Last week\u2019s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students \u201d\u201d 80 percent of them Haitian \u201d\u201d at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York\u2019s Haitian community.<\/p>\n
They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.<\/p>\n
As classmates played with cubes on Wednesday, learning to add, Michael Constant, 6, squirmed in his seat. His mother had just left for Haiti that morning to bury his father.<\/p>\n
As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell \u201d\u201d a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.<\/p>\n