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Vounette Cyprien, a patient care assistant on Shapiro 8, feels the support of the BWH community as she awaits news about her family in Port-au-Prince.
Vounette Cyprien’s parents are safe. But the Port-au-Prince native has not received word from the rest of her family, who live in Haiti’s capital city where a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Jan. 12.
“We lived right near the palace,” said Cyprien, a patient care assistant on Shapiro 8, who has lived in the U.S. for 19 years. “They say no news is good news. In something like this, I don’t feel that way.”
As news of the earthquake unfolded last Tuesday, she sat in her Brockton home with her 13-year-old son, who helped translate some of the words she didn’t understand in the news coverage. She watched anxiously, believing she spotted her mother once before realizing she was mistaken.
At BWH, Cyprien finds comfort in her work caring for patients and in the support of her manager and colleagues. She attended a prayer service led by Chaplaincy last week, along with her nurse manager Alice O’Brien, MS, RN. “The service was beautiful,” Cyprien said. “We all prayed together.”
O’Brien checked in often to make sure Cyprien was okay. “Alice is wonderful,” Cyprien said. “She understands people. She offered to send me home if I needed to go.”
Cyprien didn’t. She worked her full shift, caring for patients and catching glimpses of news coverage with patients and families who offered to turn on their televisions. “Some patients understand my situation,” she said.
The images of rubble and ravaged buildings projected on the screens were nothing like the Haiti Cyprien grew up in and visited several years ago.
She describes her years in Haiti as “a paradise,” she said. “We had good beaches, a good island.”
While she is determining how she can best help, her son is doing what he can to help the island, where he lived with an aunt for almost four years after he was born. He asked his classmates in a Brockton charter school to bring in anything they could to send to Haiti.
“My son texted me at work and told me he wants to ship five cases to Haiti,” Cyprien said. “His principal was very proud of him. So am I.”