THE JOSEPH FAMILY

Mother needs a job and a home with furniture

UPDATE: December 24, 2009

By DAPHNE DURET
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

The Joseph family’s story of perseverance inspired Palm Beach County School District teachers, therapists, students and staff to pool donations for the widowed mother of three sons, including one stricken with cerebral palsy and mild to moderate mental retardation.

Jean Zimmerman, the school district’s supervisor of occupational and physical therapy, read about the family in The Post and learned the widow’s 15-year-old son, Johnny, was in physical therapy at Pahokee Middle-Senior High School.

Folks from five departments organized a collection drive that gathered groceries, supermarket gift cards and clothes for the family. Meanwhile, the mother was summoned to her son’s school for a nonexistent meeting and surprised with a party and the gifts.

“I still get emotional when I think about it,” says Zimmerman, who estimates the food donations are enough to sustain the family for four months. “It started as a small project and it just spread in a huge way.”

The mother, who was nominated to Season to Share by the Farmworker Coordinating Council of Palm Beach County, welled up at the sight of so many gifts.

“We had a (Haitian creole ) interpreter there. He kept saying, ‘This is all yours.’ And she kept saying, ‘Me? For me?’ ” said Zimmerman.

Days later, Siliana Joseph basked in the afterglow of the surprise.

“I feel like dancing,” she said of her gifts.

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ORIGINAL STORY: Nov. 26, 2009

By DAPHNE DURET
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Late at night, long after her four sons are asleep, Siliana Joseph lies on her back and stares up at her bedroom ceiling, thinking.

She tries to close her eyes, but whenever she does, her mind races.

She thinks about her husband, Eugene, who lived in the United States for 20 years before he brought her here from Haiti in 2001 — and died without warning four years later.

She thinks about the money she had to borrow to bury him, and the local creditors who still visit her house demanding she pay the $2,000 she owes — with interest.

She thinks about how she struggles to find a job and when she does, she makes barely $40 a day for backbreaking seasonal work in the fields picking corn.

She thinks about how some days all she can offer for dinner to her four sons — including one with cerebral palsy and another with unexplained seizures — are meager plates of white rice.

“I think all the time,” says the 50-year-old Belle Glade mother. “My head is just turning, turning, turning. Sometimes I just don’t know what to do.”

Joseph said she contemplated moving back to Haiti, but she couldn’t — Hurricane Jeanne in 2004 had destroyed the small home she had in her native Gonaives. She returned to Haiti only to bring her sons, Eugeneson, Junior and Johnny to live with her here. It was only then that her family told her that Johnny, a previously healthy boy, had come down with a fever from which he never recovered. Doctors here diagnosed him with cerebral palsy with mild to moderate mental retardation.

Johnny, now 15, weighs about 70 pounds and cannot walk, feed, bathe or dress himself. Eugeneson, a 19-year-old high school student, is crippled by seizures for which doctors prescribe medications that cost nearly $200 a month.

Joseph says she has filled out papers to receive public assistance but has been rejected. She recently had to move from a cheaper, second-floor apartment because she took a terrible fall as she was carrying Johnny down the flight of stairs one morning. The two tumbled. Joseph sprained her ankle as she fell back, using her own body to break her son’s fall.

Through it all, Joseph’s focus has remained her children. Her new home, tiny and spare, is adorned with plastic flowers hanging from the walls and thrift-store figurines. Despite her trials, she says all she wants is a job and a home with furniture for her sons.

“That’s when I would sleep at night,” Joseph said. “When I know that I took care of my kids.”

THE JOSEPH FAMILY’S WISH

The family needs to live in a wheelchair accessible three-bedroom home with household furniture, including a dining room or kitchen table and beds for the boys. Johnny, who suffers from Cerebral Palsy, needs an appropriate wheelchair. Johnny will also need to be enrolled in an after-school care program when his mother returns to work this year. The boys could use shoes and clothing and the entire family could use gift cards for food. Joseph’s youngest son, Frenel, wants a PSP and video games for Christmas.