A CASTAWAY NATION
IT TAKES A LOT TO FAZE MARLEINE Bastien. After growing up under the brutal dictatorship of François Duvalier, she left Port-au-Prince for Miami in 1981. The 62-year-old thought she had seen it all in her four decades working with the city’s Haitian community as a social worker—until now.
Every day feels like a new low in the yellow stucco building that houses her advocacy organization in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. “It’s like the community is suffering from a collective trauma,” she says. “We have members coming in and telling us, ‘I cannot sleep; I cannot stand even watching the news.’” Families already struggling under financial strains are setting aside money in case relatives in Haiti are kidnapped and need to pay ransom. “I
