Clifford Joseph displays a Haitian flag on his desk in his North West Street office in Lima. Joseph has been a point of contact for Haitians wanting to make a new life in the Lima area.
Craig Kelly | The Lima News
LIMA — Walk along the produce section of a small grocery store on the corner of West Spring Street and Jameson Avenue and you will find some familiar items, like yams or even plantains, but you will also find such items as malanga, a root vegetable, or a bag of lalo, or dried jute leaves. Look a little farther and you will come across items like cassava bread or jasmine rice, along with spices like cinnamon sticks and star anise.
If you have any questions, however, knowing some Creole French would be helpful.
This store is helping what is becoming an increasingly large Haitian population in the Lima area find some tastes of home as they work to make a new life for themselves in west central Ohio. As conditions deteriorate and violence rises in the small Caribbean nation, more Haitians are seeking refuge in the United States, hoping to find an escape from the violence and poverty that has stricken their home.
“From what I’ve heard from other Haitians, usually Haitians will be in the northeast, especially Brooklyn, or in Florida,” Lima psychiatrist Dr. Eddy Bruno said. “In fact, at some point, either Brooklyn or Miami have more Haitians than the second [largest] city in Haiti.”
What is bringing Haitians to Lima?
A native of Haiti, Bruno has lived and worked in Lima for nearly 20 years. While he will say he is not the first Haitian to live in Lima, he was one of only a few in this area for some time, he said. However, he is now seeing a shift as more Haitians find themselves in Lima and the surrounding area, with some having been first in the Springfield area and then migrating to Lima.
“I’m not sure how it happened, but it seems like that even when they’re trying to make it to the States, they’re hearing that the Midwest has more jobs and more opportunity,” he said.
Bruno also cited the area’s lower cost of living as a draw for those in the Haitian community.
For John Noel, the owner of the Spring Street grocery store, that is what brought him to the area, having lived first in Columbus before moving to Lima two years ago.
“Haitians are everywhere in the United States,” he said. “They need the jobs, so they come and get the jobs. They like to work.”
What challenges do they face?
That goal of employment is not always an easy one for Haitians coming to the community with few resources and obstacles like language barriers to overcome. Born in Haiti but now working in Lima, Clifford Joseph operates an office to help Haitian arrivals work through obtaining needed documentation and point them toward resources linking them with food, housing and education, and this has proved difficult.
“They don’t have all their papers most of the time,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t even speak the language. That’s another problem. Most of the time, when they move here, they rent a room from someone but the lease is not in their name, so it’s not easy for them to register their kid for school because as soon as they go to the school, they want proof of living and stuff like that. In Florida or New York or Georgia, because there are already a lot of Haitians already established in the community, they know them, so it’s easier for them to find services.”
That difficulty has also been exacerbated by the large influx of Haitians, with Joseph estimating that about 5,000 Haitians have moved into the area over the last couple of years.
“I know it’s not easy for a small city like Lima,” he said. “They didn’t build the city to receive that many people. Getting 5,000 people at once, it’s not easy.”
How is the community responding?
Some in Lima have been working to address that need, with representatives from Mercy Health-St. Rita’s Medical Center starting a dialogue over the past year with Activate Allen County and the Lima-Allen County Chamber of Commerce, as well as representation from such areas as city and county government, public health and education, to address how to best help these new arrivals.
“It started as a conversation sometime in the fall,” Mercy Health-St. Rita’s Director of Government and Community Relations Beth Keehn said. “In the last few months, it became more active just because I think all the groups are starting to feel that flux of refugees more rapidly than we had previously.”
According to Keehn, this conversation has been leading to the beginnings of a new initiative to address these issues. To this point, the work has consisted mainly of listening, whether it was to a refugee office in Columbus, to community leaders in Springfield or to the new arrivals themselves.
“What we believe some of the challenges they are facing are questions around how to navigate healthcare, transportation options, education, and that includes traditional education as well as also a big desire to get into English language classes,” Keehn said. “Employment options are a question, and then certainly housing. We’re at the very early stages of this structure.”
Bruno and Joseph echoed some of those concerns, relating stories of Haitians facing exorbitant charges to get rides to jobs or paying as much as $600 every week for housing.
“One thing we are hoping and praying is that these people won’t be taken advantage of, but this is something we are seeing a lot,” Bruno said.
Joseph emphasized that the people coming here are often not uneducated but often include lawyers, engineers, nurses or other professionals, all of whom had to leave to avoid the escalating violence in their homeland.
“They come here just looking for a better opportunity,” he said. “They are not coming to do anything wrong. All they want is better living. They are hard-working. They are not looking for handouts. All they need is to find a job and make a good living.”
