From her kitchen in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Geralde Gabeau calls her sister Guerda Vital Previlon, the oldest of nine siblings and the only one stubborn enough to remain in Haiti.
Gabeau asks the same questions each time she calls: “How are you? How is the country? When are you finally coming here?”
Gabeau can sense when her sister is downplaying how difficult things are. If she hears a subtle tone shift, she’ll recruit other family members to check up on Previlon. When Gabeau hangs up, she sighs deeply and begins to cry.
“I cannot cry with her on the phone because if I do, it’s going to worry her more. It’s how we protect each other,” Gabeau told GBH News. “But it’s like, when is this going to end? When are we going to be comfortable knowing that she’s safe, that nothing will happen?”
After Gabeau moved out of Haiti 24 years ago, she and Previlon would visit each other regularly. That changed in recent years when Haiti’s humanitarian crisis reached an unprecedented level of instability and gang activity became so pervasive that Previlon was forced into lockdown.
“When you live in Haiti right now, every day, you are at risk for kidnapping or being killed,” Gabeau said. “We’re worried about her because with the work that she’s doing and because people know who she is and what she does, she’s at great risk.”
Both sisters work in tandem as founders and executive directors of their own respective nonprofits: Gabeau at the Mattapan-based Immigrant Family Services Institute and Previlon at The Haitian Out-of-School Youth Livelihood Initiative in Port-au-Prince.
“I am alone in Haiti,” Previlon said in a video call with GBH News earlier this month. “(Gabeau) always wants me to come to the U.S. to work, and I always tell her that the job that I’m doing in Haiti is so important for the children, for the youth, for the women. No, I have decided to stay in my country.”
The siblings grew up in Port-Salut, a coastal beach town in southwestern Haiti, raised by parents who taught them to put others first and share anything they had. The family later moved to the capital city of Port-au-Prince to be closer to schools, quickly becoming involved in a church community that focused on providing humanitarian aid.
Growing up, Previlon remembers how their mother, a teacher, would invite other families to join them for every meal, and their father would send Previlon and her siblings out to distribute supplies when he returned home from military deployments.
“This is our family culture, to share with others,” Previlon said.
Previlon spent most of her childhood caring for her siblings and the countless neighborhood kids who passed through their family home for meals or lessons on math and reading. Her siblings called her “Little Mom.”
Gabeau also took that family culture to heart. As a teenager, she started a nonprofit to educate young people across Haiti, a program that expanded to around 5,000 students and connected her to Evans Gabeau, the man who would later become her husband and work alongside her to launch the institute.
The Gabeaus had planned to stay in Haiti for the rest of their lives, but after the birth of their first daughter Gevaniah in 1999, political violence escalated to the point where the couple was held at gunpoint during a robbery in their home.
“That’s when we made the final decision to move,” Gabeau said. “We realized now that we had a child, we could not live the same way that we used to.”
As the political situation continued to deteriorate, Previlon watched as all of her siblings and her parents eventually moved to the United States to pursue educational or employment opportunities. But Previlon stayed, working with the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United States Agency for International Development and several other international institutions to secure foreign aid for children and families in Haiti.
In 2005, she founded The Haitian Out-of-School Youth Livelihood Initiative to connect families and children with educational resources and basic necessities for their survival, primarily focusing on securing foreign aid.
When her children were very young, she remembers hearing her neighbors scream as gang members ran through her neighborhood. That night, Previlon says she hid her children in a drawer to protect them as gang members attempted to break into her home. The next day, the family went to stay with friends on another part of the island.
“I was afraid,” she said. “And I decided to leave the neighborhood, to go someplace else with my children until the situation was a little more calm.”
After the 2010 earthquake caused a total collapse of the school system in the area, Previlon moved her three children — then teenagers — to stay with Gabeau in Boston, fearing for their safety. Last year, her husband, Edgar, passed away.
These days, the situation is rarely calm. She is accompanied by security guards on her trips from her house to her office, the only places she feels safe to go.
“During the last two years, for the first time in my life I am seeing these official gangs doing whatever they want, and there is no authority that can stop them,” she said. “They kidnap people, they rape young girls, they steal goods and take people’s houses, and the national government cannot do anything.”
Still, Previlon believes that she cannot leave.
“I cannot say that I’m not afraid of the situation, I am afraid,” Previlon said. “But I think what I’m doing also is important, and for now, this country needs my help.”
For her part, Gabeau has done everything she can to help her sister’s cause. Following the 2010 earthquake, Gabeau connected Previlon with foreign aid from U.S. officials. She hired several of Previlon’s employees, who had been victims of kidnapping or other violence, to work with her in Boston.
“We have the same mission,” Previlon said. “Whenever I ask her to do something, she finds a way.”
The situation has only gotten worse. Haiti has been reeling from a series of natural disasters and decades of political unrest, exacerbated by failed intervention from U.S. leaders and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which strained the country’s already fragile health care system.
In 2021, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. Violence soared in 2023 as gangs seized control of the nation’s capital. This year, Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned from office after authorizing the deployment of a multi-national security force to assist Haitian police.
Since 2022, thousands of Haitian immigrants have fled to Massachusetts, home to the third-largest community of Haitian immigrants in the United States and the only state in the country with a so-called right-to-shelter law that guarantees homeless families a place to stay.
In June, President Joe Biden designated a federal humanitarian program that would allow an estimated 309,000 Haitians in the United States to stay and legally work, a move that opened a new flood of migrants to Gabeau’s office in pursuit of documentation and work opportunities.
She said people used to arrive at a manageable pace: “Ten here, 20 there, but now you’re talking about thousands of people leaving their country at the same time and trying to make it here,” Gabeau said. “So the pressure is so high on us to help them.”
This summer, Gabeau expanded hours and the size of her staff to accommodate the surge of new arrivals. The institute, launched in 2015, now employs more than 100 people and has offices in Brockton and Malden, as well as partnerships with other organizations. The lobby in Mattapan is packed every day with people seeking work permits, social services, housing and immigration forms.
On any day, Gabeau can be seen walking through the lobby greeting mothers who need a new pack of diapers or connecting with staff.
“It’s a roller coaster from one day until the next,” she said. “When it comes to the number of people that we welcome every single day, everything shifted before our eyes.”
Though the state does not keep a record of how many migrant families have arrived in Massachusetts, approximately half of the state’s emergency shelter system caseload are new arrivals, according to a statement from the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
The increase has contributed to strains on the state’s family shelter system, leading Gov. Maura Healey to cap the shelter population and create a waitlist for shelter. Last month, Healey enacted a five-day limit for migrant families staying in the state’s overflow shelters, citing a lack of space and federal funds to support the influx. Since then, the state has created “options for extensions'' for some families, but the policy remains in effect.
Gabeau says this decision has put providers in a difficult position, with limited options to place families in safe shelters.
“It is so frustrating when you see people playing with people’s lives,” she said. “So many families are in great danger after fleeing violence, after fleeing gangs, after fleeing everything that you can imagine, for us here as leaders to just put them through even more and add to their traumatic experience. To me, it’s not acceptable. It’s inhumane.”
Across the street from the Immigrant Family Services Institute’s Mattapan office, the nonprofit uses a church space as a day shelter for arrivals like Michiline Pierre, who came to Boston with just one of her four children, her 3-year-old son Carlos. As Pierre watched Carlos play in the church lot, she pulled an eviction notice from her pocket, notifying her that she needed to leave the shelter in Cambridge where she had been staying since her arrival in May.
“I have no place to go. I have no one to call,” Pierre said in Haitian Creole through a translator. “It’s either the shelter or I’m going to have to take (to) the street, sleep in the street until I can figure it out.”
Gabeau says it’s also been challenging to advocate for resources as Haitian immigrants have been singled out by racist rhetoric and mischaracterizations of the people seeking asylum in the U.S.
In 2018, President Donald Trump used a vulgar slur when he said Haitians — and all Africans — should not be considered for legal immigration due to their origins. More recently, the former president perpetuated a false narrative about Haitian migrants eating their neighbor’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Earlier this month, Gabeau had planned to attend an event commemorating the United Nations International Day of Peace in Springfield, but the event was canceled due to security issues.
“So often people do not understand why [Haitian migrants] are here,” Gabeau said. “People think that they are here to take their jobs, but they don’t understand the trauma that they had to go through to leave their homes and go to a place that’s unknown.”
In her own home, Gabeau has converted every possible room into a living space for someone in need. Currently, there are seven people living with her, the third cycle of a total of 22 immigrants who have stayed in her home since February.
While Gabeau prepared breakfast for two of her three children before their shifts at the institute last month, her daughter Evangeline teased her about the constant flow of people coming to deliver supplies, stop by to visit or stay with the family.
“There are so many people who come to this house,” Evangeline said. “I’m so used to being like, ‘Hi’ to people who I either don’t know who it is or I see them every once in a while. This is like the (institute) headquarters … our doors are always open.”
Evangeline said many people who were helped by Gabeau or the greater nonprofit community are always coming back to help newcomers.
“My mom is selfless and does a lot of favors for people, and they will return those favors right back,” she said. “That’s what my mom is doing, and what my aunt Guerda is doing as well. They love to help people.”
Gabeau says her dream is to someday return to Haiti and live there in peace.
“We have hope. We are not going to despair,” she said. “Everything is calling us to total despair, but inside, deep inside we know that Haiti cannot die. That Haiti will come back, and the whole world will see what it means to be part of a country where freedom is part of our bloodstream.”
Every Sunday, Gabeau invites new arrivals to her home for soup Joumou, a Haitian tradition celebrating community and an opportunity to dance, sing, tell jokes and stories and enjoy a squash soup that serves as a symbol of the nation’s liberation from French colonial rule in 1804.
“All across the world, wherever Haitians are, we have the traditional soup Joumou to create a sense of community,” Gabeau said. “This sense of community is something that people are really, really missing when they come here.”
In Haiti, Previlon hosts her own soup Joumou, another thread that connects the two sisters across an ocean. She, too, has opened her home, creating a compound for people seeking shelter on the island nation.
“It’s a pleasure for me to be with people, to share what I have with people, to discuss this pain and this moment together,” Previlon said. “We don’t know for how long we will stay in this difficult situation, and we don’t know what the solution will be. So for now, we’re still waiting.”
This story was originally published by WGBH. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative. Copyright 2024 WGBH Radio.
