Five days passed with a busy signal. Five long days.
"I was calling, calling, calling. I was going crazy,'' she said. "You don't know what to do, what to think. You feel like you are dying with them.''
Finally, she got through to her brother-in-law in Haiti and she had "a happy day of my life.''
Her parents were alive; they were uninjured. They told her not to worry, that they would stick together, watch over everyone in their group, including the youngest, Annette, who is 2. A penniless and hungry family of 12 living on the street under a tattered blanket scavenged from the rubble — the image haunts Jolcimat.
"They don't have food, they don't have water,'' she said. "If they get sick, they don't have enough medicine.''
She spoke to her sister the other day and is alarmed by what she told her: I have a fever and a sore throat and I am vomiting.
Haitians, Jolcimat said, are resilient people who have weathered other tragedies — floods, violence, bloody political rebellions. They don't wallow in self-pity, nor give up easily, she said.
"They live with what they've got and they're OK with it,'' she said. "If they have one apple and five people, they split it five ways.''
And, she said, they are deeply spiritual and draw on their faith and sense of community for strength. Still, she said her country of 9 million people has never experienced a disaster of this magnitude. Authorities estimate the death toll could reach 200,000, with another 194,000 injured, up to 1 million homeless and 2 million in need of food, even a bit of rice.
"This is the worst,'' she said. "I never believed something like this would happen to my own people.''
Every night, before lying down on their bed of dirt, Jolcimat's loved ones give thanks for life.
Merci bondie pour tout sa ou fe pou mwen parce que mwen domi mwen leve (thank you God for everything you've done because for that when I sleep I wake).
"Haitian people, they are good people, they are strong people, they are hard-working people,'' said Jolcimat. "I would hate to see people who make it so far, getting disease and dying. If the world cares about us, they will want to save us.''
