Strong will led doctor to a better life

Germina Suffrant was 7 years old, and she felt all alone.

Her grandmother, who had become the child's guardian after her young parents fled Haiti for the United States, was dead.

Ms. Suffrant knew it was coming. In fact, her earliest memory is of the matriarch's return from the hospital with the bad news. Then came the bleeding.

Over the next few months she watched the strongest person she knew waste away.

"The clearest memory that I have was when she came back from finally seeing the doctor and they told her that she was going to die," said Ms. Suffrant, who suspects uterine cancer killed her grandmother but is still not sure. "They sent her home to wait until she died and as the days went by she bled more and more and became weaker and weaker. I woke up one day and they told me she was dead."

It was on that day that Ms. Suffrant's future was set. She would soon move from her grandmother's mud house in Desdunes, Haiti, to stay with her uncle in the nation's capital, Port-Au-Prince. She would try, and fail, to reach her parents in New Jersey. And she would soon begin to think about becoming a doctor, so that others wouldn't have to suffer like her grandmother did.

Now a third-year OB-GYN resident at the Medical College of Georgia Hospital, Ms. Suffrant, 31, is on the path that was set for her when she was a child.

"I knew since high school I wanted to be an OB-GYN to help underprivileged women," she said. "I want to do missionary work because it's needed."

Ms. Suffrant's parents -- young, scared and concerned for the future of their newborn daughter -- left her in Haiti while they tried to build a new life for the family in New Jersey.

Her first attempt to reach her parents ended in failure. She was apprehended in Miami by authorities, who shepherded her into a detention area before sending her back to the island.

But her luck turned when a sympathetic consulate decided to help the teary-eyed young girl if she gave it a second try. Soon, she was on a flight to Canada with a woman she had never met. During their layover in New York, she was supposed to meet them in the airline terminal. Ms. Suffrant held tightly to a picture of her mother as she nervously looked across the terminal for the face a woman she could barely remember.

"When her connecting flight was up I still hadn't seen my parents," she said. "(The woman) said, 'well, I guess I'm going to have to take you with me.' I started crying because I knew if she did that was it. I would not see my parents ever again. Right when we were leaving I saw my mom."

Ms. Suffrant has since become a U.S. citizen, and her parents were granted amnesty.

She is thankful for her mother and father, who had little but who pushed her to succeed in school, and for the country that embraced them when they were down.

"I knew I wanted to come to America," she said. "Everyone wants to come to America. I am so blessed. I came from a two-room mud house with no toilet paper and to be where I am at. I am so thankful."

Reach Adam Folk at (706) 823-3339 or adam.folk@augustachronicle.com.