For the last two months, the Casseus family has been safe in the United States and far from their devastated home in Haiti, but their struggles are far from over.
A family of seven, finding friends who could take in the whole family was a great challenge they resolved by separating.
“It was a hard decision, but I believe God has a plan for them because they are alive,” said Jean Pierre Casseus, the father of five, speaking Creole.
Mr. Casseus, 46, was visiting friends in Boston when the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Caribbean country on Jan. 12. It took him 48 hours — the hardest hours of his life, he said — to find out if his family in Tabarre, about 15 miles from the capital of Port-au-Prince, had survived.
On Feb. 21, his wife, Ismane Casseus, and his younger daughter, Ann Esther, 8, came to Chattanooga with the help of the family’s longtime Haitian friend Hairline Julien.