Haiti After the Earthquake (46 page)

We slowly moved from the courtyard to the street, where we had a better view of what we had escaped. The villa we had just occupied was leaning on one side; half of it, opposite where the meeting had been taking place, had fallen down. The large house next door had been flattened. Many of the health officials' cars had been destroyed by falling electric poles.

The streets began to fill with people, most covered with dust from the rubble, and many calling out to God. Some were screaming that it was the end of the world. Huge numbers of cars had accumulated on the roads, but many people were on foot, desperate to get home to their families. Within minutes of the quake, Haitians were working at removing their neighbors and loved ones from under the debris. Others were trying to bring injured people to safety or to some kind of health care. I witnessed spectacular displays of creativity; just about everything was used to carry the wounded: mattresses, planks of wood, doors that had been removed from their hinges, stretchers,
bourettes
, motorcycles, pickup trucks.

A storm raged inside my head: What is this? Where are these people coming from? Why are they covered in dust? Where are they going? I had been in Manhattan on 9/11, where the destruction had been contained. So in my mind, this earthquake, this foreign event that had occurred, was limited to one street or, at most, this neighborhood. I did not imagine that Port-au-Prince, our capital, had been destroyed, our cherished ministry of health and most of the other ministries along with it. A Durham University geophysics expert would subsequently assess the earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince and its surroundings to be “like thirty-five Hiroshima bomb
explosions hitting Haiti at once.” But even before I heard that frightening comparison, my heart was being guided on the way of proceeding by the teachings of Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the medically trained Jesuit priest who tended to Hiroshima's sick and dying.

As I stood there, trying to make sense of the inconceivable, Prime Minister Bellerive came over and asked if I would go with him. I told him that I would go to the General Hospital to help. Unaware of the damage to the airport or the extent of the devastation throughout the capital, I imagined that I could be useful at the outset and travel home within a few days. I understood, however, that as a public servant, the prime minister could no longer travel to a UN meeting the next day as originally planned.

Standing in the street with the astonished health team, I saw schoolchildren, their colorful uniforms stained with blood, carrying injured classmates on their backs. At times, several children worked together to carry one who, having lost use of a limb, could not negotiate the crowds. The traffic was growing. Drivers exchanged what little information they had been able to gather from word of mouth along the way: This street is blocked because all the houses are down; that street is off limits because electric poles fell on cars in the middle of the road; drivers are dead; that street is cracked open; people are trying to clear out that area. Everyone was outside, some holding packages containing the few belongings they were able to salvage. What would soon be dubbed
psychose béton
(psychosis, as in phobia or fear of concrete) took hold of the population. Thus began the massive exodus toward open spaces, which led to the proliferation across the capital of camps filled with destitute people.

After the earthquake, phones were not working. Even before the quake, when they did work, the principal way of disseminating information in Haiti is through
tele-dyol
(
dyol
is the Creole word for
mouth
). The radio broadcasts, for the few stations we were able to tap, seemed to be on autopilot, with streaming music.

Bodies were everywhere. On the sidewalk, in the streets, protruding from the rubble, hanging out of cars, crushed under buildings, suffocating inside crumbled homes. Dead people everywhere; everywhere.

Haitians have a profoundly extensive tradition of venerating the dead. In the days immediately following the catastrophe, many survivors could not locate their loved ones. People had been buried alive in their homes or places of work. The main morgue at the General Hospital was not working, and the morgues that are normally attached to funeral parlors were for the most part destroyed. In some neighborhoods, people sat in front of their destroyed homes, with their dead neatly wrapped, for the most part in pristine white sheets, by their side. They sat there as if waiting for something big to happen, even though the big event had already occurred.

Within a few more days, the stench of dead bodies was everywhere, and people walked the streets wearing masks. Those fortunate enough to have survived the earthquake wore an ashy cloak of fine white dust carried by the wind from the rubble. Word spread that putting toothpaste below one's nose would help cover the stench and help one breathe in the midst of the overwhelming dust. But though the dust settled everywhere, it did not obscure anything: not the excruciating pain, or the overpowering fear, or the deep gratitude for having survived. None of it could be hidden, not even by this ubiquitous, intrusive dust from the destruction.

In the days immediately following the earthquake, most UN staff stayed at the logistics base—log base, as we call it—the main UN peacekeepers' compound. We worked round the clock, doing both rescue and programmatic work and, when possible, finding a relatively quiet corner to sleep for a bit. UN employees went to dig under the rubble for their missing coworkers; they went on site to identify otherwise unrecognizable bodies. The head of the mission, Mr. Hedi Annabi, and the second in command, Mr. Luis Da Costa, were both acknowledged as missing and were believed to have died in the destroyed Christopher Hotel, which housed the MINUSTAH executive offices. When a computer was available and the Internet happened to work for a brief moment, people took turns sending reassuring messages to family around the world, as well as death notices to headquarters; every division lost workers. People who had
been able to retrieve some clothing shared with others who had lost all. At log base, we were blessed to have electricity, potable water, and daily food rations of MREs (meals ready to eat, little packets of army combat food). Our community of grieving yet driven comrades was a resolute bunch of humanitarian workers from every continent. As someone pointed out, everyone spoke with an accent, but there was a common understanding born of shared traumatic experiences. Coworkers from different divisions, who may never have spoken to each other before, greeted each other as long lost friends. Discovering a familiar face among the survivors was electrifying.

Walking in log base one afternoon, foggy from sleep deprivation, I noticed an Asian man walking deliberately toward me. I made eye contact as he approached, an unspoken question stuck in my throat. He walked with purpose, yet his face was shrouded with grief. When he reached me, he simply put his head on my shoulder. He did so in a familiar way, as if he had rested his head on my shoulder many times before; he did it in a familial way—as if he, a Chinese man from a faraway land and I, a Haitian woman in her native land, were kinfolks. It was as though, immersed together in this tragedy, we had been compelled to know each other intimately and discovered that we were, in fact, the same. Existentially, we did know each other; our souls were united by sorrow.

As I hesitantly raised my hands to embrace him, I realized that he was one of the Chinese peacekeepers from the airport. I felt him heaving and heard his spasmodic breathing as he began to weep. In time, I learned that the Chinese peacekeepers had been in a meeting at the Christopher Hotel at the fatal moment. Their remains had been found that afternoon. They had journeyed all the way from China to die in Haiti, the country they had come to help, just hours after they had landed.
Requiescant in pace.
May they rest in peace.

In the days after the earthquake, nearly ten thousand families, approximately forty-eight thousand people, sought refuge in a vast, open space that had served as a military landing field. Having walked through this vast expanse of land, I slowly became aware
that there was no curling smoke slowly climbing up to the heavens; there were no simmering pots. No one was cooking, anywhere in sight. No one had anything to cook; no one had anything to eat. This is how it began, before the shacks were built by people who needed shelter from the land that still rattled. Some fifty-odd aftershocks occurred in the weeks following the main event. At the time, we did not know that aftershocks were par for the course and would continue. Many of us did not even know that they were aftershocks. We thought, each time, that the worst was about to happen, that it would be the final blow.

The camp space seemed all the bigger because no structures were erected. I struggled to get my bearings: The sun was behind us, so we were facing north. Much was missing from the customary panorama. Except for the thousands of destitute families, nothing was there. The ground was barren. Even the gravel and the sticks that refugees eventually used to build had to be brought in. During those early days, small groups of people clustered around the modest bundles of belongings they had managed to salvage. Many stood, blank faced. Others sat on the ground or on whatever could serve as an impromptu resting device. Many were wounded and produced makeshift bandages from pieces of cloth they had scavenged from the rubble. Some were bleeding. Others had broken bones but were afraid to go to a medical station because word had gone out that people were getting amputations to prevent gangrene. Having lost their homes and their loved ones, many people chose to remain in the camps so as not to lose limbs. Here in the middle of nowhere, they were scared and suffering, but physically whole.

A Haitian doesn't just say: I went looking for my neighbor and knocked on his door. Instead, she mimics the sound of the action and says: I went looking for my neighbor and knocked on his door
kow, kow.
The folk art of effective storytelling in Haiti has one cardinal rule: The sound brings life to the story. If there is an accident on the road, a masterful narrator will not simply explain what occurred but will depict it in the culturally prescribed manner: The cobalt blue
2008 Toyota was approaching at full speed
voum
when the red- and yellow-colored
tap tap
abruptly made the curve
pheeew
and they collided
boom
! (Mass transportation across Haiti consists solely of a colorful fleet of mostly dilapidated trucks, adorned with vibrant naïve paintings, complemented by philosophical and biblical quotes. These trucks are called
tap taps
because of the noise they make while negotiating the country's many unpaved roads.) For the storyteller and her audience, sounds impart the nuanced details of the moment and not only enliven the account but render the story credible. Creole is not a tonal language, but it is hugely phonetic. Words don't stand alone but are reinforced by sound. Creole appropriates and conveys sounds in a powerfully onomatopoeic way.