Brooklyn bus driver idles at West Nyack Target (the driver, not the bus)
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- April
- 10
WEST NYACK – From when he drops off his group of St. Dominic’s School students at 8:15 a.m. to when he picks them up at 2:15 p.m., Daniel Joseph has quite a bit of time to himself.
So what does the Brooklyn bus driver do to wile away the hours? Joseph  and other drivers like him  visit what sometimes seems more like a metropolitan city than a mall  he hangs out at the Palisades Center.
(Daniel Joseph, 39, a bus driver for USA United Transit leaves Target to pick up students at St. Dominic’s School in Blauvelt) …
“We spend the whole day here,� he said with a slight Creole accent. “If you need to buy something, usually you can find good things here, use the bathroom if you need and by 2:10 p.m. I’m back to school and on the way to Brooklyn.�
He said the drivers stay in the county to avoid paying extra tolls as well as traffic coming back to pick up the children.
This morning, the 39-year-old Haitian-native could be found lounging in Target’s lobby.
Half sitting atop a handrail and idly swinging a leg, Joseph gazed out at the parking lot, looking as if he were reflecting on weighty matters.
He and a fellow driver, who had just left for Spring Valley for lunch, had been chatting about their families, he recalled. He paused to say  very seriously  that Spring Valley had the absolute best food.
“I don’t know the name of the restaurant, I don’t know the street, I just know that when I need good Haitian food,� he said and pausing to clap, “I go to Spring Valley.�
More specifically, the restaurant was somewhere off Route 59 and had a Haitian flag flying in front.
After chatting, Joseph then completed an errand at the post office and was now waiting for it to turn to 1 p.m., when his cell phone alarm would let him know it was time to head back to St. Dominic’s in Blauvelt.
Some days, he said, he will nap, other days he will study. Joseph, who was an architect and structural engineer in Haiti, is a student at Brooklyn’s Institute of Design and Construction, learning AutoCAD, a design and drafting program.
At about 11:20 a.m., however, Joseph was neither napping nor studying, but gazing out at the Target parking lot, which in spots, looked more like a bus depot.
“It’s really hard for someone who used to do something in your country to come here and start again,� he said. “It’s not really easy for you to just go straight like that to a place asking for a job … So I (work on the school bus), try to pay my bill and go to school to put something in my head too.�
In 2001, Joseph immigrated to the U.S. because he said it wasn’t safe to live Haiti. Still, it was difficult not to pine for his homeland, he said. Asked what he missed most about Haiti, Joseph said instantly, “I miss the sun, the good weather.
“Sometimes when I wake up here to come to work  5:30 in the morning, 7 degrees outside,� he said, “sometimes I put my sheet over my head, look outside and say, ‘Wow, I don’t want to go to work.’ But you gotta go.�
Gloomy weather aside, the bus driver, who works for USA United Transit and who makes about $100 a day, said he is enjoying his stay in America. And although someday he plans to return to Haiti and start his own design company, he encouraged everyone to live outside of their homeland.
“When you come outside your country, it’s a different experience,� he said. “You see the way people are thinking, the way people are acting, you learn from other people.�
In America, he learned everyone was given an opportunity to succeed, he said.
“If you’re here, you want to be a doctor, you can be a doctor,� he said, “You want to do it? You prepare for that? You keep going? You got it. In my country, even if you want to be, it’s really difficult.�
But that didn’t make home any less lovely in Joseph’s eyes.
“This is my country,� he said, “You’re only happy when you’re home.�
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 4:28 pm by Christina Jeng. 
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Category: West Nyack
Man, that sucks. An architect to a bus driver. I wonder if there is a Target in Haiti.