Celestin and his wife don’t plan on staying long.
Jean Charles Celestin, right, carries luggage belonging to his cousin Jhon Celestin, left, Jhon's wife Delta De Leon, and their daughter Chloe, in Port au Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. Jhon Celestin arrived in Haiti aboard the last flight Wednesday to the Haitian capital, a city the 38-year-old left three years ago in search of a better-paying job to help support his family.
It had stopped drizzling as Celestin left the airport and stepped out into streets choked with dust and smoke, carrying a bag in one hand and his 2-year-old daughter in the other. “This is not what I imagined, being here,” said Celestin’s wife, 26-year-old Delta de León, who was born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican father and a Haitian mother. “But here I am, although I hope to leave soon because the one thing I’ve never wanted for my daughter is for her to grow up here.”
The new plan is to return to Chile, where he built homes as a construction worker after obtaining a visa. With the pandemic drying up jobs and freezing the economy, the family decided to try their luck at the U.S.-Mexico border, traveling by foot, bus and boat at night for about a month. But first, the family planned to go to the coastal city of Jacmel in southern Haiti to see more relatives, a risky trip because it entailed crossing gang-controlled territory. Buses often form convoys for safety, and sometimes pay gangs for safe passage. The violence in that neighborhood has reached such high levels that Doctors Without Borders recently closed its clinic there after 15 years.
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