Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid (38 page)

Finally, on January 15, three long days after the earthquake, a call: “It’s a huge mess. You can’t imagine. I’m not even sure what is going on.” Charles’s voice sounded strong, but tired.

“What do you need?” I pleaded. “Where are you sleeping? Is it as bad as it sounds? What can I do? Are you leaving? Can you get to New York? Are you safe? Please stay safe. Are there aftershocks? Where are people living?”

“I can’t talk long, my dear. I’m fine. You would have felt pretty guilty, huh, if something had happened and you didn’t call me back!” He was able to muster a joke. Charles was really fine.

“I will be staying. I’ve lost so many friends. People from work keep coming in missing a kid, a spouse. It’s horrible. Horrible. It’s worse than what you are seeing on TV.”

For once, the reporters may not have been exaggerating.

The job offer came a few weeks later. I was in the middle of my first year in a PhD program and planned to be done with long missions in the field, at least for the next few years. My life in New York was finally starting to feel real: I was happy to be back and excited about my relationship with Jack, who worked in finance. I enjoyed spending time with someone who wasn’t tied up by the knot of professional and social concerns I had been tangled in for so long. For some time I had suspected the threads would never come loose, but now they were, and I found that not only was there a world beyond aid but that I liked inhabiting it. When the earthquake happened, though, I remembered something a mentor had told me long ago: aid work isn’t just a profession, it is a lifestyle. You never clock out of the field, or not really.

I told Jack, “I got a job.”

“Great. What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’ll be doing monitoring.”

“Monitoring what?”

“The response.”

“What response?”

“The Haiti response.”

“From here?”

“No.”

“You’re going to Haiti?” Jack had become used to my peripatetic ways. In the months we had been dating, I had been to Kenya, Uganda, and Jordan for various weeklong consulting projects, and I could tell he
assumed this was simply another one of those short trips. “For how long?”

“I don’t know, six months?” I knew this was going to come as a shock. I had applied for the post secretly, telling myself I just wanted to see if I’d get the job, never expecting it would come through so soon. But when it did, the same reflex kicked in. I felt a familiar tug in my stomach, and I realized how badly I wanted to go.

“Six months!?” He sighed. If we were going to stay together, these surprises were something he’d have to adjust to somehow, and I could tell he was trying. We hadn’t been dating long enough for him to put his foot down and demand I stay. But the relationship was meaningful enough that one of us leaving for a foreign country wasn’t something that we could take lightly, either. At least
I
didn’t take it lightly.

But my resolve was clear. Watching the response unfold on television, I knew, after having seen the aftermath of similar situations, that whatever the final death toll was it was more than just a figure. It was people—people with families and friends, people who were loved. People like Charles, who could have been a number but wasn’t. He was still Charles—and I was so grateful.

Part of me, though, didn’t think that going off to Haiti was jeopardizing anything at all. In my mind, I could justify my decision easily. Haiti was close; I was only going for a few months; it was a good job; and Jack and I worked out a plan to see each other every three
weeks. Unlike Darfur or Sierra Leone or anywhere in Asia, where the journey home was a grueling global marathon, the flight from Haiti to New York was an easy three hours or so. I could eat lunch in Port-au-Prince and dinner in SoHo, if I wanted. If this hadn’t been possible, I wouldn’t have gone. I thought I could have one foot in my professional life and one foot in my personal, and maintain good standing in both. And I promised myself that if things started to fall apart with Jack, I’d quit.

When I look back now, my actions do seem reckless. The thought that I could move fluidly between worlds was ridiculous. I had everything that I had imagined wanting from afar: a boyfriend, a sunny apartment, a life with some steady direction. Convincing myself that I could assuage the tug to follow another disaster while also maintaining a normal life at home was foolish. Sheer adrenaline was what was pulling me to Haiti—the addictive rush of being part of a major response. I loved that my career was intertwined with the most urgent events in the world. Sitting around in New York, I felt like a football player on the disabled list, watching the game unfold in front of me, but not being able to get off the bench. All my other jobs now felt like practice runs. In Haiti, I’d be in a position of seniority, with the chance to contribute more than I ever had before. So when I got the call, how could I refuse? This disaster was bigger than my nice life in New York; the allure was too powerful to ignore, and its force helped me
rationalize my decision, as I persuaded myself I could have both the job and the relationship.

When I arrived in Port-au-Prince that winter, I had never seen anything like it. Iron rods jutted out from slabs of concrete like broken bones—looking at them you’d think,
I was never supposed to see that
. Facades had been ripped off buildings, exposing the insides, and concrete walls were shot through with cracks. If a building was clearly beyond repair, it was demolished, and every day more of the town came down, as people slowly chipped away at the places they once called home.

And these chips added up. My first morning on the streets, I stared out the window of the van transporting me and the rest of the staff to our office. They had done this trip for a few weeks now and sat silently with their laptops open, somehow managing to type as we bumped along the rubble-filled streets. Meagan, the young red-haired British nutritionist who had been there since day two of the quake, looked up from her spreadsheet and saw the expression on my face. In the understated way that only a Brit can pull off, she nodded slowly and said, “Yeah, it’s a bit shit, isn’t it?”

I nodded back, unable to imagine a force powerful enough to cause all this damage. With just a thirty-second
flick of its tail,
le grand serpent
(the great snake, as Haitians called it) brought down schools and homes, crushing classrooms and entire families. More than 220,000 people were killed and approximately 180,000 homes were wrecked, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless. Close to four thousand of the roughly five thousand schools affected by the earthquake were leveled completely. January 12, 2010 would be a turning point for the nation: now people referred to events in Haiti’s history as having taken place “before”—or “after.”

The damage caused by the earthquake, however, was not merely the consequence of its magnitude, which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Chile in February 2010 was significantly less destructive, despite being
five hundred times stronger
than the Haitian quake. So why was the earthquake in Haiti so much more devastating?

One answer was that the fault line ran directly beneath Port-au-Prince, which was vastly overcrowded and teeming with poorly built structures. There was almost a complete absence of building codes and regulations. Construction companies forewent expensive materials such as rebar, the steel bars used to reinforce concrete. And the concrete itself was cheap, made from salinated sand in the hills. In order to get more for their money, builders also added too much water to the cement mixture, which meant it didn’t actually bond.

After the quake, more than half a million of Port-au-Prince’s two million residents skipped town to live
with family members in rural areas. The rest pitched tent camps all over Port-au-Prince, until it seemed as if every stretch of open land—parks, parking lots, even the dividers down the main highway—were patched in plastic sheeting.

And when the rainy season started, there wasn’t much more than a few flimsy plastic sheets, tattooed with humanitarian logos, already muddy and frayed, between people and the tropical storms. Gutters turned to whirlpools and roads became gray foaming rivers. Bodies stood stiff against walls, staring stoically outward at the road, trying to stay dry under overhangs. When people had to duck out into a downpour, they wore shower caps or held plastic bags over their heads. People moved a tire, a piece of concrete rubble, a bundle of wood: anything sizable enough to obstruct or divert the water rushing down from the hills and keep it from getting under the tents was repurposed as a makeshift dam. But still the brackish water managed to seep into everything. The stench, like the rain, was relentless. Mothers told us that some nights they held their sleeping children in their arms to protect them from the inescapable wetness.

“I’d rather be dead than living like this in five years,” a woman said to me one day, when I visited a camp. “When I am deeply thinking about life, I ask for death because I find there is no hope for my children,” she added, brushing away tears as her young son peeked out from behind her legs. “Life does not have sense for me anymore.” The earthquake had
stripped her of everything she’d relied on. Her child’s school collapsed. Her house crumbled. Her husband died. She used to sell sweets in a local market but the market had fallen apart and her supply dried up. “Neither in two nor in five years, I do not know where I will be; only God knows. I need a way to survive with my children so that they can be something in the future.” Once again, just like Darfur or Aceh, Port-au-Prince was a giant puzzle to solve, the ultimate professional challenge. And the people were truly desperate for help.

I was in charge of monitoring the agency’s response in the seven sectors we covered: health, nutrition, water and sanitation, child protection, education, shelter, and food. While people at home were writing me e-mails that said “The work you do is incredible” or “You’re an inspiration to us all,” I was doing what people in offices everywhere did: I sat behind a desk and stared at a computer. My first weeks in Haiti were spent squinting at spreadsheets that listed the number of jerry cans distributed in Delmas 31 Camp and the number of tarpaulins handed out at Gaston Margon Camp. I questioned the contents of the hygiene kits we delivered. I sorted through requisition forms when the number of blankets didn’t add up.

“Were these the hygiene kits with the toothbrushes donated by the Brits or the sanitary pads from the Danish?”

“Were these bales of blankets or individual blankets received? How many blankets are even in a bale?”

“Are these the drugs that came through Miami or Santo Domingo?”

“I don’t know. I got here two weeks ago,” was the usual response. Staff turnover in a place like Haiti was high.

I spent at least a few hours every day in a fugue of frustration. I didn’t know what people saw when they imagined me at work, but surely they didn’t picture a glorified bean counter, which is what I felt like most of the time. Regardless, being there and being able to respond and help organize this massive effort was worthwhile. I knew that the tents we distributed, the food that was handed out from our warehouses, and the water we trucked into camps were providing some relief to that woman I met in the camp and the over one million homeless people just like her. They may have been rudimentary, but the temporary schools we built helped keep children in school and may have attracted others who weren’t in school before the earthquake. Our nutrition services gave support to lactating mothers and their newborns. People who had never seen a doctor before were now able to visit our clinics and receive treatment. It was basic, and it was messy, but it was
there
, and people were grateful.