that it backed the wrong horse,” she said. “Help us to achieve a government of credible individuals so that we can at least move forward.”