Fabienne Colas on finding her family after the Haitian earthquake - and bringing them to Canada
Just after 5 pm on January 12, 2010, Fabienne Colas received a phone call. The Haitian-born actor was a busy woman, so she thought twice before picking up. Her non-profit organization runs the Montreal International Black Film Festival, and that day in January she was working on a grant application.
But when she saw it was Réal Barnabé, the vice president of her foundation, she took the call… and her whole world shifted.
Barnabé told her that a massive earthquake had struck Haiti. When Colas turned on the TV, the news sunk in. This was not a run-of-the-mill earthquake, like the ones she had experienced many times when growing up. It was the big one. Straight away she thought of her father, stepmother, mother and sister, who still lived in Haiti. She tried to phone them, but couldn't get through.
Over the next few hours Colas tried everything. She called friends who had family in Haiti, she tried neighbours, and she sent messages via Facebook, but was still unable to reach them. She was starting to panic.
"I couldn't think straight," recalls Colas. "And as time went by, the pressure kept getting heavier and heavier, because the more time is flying maybe the less opportunity I will have to hear from them. Maybe they're gone, maybe it's over already."
Finally, in the early hours of the morning, she got word from her father. They were alive.
But in speaking with him, Colas realized the full extent of the devastation. Buildings had crumbled, burying people under the rubble. Her family were sleeping on the sidewalk with nowhere to buy food. She needed to get her family out of there, to Canada, where she could look after them.
"And then that's when I get out and start advocating for a better way for the government to open up the borders, faster, to welcome Haitian people here that had family members in Canada," says Colas.
Colas used her power as a public figure to lobby for her community during the emergency. And she and her husband decided to sponsor her four family members as immigrants. Colas' husband volunteered to travel to Haiti to find them, and to bring them back to Canada.
Once on the ground, he was able to locate them, but getting them back to Canada was far from easy. It was a battle with bureaucracy — all while struggling to find food and shelter. But finally, two weeks after the earthquake, her husband returned to Montreal with her father, step-mother, mother and sister.
When they arrived in Canada it was the middle of winter, but the cold was the least of the family's adjustments — the six of them lived together, under one roof, for over a year. To put it mildly, it was an interesting time for everyone. "Life after that night was definitely reality TV," recalls Fabienne, "and I wish we had a camera, because that would have been great television right there! Having my mom and my stepmother bump into each other every day for about a year and a half, that was something!"
But seven years after the earthquake, it was all worth it. Fabienne has a new definition of family in Montreal — one that includes four newly minted Canadian citizens.
In their own apartments, that is.
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