BROOKLYN, NY -- Last week, Margarette Tropnas of East Flatbush, Brooklyn, was honored by the Brooklyn District Attorney as one of the borough's most "Extraordinary Women" for her lifelong social work commitment to New York's Caribbean community. But judging by the ways in which her job and her community are about to change, the award seems almost prophetic; a sign of even greater things to come from Ms. Tropnas.
Tropnas was born in Haiti and moved to New York at twelve, where she has since devoted over twenty years to alleviating the range of abuse issues that plague the Haitian community--from drug abuse to child abuse, making lives better and winning awards along the way. For the past two years, she has been the Program Director of CCM, an organization that helps at-risk youth avoid foster placement and trains their families to become self-sufficient.
Tropnas' next step is a culmination of her life's work, a specialized task that requires the skills and knowledge she has acquired after years of immersion in her neighborhood's schools, churches and homes. In a few weeks, Tropnas starts her new job as the Executive Director of Dwa Fanm, an organization whose goal is to empower Haitian girls and teach them about women's rights, partly in hopes to decrease the continuation of domestic and sexual abuse.
"The name of the organization is Creole for 'women's rights,' and that's what the goal is--to empower, to provide service education and end discrimination for them; to find ways to avoid them being taken advantage of," Tropnas told me a few days before the awards ceremony.
The move comes only a few months after the tragedy in Haiti, an event whose ripple effects are felt in Tropnas' community in more ways than one. "It's such a painful situation," Tropnas says, recalling the aftermath, "My husband's cousin lost a sister; my mom lost her cousin. It's been heartbreaking." Relief, she says, is going so slowly that she regularly gets calls from Port-au-Prince from people hoping that she can help, since the efforts in Haiti aren't reaching them.
"The influx of immigrants has already started," Tropnas tells me, humbly describing the ways in which she's already helping with this new pressure on her community, even though it doesn't seem to be part of her current job title. "We're expecting more immigrants, but we're already seeing the issues that arise. The people arriving need immediate relief."
Tropnas tells me that the ratio of recent Haitian immigrants, before the earthquake, was already 40/60. In the aftermath of the quake, President Barack Obama granted many of those recent immigrants temporary legal status and stopped deportations. Soon after, many immigration advocates called for a change in immigration laws that would allow Haitians to seek refuge on American shores, but only Haitian orphans were granted these rights. As Tropnas notes, however, immigrants are arriving nonetheless, and there are many concerns to take care of, from immunization records to transportation routes.
In stark contrast, the awards ceremony at which Ms. Tropnas and thirty other women were honored was fancy and congratulatory, focusing on women's history month instead of the specific issues that many of the award recipients worked on in their communities. "[These women] make Brooklyn a better place to live," said the Kings County DA Charles Hynes in a somewhat ironic statement--it's doubtful that he was thinking of some of Brooklyn's newest Haitian residents when he said that. But fortunately, Tropnas is always thinking about them, and their arrival in Brooklyn will clearly be met by one truly extraordinary woman.