Deseret News in Haiti: Utahns assist in getting Haitian orphans to U.S.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — It was just too much for 4-year-old Francia.

The little Haitian girl was hungry. She was tired. She'd spent the past week and a half sleeping in the dirt. Now, 80 orphans — her lifelong friends and playmates — were leaving for America and she was being left behind.

"It's good to be finally loading kids on the bus," said Tawnya Constantino, a Salt Lake City neurologist who was instrumental in the fight to get the children to safety. "But it's hard to see the kids who aren't going, like Francia who is sobbing."

Some of Francia's friends ran gleefully to the belly of a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane bound for Orlando, Fla. Others went warily, clinging to relief workers like Constantino. Ranging in age from infant to young teenager, they are going to adoptive parents in several states, but not Utah.

The children arrived safely in Florida Saturday afternoon.

It took involvement from the State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, various U.S. government leaders and the dogged persistence of Tawnya and her husband, Greg Constantino, an attorney. Not to mention Utah Haiti Relief.

"Who hasn't been involved?" Tawnya Constantino said, just before carrying a child onto the plane.

As children walked up the ramp of the massive plane's cargo hold, Pierre-Rebert Alexis, director of the orphanage known as Maison des Enfants de Dieu — "House of the Children of God" — was thoughtful.

"I'm thinking of how the life of the children will be and how the parents in America will be so happy," he said.

Among them was a 7-year-old wearing a pink-striped outfit and a wide smile that sometimes turned upside down in her suddenly strange surroundings. Asked in English to write her name in a reporter's notebook, she penned y-o-o-m-i-d-e. Asked where she was going, she softly said, "Colorado." Through translator Craig Nelson, Yoomide then said in her native Creole that she was "happy and scared."

Nelson, an American Fork doctor who served an LDS Church mission in Haiti, was heading home on the same flight after treating earthquake victims for a week with two other doctors who also are former missionaries in the country.

That the children would leave Haiti was not certain Saturday morning, and it was a little tense as Tawnya Constantino, the orphanage's medical director, tied up myriad loose ends.

More than 100 children, like Francia, were left behind. Relief workers intend to try to move more children out this week.

Each child who left Saturday had "FHG" written in Sharpie marker on the underside of his or her arm. The acronym stands for For His Glory, the nonprofit outreach program that supports the orphanage. Greg Constantino is the organization's secretary and treasurer. He worked the phones from Salt Lake City.