By Gretchen Keiser

Rebecca Bouloute, a native of the Caribbean island of Haiti who came to the United States 14 years ago, looks upon the new era for her homeland with hope and some uncertainty.

“The people in Haiti really want a democracy government,” she said, her English tinged with the French accent of her homeland. When news swept Haitian communities in the United States that Jean Claude Duvalier, president for life, had fled the island, there was great excitement and celebrating, Mrs. Bouloute said. She was in Miami’s “little Haiti” community when the news broke, and when she returned to her home in Atlanta, her fellow Haitians were calling to try to arrange a celebration. But, she said, they could not quickly find a place for 500 to 600 people to get together and mark the event, so it passed without a formal celebration.

The public demonstrations of joy are “a good freedom of speech” for Haitians, said Mrs. Bouloute, who came to the United States as a student at a Bible college in 1972. She has worked to help her fellow Haitians almost since her arrival, informally assisting refugees since the mid-1970s and in the 1980s becoming a worker with official refugee programs.

In the past, “if you said something critical about the government” of Haiti “you would get killed,” she said.

But while she expresses relief that Duvalier is safely out of Haiti, she is also unsure of what is to come for the island, which is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

“His majority military force is left behind him,” she said, “and you never know.”

A 32-year-old mother of two children, who is married to a Haitian, Mrs. Bouloute works for the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta in their program to assist Haitians whose immigration status in the United States is in questions. Since 1980 thousands of “boat people” fleeing Haiti have arrived on the Florida coast. They have been held in detention centers around the country pending hearings and many have been deported back to Haiti after rulings that they were not political refugees. It is the position of the Reagan administration that those fleeing Haiti are escaping its poverty, not its politics. A policy of “interdiction” has been established and the Coast Guard now attempts to turn back boats before they reach American waters.

Mrs. Bouloute said it was not possible to separate the dire poverty forcing Haitians away from the island from the political reality of a country governed since 1957 by the Duvalier family and enforced by a private security squad in the thousands called the Ton-Ton Machetes.

In order for people to leave their homeland, “there is something to push you away,” she said. We don’t have any food. We don’t have any work.”

“But what is the reason for not having it?” she asked, saying that it was because of the government that people were held in poverty. “That fact that they left their country is a political reason."

In her own case, Mrs. Bouloute came to the United States through an American sponsor to attend Beulah Heights Bible College. The daughter of a preacher, she is married to the son of another Haitian minister. Her father-in-law is now minister of the Haitian American Church of God in Atlanta, one of three Haitian churches in the city.

Although she is now an American citizen, Mrs. Bouloute said that out of fear she had never spoken to a reporter about conditions in Haiti until after Jean-Claude Duvalier left the country. She still declined to have her photograph taken, saying that she was concerned for the safety both of her own family and of her relatives, including her brothers, still living in Haiti.

As of February 14 she had been unable to reach her family by telephone to find out first hand about their welfare.

Violence broke out after Duvalier’s departure, particularly as people killed those identified as Ton-Ton Macoutes, members of an estimated security force of 15,000 maintained by Duvalier and his father before him.

The Ton-Ton Macoutes had great control, Mrs. Bouloute said. For example, she said that all students take an examination to compete and try to enter the island’s one university. But, actually, she said, “they don’t care what were the results.”

“You have to get somebody on the top to get in the university,” she said. “You go to the Ton-Ton Macoutes, who go to somebody else, who go to somebody else.”

An island of 5.8 million people, Haiti’s per capita income is about $300 in U.S. money and an estimated 80 percent of the country is illiterate. The life expectancy is about 45 years.

A videotape presentation on Haiti, shown by the Christian Council, included a scene filmed on the island several years ago on a holiday. A string of cars, including a limousine identified as that of President Duvalier, passed through the crowd, tossing paper money out the windows while people raced behind, scrambling to catch the money.

The Ton-Ton Macoutes were always present, Mrs. Bouloute said, but “you don’t know who they are.” Some wore uniforms and some didn’t, she said. The purpose of the force was “just to really block the mind of the civilian,” she said. “They have no income from the government. They take advantage of the civilian.”

She recalled a day when she was a teenage girl and sent to buy fish at the market. It was the day of the funeral of Francois Duvalier, “Papa Doc,” and severe restrictions were in place, but the market was open. While there she saw a man dressed in bright red garb and playing an instrument associated with voodoo. Suddenly, she said, Ton-Ton Macoutes began firing guns apparently because the man was behaving inappropriately on the funeral day. People dove to the ground, she said. She fell in a puddle of “stinking mud.”

“I lost the money and the fish,” she recalled and had to borrow money from someone to take a bus home, covered from head to toe with mud. She remembers wondering, “Where is the freedom in my country? It was a very hysterical day.”

Shortly after that she came to the United States and her parents came to Canada a few years later. However, she contends that security forces from Haiti can strike even in the United States.

Her greatest hope now for her homeland is that a democratic government will be established and attention can be turned to pressing needs such as irrigation and restoration of the agricultural land, which is severely depleted, and the establishment of basic hygiene to limit spread of diseases like malaria. Also she hopes that a good school system will be established.

While great anger has been directed at Duvalier, Mrs. Bouloute said, “As a Christian person I was really concerned for Jean-Claude’s life.”

Despite his actions, “I really trust the Lord can change him,” she said. “The Lord can really touch him and change his life.”

Realistically, she knows that the situation in Haiti is too unstable to determine the country’s future path now. Violence and repression in Haiti now have a long history; “it’s like a tree that has been growing for a long time. The head is cut off, but the roots are still there,” she said.

However, her faith is strong. “We have a majority of Christian people praying for the deliverance of Haiti,” she said. “I do not believe God will take it away from a bad man and give it to a bad man.”

“I’m hoping we will have peace.”