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Haiti Earthquake Diary
A blog from Port-au-Prince by Kathie Klarreich, who has lived and worked as a writer in Haiti for more than 20 years. Her memoir, "Madame Dread: A Tale of Love, Voudou, and Civil Strife in Haiti," is about her life in Haiti with her former husband, a Haitian musician, and their son.
Haiti earthquake diary: At the border, a look at two different worlds
Sunday, Jan. 31
The southern road between Haiti and the border with the Dominican Republic is, for the most part, a long, rambling but well-paved route that connects the capital with the small border town of Jimani, where not much happens besides border crossings.
I remember a time when the road wasn’t so smooth. During the 1991-1994 military regime of Raoul Cédras, when the internationally imposed embargo made buying fuel difficult, this road became one of the most popular paths for ferrying contraband across the border and into the capital. The military controlled the black market so they paved it.
Now the road is a "humanitarian corridor" full of convoys of aid vehicles and flatbed trucks carrying bulldozers and other large road equipment to remove the tons of debris.
At the border, in the no-man’s-land between the two countries, there is one lone tap tap, or mini-bus taxi. Its name is painted in bright red, blue and yellow lettering: Dieu Qui Decide.
God Decides.
God seems to have decided that the DR, and not Haiti, gets all the breaks. It's like two different worlds.
In this neighboring country there are streetlights and food stands with blaring music and people dancing. We look back across at Haiti to see the few empty stalls where merchants waited for customers – any customer – to buy their metal work and wooden sculptures.
As opposed to dry fields on the Haitian side, there are lush green ones full of banana trees and other healthy plants, the kind Haiti has in its paintings, but not in real life.
And there are lots and lots of bright, colorful houses that line the road. They are separated from each other by fences made of sticks. Sticks much sturdier than the wooden branches Haitians now use to build their homes.
--- The original version misstated the dateline of the story.
Haiti earthquake diary: The quest for temporary housing
Saturday, January 30
The Haitian government wants to get everyone in temporary shelters by March 1. An honorable goal, to which I say: "Good luck with that."
To date, the Office of Internal Migration and its partners have delivered more than 6,000 tarps, 1,948 tents, 800 shelter kits, 3,345 items of plastic sheeting, and 400 shelter boxes, each containing a 10-person tent, blankets, water purifiers, mosquito nets, tools, a stove, kitchen equipment, and materials for children to some 36,000 people.
A good start, but barely enough to equip a small metropolitan neighborhood. There are more than one million Haitians left homeless after the Jan. 12 quake flattened the capital, Port-au-Prince, and other towns and cities in the south and west of the country.
More numbers: the shelter "cluster" (the aid groups responsible for shelter) has some 9,290 tarpaulins, 7,295 tents, and 11,940 items plastic sheeting in stock with a further 57,320 tarpaulins, 50,720 tents, 32,912 items of plastic sheeting expected to in the coming days.
Great start, but barely enough.
Every single day, makeshift camps are surfacing. Sorting through the rubble and debris, men and children find wood to pound into the unsettled ground to stake out a new life.
There may seem to be no particular order to life in the camps, but there is. On the vast grounds of the once prestigious St. Louis Gonzajue campus, residents have grouped themselves according to where they lived before the quake, so small neighborhoods still exist, just in another form.
Cancoule Milton is the "secretary general" of one of the groups organizing inside the Mais Gate neighborhood, across from the airport. He's part of the "civilian protection" for the residents of the area, acting to prevent violence and theft. Not that there's much to steal, because here, like in most camps, he says that aid distribution is a major problem.
“There is a large percentage of people who get nothing, and a small percentage who get everything,” he says.
Creating some semblance of order for the delivery of food and water and doesn’t seem like rocket science. But distribution continues to be a challenge here.
Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said international aid is failing to meet its earliest goals. The UN World Food Program, along with several others, had hoped to feed 1 million by the end of last week: on Friday the number stood at only 600,000.
I just worry that the longer it takes to get people in tents, the longer it takes to get them supplies, the shorter their fuse – and the greater chances for violence.
There’s only so much people can take.
A crowd gathers outside the US Embassy hoping for a chance at attaining travel visas to enter the United States in Port-au- Prince, Haiti, Jan. 22. (Julie Jacobson/AP)
Haiti earthquake diary: A trip to the US Embassy
Saturday, Jan. 30
The US ambassador to Haiti, Ken Merten, has agreed to an interview with our PBS crew. Although I’d prefer to spend the day out on the streets with the Haitian people, there’s some value in hearing what the ambassador has to say. And, I have to admit, I’m kind of curious what the inside of the highly fortified compound looks like now.
It looks like the United States, of course.
Green grass – soft, green grass. A swimming pool, complete with a locker room, showers, and a lap lane.
There is also a barbecue pit, heat lamps, floodlights, an intercom loudspeaker. It's all a bit surreal, compared with life outside the gates.
Merten is an old Haiti hand, having been posted here twice in the past 22 years, the first time in the late 1980s. I suspect that at some point back then our paths crossed, though I can’t say for certain.
Today he’s dressed casually: Izod polo shirt, grayish-brown slacks, loafers.
In order to get the best light for the interview, our cameraman puts him in the sun. Merten doesn’t sweat. The ultimate diplomat.
He doesn’t say anything new, nor does he say anything that gets me worked up. But I like that he says that the Haitian government has its own ideas about things and is very clear in articulating them; some suggestions they take from the US, others they don’t. That sounds right to me.
He’s also another advocate of building Haiti back better than it was before the quake.
If enough people say it, maybe it will be so.
Haiti earthquake coverage: Sleeping to disaster soundtrack
Thursday January 28
The sounds that I wake up to have a direct correlation with the kind of sleep I have here – and, to a degree, the changing conditions.
At my home in Miami, I wake up early because of the sun or an internal clock that goes off to ensure that I meet my regular triathlon-training partners. Here, I barely remember going to sleep before some irregular noise reminds me where I am.
It’s just been two weeks that since I was sleeping on the conveyer belt of Mais Gate’s international airport. My slumber soundtrack consisted of: airplanes, jets, and helicopters landing and taking off; Chinese, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Spanish, and French soldiers and aid workers and journalists chatting as they passed by; cargo rumbling past in containers, and the incessant, deaf-defying engines.
Then, I moved to the relief of the Ibolele Hotel, where at least I was on grass and in a tent, even though I didn’t know who was snoring at the other end.
I camped next to the entrance of the hotel. I fell asleep listening to car engines, loud, annoying diesel trucks, four-wheel drives, and buses. The night was punctuated by the drivers, whose animated conversations seemed like they were fighting but in fact they were just trying to enjoy themselves after long workdays ferrying journalists up and down the hills.
Now, living in luxury in a hotel room with a door (to say nothing of a bed), I wake up to the sound of an air conditioner, a clanky unit that comes on around 5:00 a.m. The unit muffles the sounds I used to wake up to when I lived here in the 1980s and ’90s – roosters and car horns and shoe-shine boys. And, yes, generators. These have always underscored the lack of available electricity in this country.
The A/C mutes the constant chatter of the tent city just outside the hotel walls. But it does nothing to distract me from the noises in my head, the ones that keep me tossing at night as I try to keep abreast of all the developments that have happened during the day.
I think about the things I have to do for the next day, of the people I have to call to find out about the number of homeless who’ve received tents. I have to find out which aid organizations are delivering food and water and how many people are still homeless. I need to schedule time to read up on all the stories I haven’t followed so that I can be as informed as possible for all the people who think I know more than I do.
And to try to remember the promises I’ve made to people I’ve met during the day. I tick through the list, so that in the middle of the night, when the air conditioning unit finally clicks off, I can really sleep, at least a few hours, when it’s really, really quiet.
--- For more of the Monitor’s Haiti coverage, click here.
Haiti earthquake diary: Nadine wants to see her baby
Wednesay, Jan. 27
I finally meet up with Nadine, mother of Jenny, the two-month old I found 10 days ago.
For the last few days Nadine has been calling me. Most of the time the call cuts out before I can speak with her, but this last time she sounded manic, with stream of conscious pleas for news of her baby, who was flown to Miami for treatment.
Nadine’s also desperate for some medical attention for a foot wound, trying to find food, water, and housing. She and hundreds of thousands of others. I hate thinking it, but it’s true.
Since her home fell on her mother and father, almost killed her baby, Nadine’s been staying in the courtyard of the Canapé Vert Hospital, by the Croix Rouge. It’s the only thing I can understand for certain in her long, anguished call.
The Miami Herald has been covering her baby’s case, and there is now movement by the International Red Cross to help unite mother and child. One recent report said Jenny had two crushed arms. Unless something happened in the States, there’s no way this is true. How can this be so misreported?
Canapé Vert used to provide the best medical service in the capital. I don’t even check to see if the hospital is open when I get to the entrance. I’m focused on finding Nadine.
I know it’s her without asking. I see a woman in a jean shirt overshirt and a black tam and she looks at me and opens her arms. We embrace as if we are old friends. This miracle child pulled from the rubble is our bond. A permanent one, I suspect.
“Madame Kati,” she says over and over again. Tears fall even though I have nothing to be sad about.
Nadine pulls out a Xerox photo that a reporter has given her. It’s Jenny at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. I look at her, a fat, well cared for baby that looks at home in a bonnet and fluffy blanket – a far cry from the wet, maggot-invested clothes I found her in. Her face is clean and bright, the dust and dried mucus long gone.
I show Nadine and her husband, Junior, photos of Jenny that are in my camera. The tears disappear, Nadine’s smile is toothy. “I want to see her,” she repeats several times without taking a breath.
I use my phone to call the International Red Cross, ask them how I can facilitate the reunion. It’s a long, complicated process. The woman I speak with is sympathetic but her hands are tied.
Even though I know Nadine is not my responsibility, I feel responsible for her. I want her to live a better life. She wants to live a better life. She wants Jenny to live a better life. I want all of them, not just Jenny and Nadine and Junior, but all of these people in the tents - and there are hundreds of thousands of them now, to live a better life.
I have to remember, though, it will only happen one step at a time. Yesterday, Nadine was living in someone’s car that was abandoned in the hospital parking lot. Today, she’s in a tent donated by the French.
One step at a time. One small step.
Haiti earthquake diary: Factories are 'in limbo'
Wednesday, Jan. 27
With each passing day, the anxiety for more aid – or at least access to it – increases.
A warehouse in the industrial park has been storing supplies that came across the border of the Dominican Republic. As trucks load up the supplies to be delivered to organized distribution points around the city, Haitians trying to find work storm the gates and try to pocket whatever they can.
The Haitian police are able to back them off, but do nothing to appease the anger of the crowd. They’re hungry, poor, and looking for work.
There used to be over 14,000 people employed in this industrial park; a business plan was in place to increase that amount to 25,000 by the end of this year and 50,000 by the end of 2011. Now it’s anyone’s guess.
George Sassine, President of the Haitian Association of Industrialists, cannot open his factory for at least another month because of the structural damage. He used to have thousands of employees, but was forced to close in 2006. He opened back up in November of last year with 160 employees and was on track to employ 900 this year.
“In limbo,” Georges says about his business.
I’ve known him for nearly 20 years and he can still make me laugh. He sees the yellow bracelet that the Plaza Hotel has all its guests wear for easy access and asks, “Where do you think you are, Club Med?”
The clocks on the wall of his factory are still ticking but it’s as if the life of the room inside has stopped mid-way through a stitch. Garments, in various stages, lay next to empty sewing machines. I can see bolts of material, partially sewn pieces of clothing, bagged garments, garments with stickers on them, and boxes marked for Gildan Activewear, Setting the Standard.
Sassine’s main concern is that the clients who he supplies - Russell, New Balance - don’t succumb to pressure from retail stores and go elsewhere. Like Walmart, he says, which has to keep its shelves filled. “Their shelves cannot be empty,” he says, very matter of factly. “If not, we lose them as clients. It’s just pure business.”
Sassine is more fortunate than some businessmen. Palm Apparel, a nearby factory, had 1,800 workers. Five hundred died when one of the buildings collapsed. Sassine didn’t lose a single employee. He’s only lost money. He estimates that he’s losing $15,000 a day. Haiti’s industrial sector has probably lost more than $3 million so far.
Haiti earthquake diary: Can I do justice to Haiti's tragedy?
Wednesday, Jan. 27
A handful of people in blue T-shirts stand outside Pacific SA in the Industrial Park shortly after 7 a.m. They’re late to work, not allowed in until the manager shows up. They’ll be docked for pay today and a single day’s loss of income before the quake was bad. Now it’s catastrophic.
Twenty-three-year old Michele Simon, says she can’t get to work any earlier. She’s lost her home, her parents, and her brother, who had his arm amputated and is still in the hospital. She has to find someone to watch her 6-year old, bathe, find something to wear , and catch a bus all by 5 a.m. in order to make it to work on time. An alarm clock isn’t going to make a difference.
This slight, shy woman is not complaining. She’s just stating the facts. There are four or five other girls clustered around her who have similar stories. I listen to them all, but find that by the last one I am just translating, not really absorbing what they are saying.
I’m not glossing over their plight, but I feel as though I can only serve as the conduit for information, and not own any of it. I felt the same way in 1991-1994, when I used to interview victims of the military regime. After a while the stories all started to sound the same and they were, but it didn’t make each person’s pain any less. It didn’t diminish the grief they were processing.
I want to be able to do justice to the injustice Haitians feel, put a new face on each one’s individual hurt, and help the outside world to understand their aches. But I question whether I have the emotional capacity to do that. I don’t want to fail them.
Survivors of Haiti's earthquake wait in line to get rice from Argentinean UN troops at the Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince Thursday. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Haiti earthquake diary: Not as bad as Rwanda?
Monday, Jan. 25
Men and women in International Medical Corps T-shirts and blue scrubs are all over The Plaza Hotel, where they’re staying – and scattered throughout the sprawling grounds of the University Hospital, a.k.a. HUEH (Hôpital de l'Université d'état d'Haiti)
Dr. Anil Menon, a young emergency and medical wilderness medic from Stanford, Calif., is thrilled to be part of the team. It’s his first time on an international mission, and talking to him I feel his enthusiasm. It’s refreshing. Uplifting.
“This is why I went into medicine,” he says. “I want to make a difference, and this situation provides me the opportunity.”
The work he’s been doing for the last two weeks has changed. It went from pure overload of trauma cases to organizing the intake of patients. He misses the hands on; now he’s doing almost all logistical and administrative stuff.
Meanwhile, Dr. Brian Crawford is totally hands on. Today, he goes out with a small crew to Bolosse, on the western side of the capital, at the beginning of the road to Carrefour. I haven’t been on this part of the road since I arrived here just after the quake. It’s as awful as ever, full of water, sewage, and garbage.
If the earthquake made it work any better, I can’t see it. Merchants and resident still have to wade through the muck, as do the pigs.
The clinic where Dr. Crawford is working today is the Centre de Formation pour L’Ecole Fondamental – the oldest teaching college in the country. People inside the school courtyard have it a lot nicer than some of the other displaced I’ve seen. Their tents and tarps are scattered among small banana trees and green grass. A slight reprieve from the brutal sun and now proverbial dusty air elsewhere in Port-au-Prince.
The residents have chosen leaders to take on various challenges facing their community: Health, food, water, housing. Impressive.
Crawford saw between 60-70 people yesterday. There is at least twice that many in line now.
Back at HUEH, another doctor says this is not his first overseas mission. He’s been to Somalia, Pakistan, the 2004 tsunami (Banda Aceh, Indonesia), and this is among the worst.
But Lucy, a young dynamic EMC nurse, says Rwanda has it all over Haiti.
If Rwanda has been able to right itself after its civil war and genocide, I have to believe that there’s hope for Haiti, too.
Dr Arthur Halvorsen (front c.), nurse Tove Gunleiksrud, and midwife Aline Gagnon (r) treat a newborn baby at the General Hospital grounds in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 20, 2010. The field hospital was set up on the grounds of the earthquake-hit General Hospital, and is jointly run by the Norwegian and Canadian Red Cross Societies. (Norwegian Red Cross/Reuters)
Haiti earthquake diary: Haitians chafe at foreign paternalism
Monday, Jan. 25
The health situation has eased up a bit. Haitian and foreign doctors and nurses are ramping down the emergency operations at the General Hospital, which is actually the University Hospital as it’s the largest and only teaching hospital in the country.
It’s been transformed in the week since I was last there. It's now kind of a mini United Nations with all the foreign medical volunteers who traveled here on their own dime to help out.
The challenge is coordinating the effort, figuring out what treatment people need how best to follow up. With 90 percent of the government’s health infrastructure damaged, that’s no small feat.
Dr. Lassegue, the hospital's medical director, whom I spoke with the second night I was in the country, seems as calm as he did a week and a half ago, but this time he speaks a bit more forcefully about the need to rebuild all the surgical buildings – including the pediatric unit, the central lab and the nursing school, where more than 100 bodies are still buried. He knows the Haitian economy doesn’t have enough resources to even begin the process, but he wants to make sure that the Haitian government is included in the planning.
“Help us with our problem,” he says in a quiet but very authoritative voice. “It’s not your vision. We know we need help. I may follow your advice, but don’t tell me how to this or that. It’s still my country.”
This sentiment is cropping up here and there, and I find it understandable.
Some of the very qualified and well-intentioned internationalists here seem to have little patience for what they regard as Haitian incompetence. When they arrived in the midst of a chaotic situation they just started doing what they thought needed to be done.
I am hoping, I guess, that in this process of rebuilding Haiti, the “Haitian” way will be considered. I am not sure exactly what that means, but how Haitians do things is not always how Americans would do them.
The example of solar cookers come to mind. Even though deforestation is a huge problem in Haiti, because the trees have almost all been cut down to make charcoal, Haitians are not interested in the solar cookers that foreigners have been trying to get them to use as an alternative fuel source. Why? Because food cooked over a solar cooker has no taste. Without the charcoal flavor, they’re not interested. It would be like eating rice without salt. Or spaghetti without ketchup, two huge Haitian no-nos.
It's a small example, but there are many like it. And there will be many more as the world pours in money and advice for how to help Haiti rebuild. Here's to hoping that foreigners can help here while also respecting the Haitians and their way of doing things.
A woman sits in front a people lining up in a bank in Port-au-Prince Tuesday. The United Nations says that banks in the country are starting to reopen this month's devastating earthquake. (Jorge Silva/REUTERS)
Haiti earthquake diary: UN briefing trumpets progress
Sunday, Jan. 24
In its weekend briefing, the UN peacekeeping force that has been here since 2004 tells us that banks are reopening. I see evidence of this with long, long lines. There's no way even a tenth of the people standing in the lines will get inside.
The UN also says that 70 percent of the Haitian National Police are back at work. I see evidence of this, too, with patrols on the streets, controlling the crowds by the banks and by the Western Union, MoneyGram, and CAM bureaus – the three places where remittances can be sent from abroad, from "lot bo dlo," the other side of the sea.
In the city of Jacmel, more than 120 people have been rescued and 8,700 people in eight camps are getting food and water from the UN, according to the briefing. I wonder about Ti Goave, where 75 percent of the buildings are gone. And what about towns closer to the epicenter of the Jan. 12 quake: Léogâne, Miragoâne, Grand Goave?
According to the briefing, 30 percent of the gas stations are once again operational. I can believe it. Traffic is outrageous, worse than I remember when I left for good by the end of 1998. At that time it was impossible to go anywhere without sitting in fume-invested lines for a half hour to go two blocks. Better to walk if it weren’t for the pollution. Now the lines don’t move. What used to take 20 minutes to go across town now takes two hours. It’s really hard to get anything done.
The UN also says that soft drink distribution is at 50 percent and should be at 100 percent by the end of next week. I wonder why this particular detail is crucial for the briefing, but in these times, any morsel of good news is to be savored. Supermarkets are expected to open slowly.
I explain all this to the PBS crew that comes in, and from them I understand something else.
I am finally beginning to realize just how much press this crisis has provoked. Joanne, the producer whom I know as both a colleague and friend, points out that this kind of coverage of Haiti is unprecedented. It's reporting that doesn’t present Haiti in a vile, vicious, violent light but shows a remarkable sense of community, resilience, and resourcefulness. The world is seeing Haiti in the light under which it shines best.
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