Hatian Lucien Antoine Watching from afar
January 19, 2010
Tulsa area athlete Lucien Antoine was great on the football field and finished his college career at Oklahoma State but today his mind and heart on with his homeland, Haiti and his family that are still there.
There is nothing Lucien can do but stand idly by and watch with the rest of the world. “It’s just a bad deal,” Lucien said.
Lucien better known as his nickname of the field, The Punisher, feels helpless and his voice shakes with this same feeling and his overwhelming feelings of being powerless.
The images flashed across the television and newspapers are of a city that Antoine knows very well. He was not born in the capital city but he did visit often and has spent memorable times there.
When Lucien was just a toddler, his mother moved to the United States, it took his mother over a decade to secure a green card for him. In order for Lucien to leave Haiti, he had to fill out all kinds of paperwork, which was done in Port-au-Prince.
“That’s where you’ve got to go and take care of everything, get your passport and everything like that,” Lucien stated. It took several months and this time was spent in Port-au-Prince.
At this time, Lucien was sixteen years of age and you certainly remember things from that stage in your life. What he does remember is more frightening when you consider the horror that devastated the area a few short days ago and that is as Antoine said in his own words, “It was crowded, a lot of people. Houses right next to houses. It was like everybody was close to everybody.” He went on to say, “There wasn’t a lot of space to move.” After a short pause he went on, “There’s going to be a lot of people that get affected because of that.”
He remembers the neighborhood in which he lived while getting all that paperwork completed in which all the homes were built on a hill. Most people in Haiti were not worried about building homes on a hill. The reason as Lucien explained is that “Mostly in Haiti, you have hurricanes. Things happen, but you never really expect an earthquake would hit Haiti.”
Antoine is waiting like others and in his words, “There’s nothing really that I can do,” Antoine said, but on a good note, “All I’m doing is just … pray and donate,” he said.
