La Ronge Woman Awaiting Word From Mom In Haiti

La Ronge Woman Awaiting Word From Mom In Haiti

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 12:44

A northern Saskatchewan woman who grew up in Haiti says what she wants most right now is a phone call from her mother, who was in the area when last week’s earthquake hit.

Guerline Bailey, who is now a French Immersion teacher in La Ronge, says that while she has now heard that relatives living near where her mom was had survived the quake and “everybody was okay”, she and her siblings in Canada have yet to hear from their mother.

Bailey says that’s been hard to cope with, especially knowing her mother was staying just a few miles from the country’s hard-hit capital, Port-au-Prince.

“The first few hours, I didn’t know what to think — (I feared) that she would be dead, being so close to Port-au-Prince. But I kind of had also the intuition that she was okay. But I had both things debating in my mind, whether she was alive and safe somewhere, or whether she was dead under the rubble,” she says.

Bailey says she hopes that people in La Ronge, and elsewhere in the province, will be open to helping aid organizations meet Haiti’s immediate and long-term needs.