Elmont toddler back from Haiti

One Elmont family had plenty to celebrate on Saturday, March 13, as they welcomed home their 2-year-old daughter after she spent months stranded in Haiti.

Brianna Dacius, a 2-year-old Elmont resident, accompanied her family last year, including mother Fabiola Pierre-Paul and father Jean Dacius, on a trip to the island nation to meet her grandmother for the first time.

When it was time for the family to return home, Brianna stayed with her grandmother, to be picked up at a later date by her father.

When the earthquake hit on Jan. 18, the family was utterly dumbstruck, unsure if their daughter and her grandmother were even alive.

Pierre-Paul said that once news of the earthquake had sunk in, she and her husband leapt into action, calling friends and neighbors, anyone they thought might be able to help or even verify that Brianna and her grandmother were still alive.

“There was only one thing on my mind,” Pierre-Paul said, through tears. “My daughter, there’s no more daughter, and my mother-in-law, I thought both of them was gone.”

They discovered, after hours on the phone, that Brianna and her grandmother had survived the disaster, but that the family’s Port-au-Prince home had been reduced to rubble, and that Brianna was stuck with her grandmother in the streets.

Compounding matters for the family was the fact that Brianna’s mother and father had held on to her passport, assuming it was safer to keep it with them and bring it back for the toddler’s return trip.

Pierre-Paul and Dacius were stuck between a rock and a wall of red tape, as it became clear that delivering the passport to the disaster-ravaged country was not going to be an option. Pierre-Paul said she was unwilling to just sit on her hands and fret about what would happen to her child.

“There’s no way I could just sit here and let my daughter die down there, no way,” Pierre-Paul said. “I would never forgive myself.”

Pierre-Paul vented that the greatest challenge in getting her daughter back stateside was trying to reconcile everything that both the Haitian government and the U.S. State Department wanted her to do to prove that her daughter was an American citizen. She said that she often spent hours a day on the telephone, trying to get the U.S. to bend its customs rules to allow her daughter to return home without a passport because of the emergency.

After a full day of trying to work through government channels, Pierre-Paul reached out to Argo Civic Association President Mimi Johnson, whom she had met before at local civic meetings.

Mimi Johnson put Pierre-Paul in touch with State Sen. Craig Johnson (D-Garden City), who was moved to help, along with a handful of other legislators.

“This, today, is what civic work is all about,” Mimi Johnson said, sitting on the couch in Pierre-Paul’s living room. “Getting government and the community together to help … because our elected officials cannot help every single constituent.”

Sen. Johnson, when told about the incident, decided to take a hand in helping to reunite the family by helping them navigate the logistical hurdles and pay for Brianna’s plane ticket home.

Originally, Johnson said he, New York Senator Charles Schumer and U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy had worked to get Brianna on one of the military flights out of Haiti to get her home as soon as possible. The arrangement couldn’t be made before commercial flights resumed, however, and once that happened, a military evacuation was no longer possible for Brianna.

“Once the civilian flights started up again the military shut down the efforts to get some of these people out,” Sen. Johnson said. “It just took a little bit too long, and that’s something we have to address when it comes to our disaster relief.”

Brianna arrived home Friday evening, March 12, to the waiting arms of her father and mother.

By Saturday morning, Brianna, with brightly-colored beads in her hair, was running through the kitchen, living room and bedrooms of her home, and sitting on her brother’s lap for the first time in months.