With all the odds against him, he refuses to say, ‘No, I can’t’
Published: April 17, 2007
John Rovetto is a survivor.
The 19-year-old Vernon resident twice cheated death as a young boy in Haiti and, after being adopted by an American couple, has overcome one obstacle after another.
“He’s on his third life now,” said his adoptive mother, Kathy Rovetto.
Despite partial paralysis in his left arm and leg — from elbow-to-fingers and shin-to-toes — from a childhood head injury in Haiti, Rovetto played three seasons of basketball at Sussex County Technical School in Sparta, where he led the team in blocked shots in his junior year. He was sidelined this season, his senior year, due to corrective surgery on his left foot.
Last month, Rovetto was named one of four winners of the nonprofit Council for Exceptional Children’s “Yes I Can Award” for athletics.
The council, founded in 1922, bills itself as the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving education for students with disabilities and/or the gifted. It is giving 29 awards this year in nine categories.
The “Yes I Can” awards are given in categories of academics, arts, athletics, community service, employment, extracurricular activities, independent living skills, technology and self advocacy.
“He’s an inspiration to his teammates,” said Carol Sprague, Rovetto’s English teacher and the person who nominated him. “He’s an honest boy, always smiling, always helpful. He’s a good student.”
Rovetto also is “conscientious” and “never stops trying,” according to other teachers.
“John will always be known as ‘Mr. Can Do,’” teacher Matthew Fredericks said in a letter supporting the nomination. “He never lets his body’s bad side tell his good side he can’t” do something.
Overcoming and adapting have been John’s hallmarks most of his life. Before age 7 he twice cheated death and then had to learn how to survive in a new country.
Because his left hand is paralyzed, Rovetto had to learn to tie his shoelaces with only his right hand — and he nimbly performs that task. He starts by pulling each lace taut around the heel, and then brings one lace at a time back around to the front to thread them into a pretzel twist. He then uses one finger to hold that formation down, while forming the bow loops and cinching them up into a knot.
He also learned to shoot a basketball with one hand.
FACING DEATH
Rovetto’s story begins in Haiti, where he was born Jean Rithel Simeon on April 5, 1987, in a remote mountain village.
At age 2, he was unconscious and so bloated from malnourishment that missionaries — one of whom was Kathy Rovetto — did not expect him to survive a two-day trek by truck and boat to a hospital in Port-au-Prince.
Kathy, a nurse, stuck a tube through John’s nose and throat to feed him powdered Gatorade the missionaries carried and mixed into their canteens of water.
“His (biological) mother had brought him to an open-air clinic and he was not conscious, he was severely malnourished,” Kathy Rovetto said. “He was pretty near death at the time. We put a tube down into his stomach and started an IV with antibiotics, and all I had to give him was Gatorade.”
Another child on that trip died. John spent the next two years in the New Life Children’s Home orphanage in Port-au-Prince, where he recovered before going back to live with his mother and six siblings in a hut that lacked electricity or running water.
In 1991, he faced death again.
John was inside a hut while his siblings were playing atop the thatched roof. Suddenly it collapsed, sending spears of bamboo into his brain. He was in a coma for three months and partially paralyzed on the left side of his body.
Because handicapped children sometimes were killed in jungle villages, his mother feared for his life if she took him back home. Instead, she put him up for adoption through the orphanage.
The Rovettos agreed to adopt him, and the bureaucratic process began. By June of 1994, Haiti’s governmental strife worsened and Americans were advised to leave the country. It was now or never for the orphanage to get the 7-year-old boy out of the country, and on June 17, 1994, he was flown to Miami, where the Rovettos picked him up, the day before the airport was closed.
“They were racing against time, it was really hairy,” said Kathy Rovetto, a nursing supervisor for PSA Health Care in Sparta, a home-health-care agency.
For a little boy who spoke only Haitian Creole (a mix of French and West African languages), it was quite a culture shock to be plucked out of Haiti, said his adoptive father, Stephen Rovetto, who is a case manager in the criminal division of Superior Court in Newton.
“He came out of Haiti with used clothing, a baseball cap too small for his head and a pair of old loafers that didn’t fit, and an old toothbrush. That was it, that was his stuff,” said Stephen Rovetto. “He was overwhelmed by everything.”
In Vernon, John became the younger brother of Allyson and Stephen Rovetto, who were 11 and 8 at the time. It was their job to teach him English during that summer so he could attend kindergarten in the fall.
“He was teaching them Creole faster than they were teaching him English,” said the father.
The boy’s name was changed to John Rithel Rovetto and the adoption was finalized on Jan. 15, 1995. At age 11, John became a United States citizen. And over the years, he has undergone two foot surgeries and four arm surgeries.
“Right now, he’s an all-American kid,” Kathy said. “We’re so proud of him.”
John, who is polite and easy-going, now will receive the “Yes I Can” award at a ceremony in Louisville, Ky., April 20.
John does not remember his childhood in Haiti. Most of what he knows about his family and native country is what has been told to him or what he’s seen in photos. In recent years, he has reconnected with his family there, and he has been helping to feed them by sending them $20 a month that he earned at part-time jobs, first at Wal-Mart in Hampton and now at Domino’s Pizza in Andover.
“I want to go back,” John said. “I do miss it, from seeing pictures and seeing my mom (in photos). I miss it a lot. I write to her and send her money.”
He also sent his Haitian family his graduation picture. They sent back a photo of them proudly holding his smiling portrait in cap-and-gown. Though he already has his graduation photo, Rovetto won’t receive his diploma for a few more months, when he graduates at the end of this school year from Sussex County Technical School in Sparta.
A trip to Haiti is still perhaps a few years away. He is studying automotive services in school and enjoys creating rap CDs on the computer with his friends.
“He’s come a long way,” said his father. “We’ve always told him that regardless of his disability, he can do whatever he sets his mind to.”
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