Shelter from the storm

Their parents, Newton and Aricie, have the second bedroom. There’s a television in the living room, a computer in the small office, and food in the fridge. The place is fully furnished, down to the curtains, rugs, dishes, candlesticks, pictures, and lots of children’s books, some in French. All of it has been donated.

It isn’t the Port-au-Prince dream house they bought last year, but the Henrys are hardly complaining. In Haiti, a country of 9 million where half the population is illiterate and only 20 percent attend high school, the Henrys are in a tiny minority: a professional couple with advanced degrees.

She’s 36, an economist, he’s 42, a lawyer, in a country that has one of the lowest college enrollments in the world. Before the earthquake, the National University of Haiti had 28,000 students but graduated only 600 a year.

Four months ago, their world came tumbling down. It was precisely 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12 when the Henrys’ home began to shake. Pictures fell off the walls, books off the shelves. Dishes shattered. The noise outside was thunderous and when it stopped, the screaming started.

They grabbed their passports and birth certificates from the desk drawer and fled. Outside, they took sheets off the clothes line and slept in the street with their neighbors. “Everyone was crying, ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ ’’ says Aricie.

Three days after the quake, the Henrys’ home collapsed. Newton’s law office also lay in ruins. His 19-year-old niece, an only child, was killed in her university classroom. Many of the couple’s friends and colleagues were also dead.

In the street, Arlee, who had been bitten by something in the night, spiked a fever and was vomiting. Her parents knew they had to make a move.

The news media have reported extensively on the underclass that has suffered the most in the aftermath of the quake. But professionals who were following what they thought was a straight path to a stable life were uprooted, too: houses, possessions, and life savings gone in less than a minute.

In Port-au-Prince, Newton and Aricie had worked in the same office, fallen in love, and married in 2004. A year later, Newly was born, and then came Arlee. Last year, the couple put nearly all of their savings into a house they loved. It had four bedrooms and a yard with a pool, coconut palms, mango, plaintain, and banana trees. Most of all, it was in a safe neighborhood for their girls.

After the quake and five nights on the street, the family took a bus to the border with the Dominican Republic, then rented a couple of horses for the brief river crossing. Aricie, who worked for the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, called colleagues at the World Bank in Washington, who wired her four tickets to Boston. She had been here before, visiting an uncle who later returned to Haiti. Newton has a cousin in Waltham and the Henrys crowded in with him, seven people in two bedrooms.

Two weeks after the earthquake, Maria Trozzi was at her clinic in the emergency room at Boston Medical Center. Trozzi is cofounder of the Good Grief Program, which provides advice to parents whose children have suffered trauma. Over the years, she’s done crisis counseling in the aftermath of Columbine, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. The Henrys had come to the hospital to see about Arlee’s bite. A social worker gave them winter coats; they had fled Haiti with only the clothes on their backs.

“When they came to my clinic, just the elevator ride, the tremor, was traumatic for the children,’’ says Trozzi. As for the parents, they had been “climbing the ladder which fell on them’’ in Haiti.

Trozzi has seen scores of parents in her clinic. But the magnitude of the devastation in Haiti, and the trauma experienced by the girls, prompted her to take action beyond her usual counseling. “I don’t think I was ever confronted before by a young, middle class, well-educated family that was without real basics of food, shelter and clothing,’’ says Trozzi.

Complicating matters, the cousin’s landlord had ordered the Henrys to leave. Trozzi, who lives in Dorchester, sent e-mails to friends asking for help; within weeks, she had raised $18,000.

But where would they live? Trozzi, who grew up in Milton, knew that it has a sizable Haitian community. She found an apartment there on Craigslist and in March, the family moved in.

The earthquake wasn’t the first tragedy to befall the Henrys. Both Newton and Aricie come from families of nine children; both sets of parents attended graduate school. In her family, the first five children were lawyers. One, a sister, was 33 when she was shot to death on the street in 1996. In 2005, a brother was kidnapped and held for ransom — a not uncommon occurrence there.

“We paid a lot of money for him,’’ says Aricie. But the beatings he had suffered by his captors led to his death last year. Another brother died of “a mysterious disease.’’ Of Newton’s eight siblings, four have died from illnesses.

Trozzi’s network yielded quick results. Her church, United Church of Christ Congregational in Norwell, donated Stop & Shop gift cards. The Inly Montessori School in Scituate collected winter clothing and shoes. A preschool donated toiletries.

In Haiti, Newton was secretary of a human rights organization. “I consider health and education human rights,’’ he says. “In Haiti, people are hungry, sick, have no electricity. No basic needs were met before the earthquake and now it’s worse.’’

Aricie, too, worked full time. In early March, she got an e-mail from her boss saying that March 8 was the deadline to return to work. She responded that she was ready, if they could give her and her family “a safe place to sleep.’’ She never heard back.

The family is here on a temporary tourist visa, which Trozzi hopes can be changed to permanent, though she knows that will be difficult unless they can find jobs. Meanwhile, they aren’t allowed to work; they have written their resumes in hopes that their immigration lawyer can help them find a way to stay. (Arlee is a US citizen; she was born here, a month premature, when Aricie was visiting her uncle.)

“I can see Newton doing great work with Legal Aid,’’ says Trozzi, adding that 30 percent of the patients at Boston Medical Center are Haitian.

“The most important thing is for me to work and support my family,’’ says Newton.

For now, their routine consists of walking Newly to St. Mary of the Hills school, which admitted her free, doing errands in Mattapan Square, attending the Mattapan Baptist Church of Milton for services and e-mailing loved ones in Haiti.

A fund-raiser is planned for June 6 in Milton and Joanna’s Place, a nonprofit that helps families suffering change or loss, is helping.

“We think our life is a miracle,’’ says Aricie. “The community is very, very kind.’’

As for the children, they have drawn a picture and hung it on their bedroom wall: an American flag next to a Haitian flag.

For more information on the fund-raising, go to www.joannasplace.org.