My father was 6 months old when his parents swaddled him up, packed a few belongings and moved from Chattanooga to Haiti. From 1945 to 1952, they were missionaries there. Among the friends they made was a teenager named Raymond Joseph. His father headed a church association, and faith united our families.
Early on, Mr. Joseph had an enterprising spirit.
“I was a very inquisitive young boy,” he told me during a recent phone interview from Washington. He read feverishly and eventually started a Christian newspaper.
That go-getterism notwithstanding, he never imagined he would find himself an honored guest at a State of the Union address some 60 years later. But on Jan. 27, as Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, he took his place near the first lady as her husband addressed both houses of Congress and millions of Americans.
His 78-year-old visage beamed, though it must have been a bittersweet moment. Mr. Joseph’s ambassadorship tragically took on a high profile with the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed possibly 200,000 of his countrymen and left countless more injured and without shelter. Perhaps one in 13 residents of the capital, Port-au-Prince, died, the Los Angeles Times reports.