For the past three days I’ve been working side by side with a friendly computer tech. His English proficiency being equivalent to my kreyol, did not allow our conversations to extend much past the typical pleasantries. Last night he ate dinner at our house…thanks to a translator, we for the first time, were able to have a semi legitimate conversation. It was then that I was told, he, this man with whom I’d been exchanging simple greetings all week, had been trapped for 4 days under rubble in Port Au Prince after the earthquake. His comforting smile and nervous laugh had in no way prepared me for this discovery. The horrific disaster of January 12th really did happen, and it happened to him, the man sitting across the table from me. He drank his own urine for days waiting for his friends, who he was able to call from his cell phone, to dig to his rescue.
Weaving in and out of the densely populated and dangerously narrow streets of a crumbled Port Au Prince I observed the masses of meandering people coated in the white powder of cinder block rubble being churned up by the racing cars and motor bikes battling for road space. I quickly recognized the city I had visited a year prior to the quake. People lounging at their vendor’s stand, waiting for a breeze that might never come. Naked babies and goats roaming in heaps of garbage. It was all the same, and yet an additional devastating factor had very evidently been added to those already in existence. How could things possibly get worse I remember thinking a year before. This country could go nowhere but up, I was sure. And then, just like that, the dilapidated capital city, which yes, housed poverty, joblessness, and malnutrition but nevertheless served as some sort of foundation for this country, came crashing to the ground.
The density and range of destruction and disorder in Haiti since the earthquake of January 12th can hardly be portrayed in photograph, much less writing. There is fallen building upon fallen building and the streets are packed with crowds of people which is typical for Haiti, especially Port Au Prince, the difference now is these people are all living in tents. As I began my trek through PAP the magnitude of this disaster really set in…but it wasn’t until we had traveled 2 hours outside the capital city, still surrounded by tent villages for as far as the eye could see, that full on shock took hold. An entire country of tents…its unfathomable.
And yet, the screams of disaster have hushed. People are no longer running in panic. Instead, what I saw in the mist of the mountains beyond mountains of rubble were people laughing, people holding hands, people gathered around tables playing cards. The landscape revealed tragedy but the people within the landscape depicted a type of subtle and natural strength, that has allowed an entire country to continue to function, to survive, much like it miraculously did before but now with even fewer local resources.
