By JONATHAN M. KATZ
Associated Press Writer

LIMONADE, Haiti – When Alix Charles slipped out of his tin-roofed shack at night, he didn’t say where he was going, only that he would be back soon.

The 23-year-old father of two infant daughters left on a treacherous ocean voyage that turned deadly for at least 15 migrants and perhaps dozens more. His family still didn’t know Saturday, six days after the accident, whether he survived – or how they would get by if he didn’t.

“I’m not angry, he went to search for a life,” his 20-year-old wife, Dieula, said as she breast-fed one daughter beside a row of cactuses in this northern Haitian town, an hour’s walk from the sea, and waited for news. “The problem is I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and there is no one to help me take care of the kids.”

There have been enough catastrophes for Haitian migrants that everyone is aware of the danger. Yet the perilous voyages are a familiar passage for Haitians, forced by their country’s almost medieval economy to spend more than a year’s cost of food and housing and risk their lives for a chance to work abroad.

Thousands flee this country of more than 9 million each year to reach “lot bo dlo” – Creole for the other side of the water. Many travel the same way as the migrants who were killed when their overloaded sailboat struck a coral reef at night off the island of West Caicos, launching some 200 people into the sea. Some managed to swim to land, while others clung to the jagged reef for 17 hours without food or water. Nearly 70 are still missing.

Original Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/haiti/story/1167426.html