Source: Washington Post (From the Article 'Dead U.N. workers were fond of their life in Haiti'
She had fallen in love with Haiti during the heady days when she was fresh out of Smith College and Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the fledgling president of a poor country seemingly filled with promise. By Tuesday afternoon, as she sat in a meeting in a basement room of the U.N. headquarters there, Lisa Mbele-Mbong had worked in Port-au-Prince as a human rights specialist for 3 1/2 years. When the trembling began, she was the first out of the meeting to find out why.
She walked onto a veranda. A large slab of concrete struck her head, killing her instantly, according to her supervisor, who was nearby. As he did every day after school, her 10-year-old son, Nady, was outside the complex with their driver, waiting for his mother to leave work.
Mbele-Mbong's death in the earthquake -- even as her colleagues in
the basement of the U.N. complex's human rights section survived, her
family has been told -- has not been officially announced. At 38, she
was a woman of penetrating intellect and many cultures, as comfortable
grilling gang members about genocide in Congo as nurturing her son's
passion for soccer. She is one of nearly 400 U.N. workers listed as
missing or killed, a toll certain to
...Mbele-Mbong was the daughter of a mother from Minneapolis and a father from Cameroon who grew up on three continents. After graduating from Smith, she moved to Washington, but gravitated to Haiti again and again. She volunteered twice as an election monitor and later worked there as a consultant for the National Democratic Institute, trying to foster civic education. She had a romance with a Haitian economist, her parents said, and gave birth in 1999. She moved to a U.N. job in Geneva to be closer to her parents in France and eventually left her son, Nady, with them to go to Congo as a humans rights officer.
"She fought to go back to Haiti," said her younger sister, Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, because "she had this built-in warm community" there, that would enable her to bring her son.
She had returned to Port-au-Prince on Jan. 6, after a three-week Christmas visit with her family in France. "Her last days, she was . . . very discouraged" about Haiti, her father, Samuel Mbele-Mbong, said. "She could see where the country was going, contrary to the hopes she had."
After she was killed Tuesday, a peacekeeper from Cameroon, a friend to whom she rented a room, raced to the U.N. complex and found Nady outside. His father, the economist, gave permission for him to leave the country, as soon as an embassy can transport him to his grandparents.
And in the middle of the tragedy, a small but crucial fragment of good news materialized. Nady can leave Haiti because he knew that his mother usually carried his passport in her pocketbook. A U.N. worker picked through the rubble and found the pocketbook. Nady's passport was inside.
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