Haiti native turns 100

Anna Jean-Gilles has spent the last nine years living in Valley Stream and the soon-to-be centenarian said she enjoys the serene atmosphere of the village, especially when comparing it to life growing up in Haiti.

“It’s calm, quiet and not a lot of activity,” said Jean-Gilles, about Valley Stream. “I really like it here.”

Jean-Gilles, who turns 100 on Jan. 22, moved from a small town near Port-au-Prince, Haiti to Brooklyn in 1969. Her life growing up in Haiti, however, was filled with hardship and turmoil. Jean-Gilles was the fifth child in a family of seven, but even as a young girl, her family looked to her to provide stability and maturity. Her mother, Jean-Gilles said, was very sick, and she, along with her sister, cared for their mother and picked up many of the parental responsibilities. Her mother died when she was 16.

“It was a difficult life,” Jean-Gilles said. “My mother was always sick and we had to take care of her.”

Her happiest memory, she said, was when she attended school and had free time to hang out with her friends. Jean-Gilles went on to have four kids, but raised her family as a single mom. To support her children, she opened a convenience store that served the community, as well as military personnel. Haiti was occupied by France at the time, Jean-Gilles said, so she often sold food and candy to local soldiers. Running a business and raising a family on her own was tough enough, she said, so having to ride alone, on horseback, to buy merchandise for her store didn’t make things easier. “There was a lot of turmoil in Haiti that we had to deal with,” she said,

When Jean-Gilles moved to the Park Slope section of Brooklyn in 1969, it was a total culture shock. A blizzard hit New York that winter, and snow was something Jean-Gilles had never seen before. “She went from a tropical island to a snow storm,” her granddaughter, Theresa Hutchinson said. “That was a huge shock to her.”

Jean-Gilles said if there’s one thing she misses about Haiti, it’s the food. She noted that throughout her life, she has eaten well, prayed to God, and treated people with respect, and attributes those factors to her reaching the century mark.

Though Jean-Gilles said she woke up at 5 a.m. to head to the polls to vote for Barack Obama in November 2008, she said her favorite president over the last 100 years was Bill Clinton. “He seemed to get along with people and he did good things for this country,” she said. Jean-Gilles added that she became a U.S. citizen during Clinton’s administration.

Last Saturday, her family threw her a 100th birthday party at the Coral House in Baldwin. More than 200 family members and friends attended the party. However, Hutchinson said, the guest list originally was only 150 people long. “She loves her phone and she has a lot of friends,” Hutchinson said.