The 12 labors of Diane

“I feel like Asterix and Obelix who, in The 12 works, have to face the administrative system which drives them completely crazy. »

This is how Diane Thibaudeau, a Quebecer stuck in Haiti with her adopted child, sums up her maze to be urgently repatriated to Canada when she feels their lives are in danger.

Generally speaking, The 12 labors of Asterix, this is not the exception, but the rule in immigration cases. What is less common is that this work lasts more than 12 years. Yet this is the inhumane situation in which this 67-year-old humanitarian worker, living near Jacmel, finds herself, who is trying in vain to obtain help from Ottawa to return to Quebec as quickly as possible with her son.

On Wednesday evening, a little over 48 hours after I asked Global Affairs Canada and Immigration Canada what they planned to do to help this mother and son, Diane received a call from a Global Affairs officer Canada informing her that she alone was being offered an assisted departure from Port-au-Prince on April 26.

The end of the 12 works? Not really. Because in addition to forcing her to leave her son alone in a country in crisis, this assisted departure had more of an appearance of assisted suicide.

She hasn’t slept for days, desperate to see that her numerous calls for help to Ottawa and to her MP have not been able to relieve her of her distress.

Diane is not exaggerating, confirms her friend Lucille Lemire, volunteer security coordinator for the Canadian embassy in Haiti, who lived in Jacmel until April 5 and who recently returned to Ottawa. She found herself in the same untenable situation as Diane after Ottawa offered her an assisted departure from Port-au-Prince which she had to refuse. While there is no way to get out of Jacmel by plane and the road leading to the capital is stormed by bandits and armed gangs, getting to Port-au-Prince by land is a “suicide mission,” she says. To leave the country, she had to make her own way to take a boat to the southern end of the border with the Dominican Republic and then fly to Santo Domingo.

Officially, Global Affairs Canada says it is working “tirelessly” and “offering support to the families and loved ones of Canadians” who remain in Haiti. In fact, those who are in the same situation as Diane, either because they live far from Port-au-Prince, because they cannot afford to rent a boat or because their children do not have the papers required to cross the border are left stranded.

“I find it abominable! », thunders Lucille Lemire, who has just launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign to help Diane Thibaudeau, who lives in extreme precariousness, to obtain a visa for her son and pay her repatriation costs.

In April 2012, I told the story of Diane who was already trying to return to the country with her child.¹.

This is the story of an atypical humanitarian worker, a trained psychologist, who moved to a small hut in Haiti almost 30 years ago in order to help the most deprived people there.

17 years ago, a Haitian mother named Rosaire knocked on her door. She had just given birth prematurely to her sixth child. He was 3 days old. He weighed barely 1 kg. Her first child died before the age of 1. The next three had been placed. The fifth died at the age of 3. She begged Diane to adopt her newborn.

At first, Diane didn’t want to know anything, she was already thinking of returning to Quebec because of health problems. But when she held this fragile baby in her arms, her heart melted. She, who is very religious, had the impression that this child fell to her from the sky. She had no choice but to love him, to raise him.

“Go with him. It’s your son,” Rosaire told him, who consented to Diane’s name appearing on the birth certificate and for her to choose the child’s name: Raphaël Emmanuel Thibaudeau.

Reached by telephone in April 2012, when I wrote a first column on this story, the biological mother had repeated the same thing to me. “He’s Diane’s son. »

At the time, Diane wanted to return to Canada with Raphaël, who was only 6 years old. But to get there, he had to get out of a double bureaucratic labyrinth. First, officially adopt Raphaël under Haitian laws. Next, confront the Canadian bureaucracy.

It happens that the media coverage of a Kafkaesque story of immigration – forgive the pleonasm – helps to suddenly unblock a file.

It also happens that it is not enough.

Diane’s case falls, unfortunately, into this second category. Following the publication of the column, generous readers, like so many of me, mobilized to support the mother and ensure that her son lacked nothing for several years. Diane is eternally grateful to them.

On the good side, everything was fine. On the bureaucracy side, things have deteriorated. Even while spending large sums of money on legal fees, Diane never managed to officially adopt Raphaël or obtain Canadian citizenship for him.

As she is over 50 years old and lives with next to nothing, she was refused legal adoption of a child whom she nevertheless saved and loved as if he were flesh of her flesh.

“I have no other family,” Raphaël told me, who is now 17 years old and wholeheartedly hopes to put his hopes in Quebec with his mother.

After having had all the trouble in the world sending an application for Canadian citizenship for her son to Immigration Canada from her phone (which she had to recharge at a neighbor’s house), as was initially recommended to her, Diane was told that it was not the correct document. Instead, he had to apply for a temporary residence visa for Raphaël. While her daily life is a struggle – she lives without running water or electricity and struggles to find food on the black market as food prices skyrocket – she feels like Asterix in search of the A-pass. 38.

“The Canadian government cannot tell a woman: leave your child behind. This is unacceptable ! » said Lucille Lemire.

Instead of putting obstacles in her way, Canada should recognize Diane’s immense dedication, adds her friend Dominique Favreau, who promises to be there to take care of her when she arrives in Quebec.

“Diane sacrificed herself to help a little Haitian child who would have died without her. (…) She was also there during the earthquake and she missed the repatriation of Canadians because she was involved in helping her community, saving people in the rubble…”

As her own life collapses in a country ravaged by violence, the least we can do is help her return home to her son.

1. Read the column “Never without your son”