Quake dangles an unlikely opportunity for Haitian

OGDEN — Daniel Delva thinks his native Haiti will need a lot of help for many years to come, but no need will be greater than that for good engineers.

He plans to be one of them.

So Thursday morning, less than a dozen hours after a plane brought him from Port-au-Prince, Delva found himself somewhat improbably in the International Student Services offices at Weber State University. There, he showed his student visa and his passport to adviser Jenny Callaghan, then got going on paperwork.

The earthquake that devastated his homeland in January has given Delva, 27, a realistic shot at the future he's been carrying in his head and his heart for years: an American education.

The quake brought doctors from around the world to help the wounded. And some of those — doctors from Utah — have now brought him here to go to school.

Of all the young Haitians who translated for and drove doctors around when they arrived to provide emergency care, why him? a reporter asked his sponsor, Dr. Jeremy Booth.

"He asked," said Booth, an emergency room doctor at McKay-Dee Hospital, who learned Creole on his Florida mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and rushed to Haiti in the first wave of helpers after the quake.

They were talking about the future and Booth said Delva told him, "I really want to do something to help my country, my family, the future of my country." Then he asked, "Would you consider helping me?"

Surprised, Booth hedged. "We'll see."

"Oh, I know what that means," he said Delva told him. "You have to ask your wife."

Indeed. And the physician's mother and father, too, since they were part of the plan that was already beginning to unfold in Booth's head.

Some months and a very great deal of paperwork later — officials "even wanted to see six months of my bank statements to make sure I could afford to help him, and we had to pass a lot of paperwork back and forth," Booth noted — Delva is standing next to the LDS Institute on campus with his friend. They've already met with Callaghan and Morteza Emami, who oversees services for the roughly 340 international students enrolled at Weber State.