WAUCHULA, Fla. -- Imelda Cruz wants out.
Out of the cramped bedroom where the window won't open.
Out of the mobile home she shares with four adults and two children, including her husband and daughter.
Out of the humidity, where she can barely breathe.
Imelda had never seen a fury like Hurricane Charley. It turned her mobile home into a cluster of gigantic splinters.
Six days later, she sits in front of a neighbor's mobile home that was spared. A blue tarp, strung from the home to two surviving trees, offers shade but little relief from a scorching noon sun. Sweat gathers under Imelda's eyes and in the folds of her shirt. Fat flies lazily buzz her face.
Before Charley, Imelda and her family lived on $40 a day. Now, the hurricane has threatened her husband's job. Air-conditioned shelters dot the county, but Imelda doesn't know about them or where they are. She hesitates to step outside her small circle, as decimated as it is.
And the thought that haunts her is this: Where will my new baby sleep?
"Tomorrow," the 24-year-old says in Spanish, "is my due date."
The forgotten victims
They were forgotten in the first rescue efforts after Charley _ and before Hurricane Frances _ hit.
For thousands of migrants in Central Florida who labor in agriculture, stability often lasts as long as a day's pay. And they always fear la migra, or immigration, is around the corner.
So when Charley swept away their homes and jobs, many migrants stayed put, not leaving for aid, not knowing whom to ask, whom to trust or how to communicate with an English-speaking world, and not knowing whether government assistance applied to them.
When relief workers eventually went looking, they found people like Imelda.
One of seven siblings, Imelda grew up in Vera Cruz, Mexico. At age 10, she left school to labor in the fields with her family. About four years ago, Imelda and a cousin decided to head for Florida, where they had heard workers were needed.
They walked two days in the desert until they passed into New Mexico. Shortly after arriving in Florida, Imelda met Jorge Matra while the two worked in tomato fields near Myakka City.
They married, and Sandra, now 4, was born in South Carolina, where they'd gone to pick apples. When the pain started, Imelda was alone. She stumbled to a local day care for workers' children, and a woman there drove her to the hospital. Jorge arrived for the birth.
So when Imelda got pregnant late last year, the couple chose not to travel north. Jorge got a job at a plant nursery for the summer, awaiting the fall citrus season.
It would be better for Imelda and the baby, they decided, to stay in Florida.
Making do
As Charley bore down on Wauchula, Dumitru Grosu, owner of the Pine Cone mobile home park, had to chase out residents, many of them migrants.
Imelda, Jorge and Sandra fled to a friend's house in his cousin's dented Ford Escort. As Charley hit, a half-dozen children screamed, Imelda recalls. She couldn't cry. She had to be strong for Sandra, who clung to her as trees flew by the windows.
When the family returned to the trailer they'd rented for $100 a week, it was in tatters. Imelda had kept one picture of her family, a photograph of her brother and mother. Charley stole it.
Two days after the hurricane, they moved the few possessions they had _ some clothes, Sandra's citizenship papers, their Mexican identifications _ into the mobile home of neighbor Brigida de Jesus.
Like many other migrants, they spent the next few days surviving on the water, canned goods and tortillas they had hoarded before the storm.
Now, nearly a week after the hurricane, a Grand Cherokee grinds to a halt on the dirt road.
The mobile home park still has no electricity or water. Imelda and her family bathe with rainwater collected in buckets.
"We have food!" yells a woman inside the truck. "Do you have any babies?" she asks, climbing out of the truck.
"Ba-bies?" the woman repeats slowly in English. "I have baby food."
Mindy Blakeley and Richard Elsishands are from Incarnation Catholic Church in Sarasota. They are among dozens of volunteers, many from the Tampa area, who spot the crumpled aluminum of the mobile home park off U.S. 17 and stop, hoping to help.
Imelda smiles sadly as they offer hamburgers, bottled water, clothes and diapers. She's grateful, but they can't give her the one thing she wants most right now: a home for her new baby.
"There are apartments up the road," Imelda says wistfully. "But they want $1,000 for rent and a security deposit."
Imelda sits in one of the plastic chairs under the tarp, swatting at the flies. She dreads the night ahead in Brigida's mobile home.
"It's so hot, we can't sleep."
A hint of normalcy
Imelda tries to rest in her room. On her back, she looks up through a window that the hurricane sealed shut, aching for just one cool, merciful breeze.
She gives Sandra, a small, dark-haired girl with large almond eyes, a bath. The girl starts to wail even before Imelda pours the cold water over her. Imelda then steps in the tub and lets the water wash the day's heat from her long hair and swollen body.
In the early evening, the family is once again outside. Jorge lies on the ground in the shade of the tarp. Imelda sits in a plastic chair, contractions wracking her body. She grimaces, holding one hand to her belly, the other to her back. She endures the pain quietly. No one comforts her.
A small television propped on a plastic chair is plugged into the Escort's battery. The families watch a telenovela, a Spanish-language soap opera. It's still too hot to go to sleep inside. A useless fan sits silent, wedged between the two twin beds the family has been sleeping on. A doll props open a window in the hall.
Imelda folds the clothes they escaped with, a few sets of shirts and pants. She wants a bed for the baby. But even if she had one, she doesn't know where she would put it.
The waiting goes on
On Aug. 20, Imelda's due date, the morning sun splashes a golden light over the mobile home. The rain-soaked mud and debris smell rotten.
The contractions have stopped. But in the middle of the night in the stifling heat, Imelda rises and walks outside.
"It was so hot, and there were so many mosquitoes," she says.
Hillsborough County public health workers arrive in the afternoon with a doctor and a translator. "You need to see someone today, as soon as possible, to run some tests," Dr. Charurut Somboonwit tells Imelda.
She looks down and says softly, "My husband was here, but he had to leave."
"It's best for you not to delay," Somboonwit stresses.
Imelda has an appointment in five days, Aug. 25, at the Hardee County Health Department, where she had been receiving prenatal care. She decides to wait for it.
But a county health worker returns on Aug. 23 and takes Imelda and Sandra to a clinic in Wauchula for a quick checkup. Everything is fine.
Aug. 25 arrives, and Imelda is relieved and excited. Today is the day, she thinks, her baby will come. She hopes doctors will induce labor. She had slept well the night before for the first time in about two weeks. The park owner had run a generator for several trailers so they could use fans during the night. She gets dressed up, with a long denim dress and white sandals.
Imelda and Sandra carry matching white purses that were donated.
Jorge meets them at the clinic. His job already tenuous, he didn't tell anyone at work he was leaving.
About an hour later, Imelda exits the clinic frowning. They will not induce labor today. Instead, a note tells her to appear at DeSoto Memorial Hospital in Arcadia on Aug. 27. Back at the mobile home, Imelda sits on a cooler and bounces her leg nervously. Sandra fights with Riquelino, Brigida's 2-year-old son. There's nothing more for Imelda to do. She sits and waits outside the stuffy trailer, alone with the restless children, wondering again how they'll all fit when the baby arrives.
Her time, at last
The next day the contractions return. Imelda wants to wait for Jorge to get home from work before going to the hospital, but migrant outreach workers from Hardee convince her to leave right away. They promise to take her to Jorge.
"Let me get my things," she says, grimacing and holding her back.
At the plant nursery, she and Sandra get into the Escort, and the family heads for DeSoto Memorial Hospital. As they drive on U.S. 17, they pass countless orange trees toppled by Charley. The fruit _ and Jorge's promised fall work _ sits rotting on the ground.
A half-hour later they arrive. A blue tarp covers a large section of the hospital's roof that was ripped off by Charley, and the heavy smell of burning tar drifts down from repair work. Boards still cover blown-out windows.
Imelda's room is small, with one bed, a pink blanket and a television hanging off the wall. But since the hurricane, it's the biggest and most comfortable place she has slept.
"Our whole labor side got pretty much destroyed," says Sonia Olvera, the obstetrics unit coordinator. "We're short seven rooms."
Doctors check Imelda's amniotic fluid and decide it's too low. Labor needs to be induced.
Jorge goes home with Sandra to change out of stained work clothes. They return but aren't sure if they can stay for the night. "I can sleep in a chair, but they don't have a place for Sandra," Jorge says. "And I can't leave her alone when the baby comes."
In her room, hooked to an IV, Imelda starts to cry.
"I'm afraid," she says. "I don't want to do this alone."
The baby's heartbeat is registering in loud whooshes on a machine.
Sandra refuses to leave, so at around 11 p.m., father and daughter head down to sleep in the car.
Imelda asks for a shot for the pain. Nurses tell her no, she has to wait a little bit longer. Her toes curl with the pain.
Between contractions, she wearily watches a telenovela.
Difficulties all around
Around 4 a.m. Aug. 27, Imelda is moved to a delivery room and given an epidural.
Peter Watson, the anesthetist, worries that Imelda thrashed around just as he inserted the needle into her back.
"I don't think it's working very well," Watson says as Imelda gulps for air and grabs the handles on the bed.
"There were 34 patients here during the storm," Watson says. "We were pulling them down the steps on mattresses. There were windows blowing out all over."
"Ayyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!" Imelda yells and starts to weep.
Nurse Kristin Anne Berndt, a Navy lieutenant based in Jacksonville who was brought in with other military personnel to help after Charley, rubs Imelda's arm to soothe her. Imelda asks for Jorge and Sandra, and they are awakened from the car.
Sandra, her hair tousled, touches her mother's arm. Imelda reaches out and caresses her daughter's face.
A home for baby Jorge
Shortly after 6 a.m., Dr. Kayum Mohammadbhoy, a soft-spoken man who cut his vacation short after Charley, gives Imelda a quick exam and announces that the baby is ready.
The nurses move into action. Watson leads Sandra out of the room.
"Empuja! Empuja!" Mohammadbhoy tells Imelda. Push! Push!
A little purple head emerges.
"We got a beautiful one here," Mohammadbhoy says. "Look at that face."
He pulls out the rest of the little body and hands Jorge, who looks scared and a little ill, a pair of medical scissors to cut the umbilical cord.
Philip Grady, a nurse and Navy lieutenant from Pensacola, takes the baby. It's a boy.
Grady wraps him snugly in a blanket. "Guapo," he announces, handing the baby to his father. Handsome.
Jorge carries baby Jorge to Imelda, who touches him and gazes into his face.
"I didn't think I could do it," Imelda says.
She knows the family's future remains uncertain. But a safe nest for her newborn is finally coming together.
Jorge has told her that Grosu, the mobile home park owner, is going to fix up a small trailer for them to rent for $75 a week. And the Hardee County health clinic gave them a play-pen bed for the baby.
"There will be more space for the children," Imelda says, a small smile crossing her face.
TO HELP OUT
If you'd like to help, call the Redlands Christian Migrant Association at (863) 767-0134 or Lutheran Services Florida/Lutheran Disaster Response at toll-free 1-800-651-1853.
Amid contractions, Imelda Cruz, 24, tries to rest in the room she shares with her husband and 4-year-old daughter. The mobile home has no running water, the electricity is out and the room's window was sealed shut by the storm. "It's so hot, we can't sleep," she says.
Holding 2-day-old Jorge, Imelda Cruz glances around her new trailer at Pine Cone trailer park in Wauchula. Hurricane Charley destroyed the trailer her family had been renting one week before she was to give birth, and they had been staying with friends. "We have so much more space here," she says as her husband, Jorge Matra, and 4-year-old daughter, Sandra, check out the kitchen.
Thelia Escovedo of Lake Placid hands Sandra Matra, 4, a donated shirt in front of the trailer where Sandra and her mother, Imelda Cruz, right, are staying. Thelia was brought along by a group of volunteers to help translate.
Sandra and her father, Jorge Matra, check in on Imelda Cruz as labor progresses at 5 a.m. Aug. 27. At 6:25 a.m., baby Jorge was born. |
