Entering Wilda Randolph's town home on Mass. Ave. in northwest Cambridge, visitors see that her children are growing up with a television, telephone and a stocked refrigerator.

Simple things.

But when Randolph arrived in Massachusetts 20 years ago, she had hardly anything. Arriving with her sick mother-in-law in the middle of winter, she spoke no English, had no job and was far from the warm shores of her native Haiti.

The last two decades have hardly been rosy. She was evicted from her apartment earlier this year. Her house burned down nine years ago. She divorced her husband several years after she arrived. She dreamed of getting a Ph.D. but because of the constraints of jobs and single motherhood, she has not been able to complete her GED.

But she says, in the end, she came to America to survive and give her children a better chance at life--a chance that would have denied in the tumultuous world of Haiti.

She says she has no plans to return to Haiti, and she is even planning to bring her mother to Cambridge and she hopes someday that her siblings will join her. And while Randolph's story mirrors the hard-scrabble existence for Haitians in Cambridge, political turmoil at home ensures that this recent immigrant wave is here for the long haul.

Coming to America

Randolph set foot on American soil for the first time in 1980, when she arrived in Florida as a newlywed with her husband, an Asian-American airman who had been stationed in Haiti.