Haiti After the Earthquake (43 page)

After the program ended and other programs began, the dark night dragged on. My brother-in-law came over with some friends and we put together a kind of command center, trying to make our efforts at reaching loved ones more efficient. We were still watching the television news programs, but some of us were now delegated to the phones and others to the computer and the radio stations.

Around midnight, we managed to reach my mother-in-law on her cell phone in Les Cayes. There had been no damage where she was in Les Cayes, but she was still feeling tremors.

“The ground is shaking,” she kept saying. “The ground is shaking.”

Her radio transmission had gone off that afternoon and she knew very little about what was happening in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. We told her the little we knew and she was shocked. Before she could ask about her brothers in Carrefour, we were cut off. We would not be able to reach her again for five days.

With daylight the next morning came the first vivid images of the devastation. Piles of rubble were everywhere, many with both frozen corpses and moving limbs peeking out of them. Watching a video of one trapped little boy reaching for his mother from a pancaked house, I saw the little hand and cried. Little did I know then that my cousin Maxo and his ten-year-old son Nozial had already died and that three of Maxo's other children—including the fifteen-month-old—would be trapped in the rubble for two days before being rescued.

Perhaps because the images of the helplessly trapped were so hard to take, a lot of the television news coverage quickly shifted to successful foreign-led professional rescues. Many months later, I was
surprised to learn that fewer than two hundred people had been rescued by professional rescuers. The rest, like Maxo's wife and children, had been saved by their Haitian friends and neighbors.

As for the foreign-led rescues, even if the rescued person died an hour or a day later, that person's predicament needed a dramatic arch, not unlike the short stories and novels that someone like me might write. The viewer needed an ending, and it had to be uplifting so that he or she could continue to watch the heart-crumpling rest. Of the many stories that might have been too devastating to watch are some that my family members told me: of hundreds of people who individually or in small groups kept vigil near a pile of rubble and spoke to their buried loved ones as they slipped away, dying an agonizing death so close, yet beyond reach. Of the trapped loved ones who exhorted their family members to go and leave them behind, to go on with their lives. Among the many things that are haunting about this disaster is to think about how many people could have been, might have been saved, if only love and good will could have rescued them all, if only there had been the right equipment ... if only ... if only ...

Since January 12, 2010, I have often been asked what it was like to experience the earthquake from a distance. Was it traumatic?

Frankly, I have seen too many people who've been irreparably scarred by both physical and psychological wounds to say that I have suffered many. It would be disrespectful to equate my pain and bereavement with that of those who nearly lost their lives and sanity to the devastation.

The Sunday following the earthquake, I took my girls to a service at a large Protestant church in Little Haiti. I had not attended church for some time and was craving that sense of community and solace that it could offer at moments like this. An earthquake survivor, a Baptist minister, had found his way to us and was telling what had now become the familiar story of hundreds of thousands of corpses, most of them picked up with earthmovers to be carried to mass graves.

As the minister was speaking, the woman sitting in front of me, in her early forties and the mother of two small children, like me,
became increasingly upset until she was doubled over and convulsing with grief. That woman had lost twenty-five family members. Because she was not a legal resident of the United States, she couldn't go back to Haiti and try to find and bury her parents, without risking not being able to return to Miami.

There are degrees of trauma and loss I suppose and if you get invited on television programs and are asked to write articles about yours, it seems bigger. However, so many people have suffered much more, are still suffering much more, and I surrender all the blank spaces in and around these words to them. I surrender these spaces also to the dead, to the lives unfulfilled, to the stories untold. We will never know all the stories. Mine is only one—and it is from far away, from
lòt bò dlo
, “the other side of the water,” three Haitian Creole words which evoke both migration and death. Separation, no matter how it happens, is earth shattering. But even for families accustomed to necessary ruptures, this was the most catastrophic. Like the woman in church, they would never be able to say good-bye and would never even learn the fate of their loved ones who were buried, unidentified, in mass graves.

In the weeks and months following the earthquake, many journalists, visiting dignitaries, and even casual observers praised the extraordinary resilience of the Haitian people. Indeed, that resilience is inspiring. For the first hours and days after the earthquake, Haitians were pretty much on their own. Their government, paralyzed by its own losses, was incapable of assisting them, so they dug their loved ones out of the rubble with hammers and axes and even their bare hands. As food and water became scarce, they divided small rations among themselves.

Haiti, which is often referred to as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, had yet another crucial lesson to teach the world: a lesson in resilience. If some of the more sensationalist broadcasts were any indication, the world was expecting something else. Journalists eagerly jumped in the middle of chaotic food and water distributions, allowing themselves to be bumped and shoved for the cameras. Such was the fear of looting that Haitian policemen shot hungry young men to death over bags of rice. However, the
massive, large-scale looting that was anticipated never took place. Instead, Haitians buckled down for what will surely be a long and difficult road. They set up temporary shelters with sticks and bedsheets, making public places their homes. When it rained, they stood up and let the muddy water flow between their legs.

After three post-earthquake visits to Haiti, I began to ask myself if this much-admired resilience would not in the end hurt the affected Haitians. It would not be an active hurt, like the pounding rain and menacing winds from the hurricane season, the brutal rapes of women and girls in many of the camps, or the deaths from cholera. Instead, it would be a passive hurt, as in a lack of urgency or neglect. “If being resilient means that we're able to suffer much more than other people, it's really not a compliment,” a young woman at the large Champs de Mars camp in downtown Port-au-Prince told me.

As friends and leaders both in Haiti and in the international community shape their reconstruction plans for the country, they will be remiss if they misinterpret as complacency the grace, patience, and courage that Haitians have shown for more than a year and a half since the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Haitian history teaches us otherwise. Haitians were resilient against the brutal Napoleonic code of French colonial slavery until they started a revolution that created their republic in 1804. Haitians endured thirty years of the Duvalier dictatorship until they ousted Jean Claude Duvalier in 1986. It is now only a matter of time before their post-earthquake endurance justifiably wears out.

In the meantime, that resilience has shown itself in many homegrown efforts, in the beauty parlors and barbershops in the camps, where people who wake up and go to sleep in the midst of inevitable squalor refuse to let it define them. In the letters dropped in the suggestion boxes in which tent city residents plead for food and water and jobs and schools for their children. In the faces and voices of the men and women who read to, sing with, and draw with the orphaned children in the displacement camps, where they are also living. Often unrecognized, some extraordinary leaders are rising out of the makeshift displacement camps. I know a woman who from one day to the next had a hundred people in her yard. She would have
never considered herself a leader before the earthquake. She is sixtynine years old and has lung cancer. Another man was feeding and organizing an entire neighborhood after the earthquake. He is a painter. Haitian-Americans have also stepped up to the plate. Some have rushed to Haiti with larger aid organizations, and others have just picked up and gone on their own. From the young doctors and nurses who arrived that first week, to the teachers and therapists for whom going back and forth to Haiti has now become routine. And yes, also the artists, singers, painters, poets, and novelists too.

For us creative types, especially those who have spent most of our lives outside Haiti, yet still consider ourselves bound to it as the umbilical cords that joined us to our mothers, another Haiti occasionally sparks our imagination. Whenever I am asked to lay out my own personal “vision” for Haiti's future, I think of that place. It is a place where every child (both boys and girls) goes to school, where every person eats everyday and has a roof over his or her head. It is a place where women and girls are fully protected, where there is no rape, no kidnapping. In that place, there is no
peyi andeyò
, no unsurmountable rural-urban divide.

It would be great, however, to see a society emerge out of the rubble that comes closest to the ideal vision that the majority of Haitians, who are mostly poor and marginalized, have for Haiti's future. All of Haiti's children, including my two daughters and all of those who have crossed both earthly and cosmic barriers to
lòt bò dlo,
will be counting on it.

When my friend Paul Farmer asked me first to participate in, then to write about, the collective effort we undertook last February and March to give voice to the silent majority of Haiti, my answer was immediately yes.

Yes, because I owe this small contribution to so many friends forever silenced. I owe it also to the hundreds whose bodies I saw lying on the sidewalks of the Canapé Vert and Martissant roads, in Port-au-Prince the day after that fateful January 12. Each one was covered with a clean white sheet, in a sign of ultimate respect from an unknown survivor to an unknown victim. I owe this small contribution to the mother I saw carrying on her back at 5 o'clock that terrible morning of the 13th, a wounded son twice her size, rescued from the rubble. I don't know her name. I don't know if she ever found a hospital. We never spoke. But I know in my soul how much her voice should count.

In the midst of the mind-boggling devastation that was my city—the dead bodies and more than a million displaced people living in makeshift camps—I felt compelled once more to help echo the voices
of those who are never heard, those who are never consulted, and those who never participate in the life of their own country except when they are asked to cast a ballot for one candidate or another, as was the case last November.

I worked for many years doing just that, before the quake shattered all our lives, as a radio journalist at Radio Haiti. Since the midseventies, we had lent our microphones to coffee growers and factory workers, peasant associations and newly formed labor unions, trying to break the wall of silence imposed by a dictatorship. We were there again in 1987, after six years of forced exile, recording and broadcasting the voices from the slums of Port-au-Prince and Gonaïves and from the villages of the Artibonite valley.

Back then, the words from peasants, artisans, and market women expressed the aspirations for change. Our mission was about participation, justice for all, and transparency in government. It was about
chanje leta,
changing the state, from a predatory one into one that provided services to its population. We would make sure, in our newsroom at Radio Haiti, that every day would have one major story from
andeyò
, the “outside country,” as every place besides the centralized Republic of Port-au-Prince is called.

In the last few years, however, the voices from below have become muted or irrelevant to the decision makers. The airwaves are filled mostly with politicians speaking about the government and about other politicians, with little reporting from
andeyò.
I wonder how much effect the voices we so often aired had in shaping our post-dictatorship Haiti. Has our oral society absorbed the calls for change so that we can produce real change? Was voicing our demands a good enough substitute for action?

Now that the dust has settled, the hidden realities of Haiti are emerging. “Beyond the mountain, there is another mountain,” says the Haitian Proverb. The quake that killed tens of thousands of the people we loved has brought together in the tent cities not only the victims of those thirty-five apocalyptic minutes but also those who have moved from the slums of La Saline, Cite Letènel, or Jalouzi to find, in the camps, the basic services they were denied for decades. The deep-rooted social injustices of the past have now caught up
with us, no longer hidden, exposed now on every public square and every vacant lot in this broken city.

Another reason why I said yes to Paul is because I felt that I was in a privileged position to better echo these voices. I had been working at the United Nations, before returning to Haiti in early January for what was supposed to be a carefree retirement. Then the earthquake struck. I was asked to join the UN again, this time in Haiti, as Special Adviser to the Secretary-General's Special Representative there, Ambassador Edmond Mulet. I did not hesitate. After what had happened, could I be anywhere else?

So I was back to fourteen-hour days filled with grueling visits to relocation camps and destroyed schools. I drove to work through bumpy streets twisted by
bagay la
, “the thing.” We refuse to name it “the earthquake,” an absurd semantic shield against a possible return of the beast. I am now painfully aware that as a privileged survivor, I have the chance to play a role—even a modest one—in the ambitious national and international agenda to rebuild Haiti better. As a Haitian, I am part of that wounded land and can inject a different perspective in the decision-making process. As a long-time international civil servant, I have learned to cut through the paralyzing bureaucratic red tape that is too often part of working for the UN. The cataclysmic event I have lived through has forced so many of us to think “outside the tent.”