For more than five years, Marie has paid in cash for the rent on her two-bedroom Flatbush apartment. She did so because the building superintendent convinced her that cash would be more convenient.

But everything went awry when she received a letter from the building owner hauling her to court for failure to pay the $800 monthly rent. Marie, whose real name is being withheld, was able to convince a judge that she had met her monthly obligation because the superintendent’s story was inconsistent.

“I know I pay the man his rent,” said Marie, a single mother who works as a hotel maid. “It was an ordeal. But thank God, everything came out fine.”

The court ruled in her favor, but the victory came at a price. Marie hired and paid a Creole-speaking Haitian-American attorney $800 to handle the case.

Marie and thousands of other Haitians in New York are facing a myriad of legal issues as they take their first steps on the long road of assimilation into American culture.

Some newcomers are not only entangled in tenant-landlord disputes, but in a host of other legal predicaments such as criminal charges, child abuse issues and civil rights violations.

Asians and Latino residents have access to free or modestly priced legal aid in their native tongue, to help them with legal problems. However, few Haitian immigrants find affordable legal assistance available in their native language.

Haitians have no such recourse in New York. Perhaps only a handful of legal aid groups have Creole-speaking staffers. In addition, legal organizations are so thinly stretched that they are unable to sign on new clients.

Instead Haitian immigrants, such as Marie, rely on private attorneys whose fees are not affordable to the working poor.

“It will take a generation to adjust,” said Vladimir Rodney, a lawyer and vice chair of the Haitian American Alliance. “One generation is at the mercy of a self-appointed facilitators and brokers.”

The legal system is foreign to Haitians who come from a country where many things are handled informally. For instance, people are not accustomed to signing leases for rent. These types of businesses are conducted between friends and a handshake is often as good as a signature. So When Marie’s landlord asked her to pay cash, she never hesitated.

“The legal problem facing the community is tremendous,” said Herold Dasque, the executive director of the Queens based. Haitians-American United for Progress. “In this country people need a lawyer for just about everything and we’re not used to that. Unfortunately, this is something for which we lack the proper means to address.”

The consequences are detrimental. They range from keeping children with their parents to being deported unjustly to serving stiffer sentence than the crime warrants, attorneys and community leaders say.

“Rights are being trampled on without legal advocacy of the needy,” said Fritzgerald Philippeaux, a former staff attorney at National Coalition for Haitian Rights.

In the last four years, NCHR has made several efforts to tackle this mounting problem in the Haitian community. In 1999, NCHR launched a legal education project couple of years after the Abner Louima police brutality case in Flatbush made national headlines.

The program, whose funding ran out last year, provided basic legal education. Using the Haitian media, NCHR staff distributed fliers in Creole that informed readers about what to do when stopped by police and introduced immigrants their rights under the First and Fourth Amendments. Public service announcements aired on radio and television.

As a result, NCHR was flooded with calls about a range of legal issues. While a good percentage of the more than 1,000 calls NCHR fielded during the three years of the program, centered around immigration, criminal, juvenile delinquency and civil cases gave the organization a good sense of the legal needs of the community.

“What was surprising about our tracking of these calls was the number of criminal cases,” said Fritzgerald Philippeaux. “These cases are difficult in that few legal aid organizations can handle them properly. They take time and require a lot of work.”

While Philppeaux provided legal advice to callers, he said criminal cases were referred to private attorneys.

Many people, he said, have to borrow money to pay their legal fees. The criminal cases often involved juvenile who are arrested by the police for routine stops. Feeling harassed, teen-agers would talk back to police and would be arrested.

Some of the youngsters are getting involved in drugs and joining gangs, Haitian community leaders say. As a result, about half of the NCHR’s legal education program concentrated on youth.

NCHR staff visited schools, churches and community centers to conduct workshops and seminars on police-community relations.

At the end of the legal program, NCHR applied for a federal grant to provide more direct legal aid to the community. But it received one-third of the $300,000 needed to get the entire program under way. A scaled-down project was established to provide some legal education.

“It’s not what we would have liked to do, but for the time being, we can at least provide people with referrals,” said Marie Bellevue, program coordinator for the new project.

One area of concern involves the community’s contact with police. An NCHR study of about 300 people, found Haitians believed police were stopping them because the immigrants are black. In addition, respondents, in the survey taken two years ago, said they believed the Haitian accent triggered mistreatment by police.

This lack of communication also appears between attorney and client. Philippeaux recalled a case in which a Haitian man said he acted in self-defense during a fight. But his attorney did not understand him and prepared the case differently.

Luckily, Philippeaux said, the man visited him before the case went to court. Philippeaux contacted the man’s attorney and translated the case. The attorney was surprised to learn what his client had actually told him.

“I can’t do that all the time because I don’t want to interfere in another attorney’s work,” Philippeaux said. “But can you imagine how many people are in this position.”

Another area where Haitians find themselves tangled into the long tentacles of the law in the United States is in family courts. In Haiti parents are allowed to discipline their children almost at will. So here newly arrived parents think it is acceptable to hit and use corporal punishment to discipline their children. Those actions, once reported by neighbors and the children themselves, put the parents in precarious situation, Haitian community leaders say. In family courts the parents don’t have the right of a state provided attorney while the children have a legal guardian defending their rights. So the parents show up in courts badly prepared for the deliberations. Rodney of the Haitian American Alliance, points to a recent case that he was handling of a single mother living in a one-bedroom apartment with five children. He said the judge had ordered the woman to take some steps to insure a better living conditions for the children. But because she didn’t understand the judge’s orders, she failed to follow through. When Rodney received the case, he found himself fighting to keep the family intact because the judge was ready to put the children in a foster home.

“Those are serious consequences,” Rodney said. “The courts have a quixotic view of the family and as a result they do a disservice to the Haitian family.”

This article was written as part of the Ethnic Press Fellowship of the Independent Press Association-New York.