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: Rebuilding a sense of community
SUNDAY, JAN. 17
Patrick Delatour, husband of my dear friend and old landlord Nancy Policard, is Haiti's Minister of Tourism - has been for about seven years, I think. Now, he's coordinating the assessment of the earthquake damage.
The Delatour brothers are well known and well connected.
Patrick's deceased brother, Leslie, was head of the National Bank and former finance minister. Leslie’s widow, Elisabeth, just married Haitian President René Préval.
Lionel is involved in US- Haitian relations, a big player in the civil service arena. Mario is a documentary journalist.
The matriarch and patriarch of the Delatour family died when the earthquake brought down their family home. For obvious reasons, Patrick can’t take much time to grieve.
It’s been several years since I’ve seen him. His eyes show fatigue. He’s got a light laugh for such a heavyset guy, and his face looks younger when he smiles. But there isn’t much to smile about when he talks about the current situation.
Before we start on the more serious questions, I ask about his kids – he’s a grandfather now. I show him a picture of Kadja, my son. He puts his hands on his hips and stares, shaking his head. Kadja’s 18 now. Patrick first met Kadja when he was just a year old.
Patrick says Port-au-Prince was built for 250,000 people and now has nearly three million. A city of architecture without architects, engineering without engineers, planned but without city planners. And now, “not one government building is still intact. Customs building down, tax building with all the historic memory down, all the hospital services are destroyed,” he says. He may be exaggerating, but not by much.
The government is working out of the former police headquarters down by the airport. It took a while for them to figure out where to go – like everyone else they were handicapped by the loss of their homes, family members, vehicles, communication.
If the international media, with all its resources, had trouble mobilizing, it's no surprise that it was hard for the government to regroup. The prime minister was traveling by motorcycle the first few days and President Préval was touring on foot. Now everyone – parliamentarians and ministers alike - are all in one small building, trying to coordinate the government’s next steps.
I am pleased to hear Patrick say that an effective strategy to rebuild may come from decentralizing. I’d been thinking about that since I saw the ruins. Maybe some of the resources that come into the capital could go to the countryside. That way, people who have left or are leaving Port-au-Prince to be with family will have a reason to stay. That way, they won’t tax the limited resources of their families.
Patrick is not worried about people’s individual survival: Haitians have proved for over 200 years that they can survive. What has to happen now is to strengthen the community concept.
For Haiti to effectively rebuild, it’s got to be the survival of the entire community, rich and poor alike, he says, except he expresses it in terms that are probably not appropriate for a family-oriented news outlet.
--- For all stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to The Monitor's Haiti page.
Haiti earthquake diary: 2-month-old baby Jenni is rescued
Saturday, Jan. 16.
A few hours later Lara Coger of ABC-TV, and I are on our way back to the Hotel Ibolele. We're passing through the Canape Vert neighborhood when I notice someone on the left side of the road. He's standing on top of a huge pile of debris with a shovel or axe, and shouting to someone on my side of the street.
We’re slowed already because of traffic so I roll down the window and ask, "What’s up?" The guy on my side of the street says, "There’s a baby alive beneath the debris."
I look again at the pile – it’s huge. I can’t say how tall it is in feet but it’s an entire hillside of rubble. "They need professionals," I say to Lara, "Let’s look for the number of some rescue squad to call."
But before I have a chance to pull out my phone, I hear the guy on top of the hill shout, "Li vivant, li vivant!" I see him running down the hill with a baby in his hands.
I’m out the car and running up the hill. I hope I looked across the street before I ran but I don’t remember. And then I am in the car, the baby cradled in my arms, and everyone around is saying, "Mezami, gade ti bebe a."
My heart is pounding. But really pounding, and my adrenaline is running at 220 volts. I’m not sure what I’ve just done but here I am with a baby that is breathing, that has somehow survived three and a half days under the rubble, and I’ve got him/her in my lap.
But where to go? Lara is calm and collected and directs Sanba, our driver, toward the airport, where the UN has set up a triage unit.
Sanba keeps it together, too, driving as quickly as possible through impossible traffic. Lara takes a piece of cloth and wets it, puts it by the baby’s mouth and the baby sucks. And sucks, and sucks some more.
The baby's nose and mouth and one eye need to be cleaned and it looks like she may have two head wounds. But she is breathing and at this point it’s all I care about. Her right eye is clear and she seems to be looking at me, seems to be alert, and I’m talking nonstop, telling her in English and Creole that it’s OK, that she’s safe now, that we’re going to get her to a place that will take care of her.
I’m panicked, really panicked that she is not going to make it. If she doesn't, then I will never get over it. Lara pours water on her face and she reacts beautifully, just the way she should, agitated and annoyed. She continues to suck, and when she stops I shake her a bit, put my head down close to her chest to make sure that she is still breathing.
The odor is intense. It’s not an odor of death, but it’s really unpleasant. Her clothes are now wet from the water, my pants and shirt also wet, and I know that I am going to smell the same as she does before we make it to the hospital.
We get stuck in a traffic jam and I am almost hyperventilating. When a UN vehicle passes, Lara tries to convince them to let us go with them. They say, "No." But they put on their lights and let us follow them. It’s now been 45 minutes and my anxiety is increasing by the minute. Unbearable.
We finally make it to the UN triage unit, and immediately they sit me down with the baby, listen to the situation and start to evaluate. They continue to keep her hydrated, then peel off her pants to get her into dry clothes.
Then she’s lifted from my arms and placed on a bed, surrounded by a team of doctors.
I feel an unbelievable sense of relief, and feel guilty for feeling relieved that I am no longer holding her.
By now the baby has a name – Jeanne. I appreciate that the staff, who it turns out are from the University of Miami, hasn’t wanted to give her a number.
I walk outside, trying to get a line to ABC, to tell them why we haven’t yet showed up at the hotel, and ask them again why they haven’t responded to Lara’s plea to get a camera crew to us.
It turns out they’d been trying, just had trouble finding where we were. On my way back to Baby Jeanne I see Alonzo Morning, tell him about the miracle baby. He just smiles and nods his head, says there is a reason she was meant to live.
Lara and I find Sanba and we make our way back to the ABC base. They love the story, want more on it. Right away, in fact, so I can’t even shower before I head back out with a crew to the site of the rescue to see if we can find the guy who pulled Jeanne from the rubble. And we do, almost immediately.
Pasteur Leni August saw the baby’s foot moving when he went to gather pieces of wood to use to help block off the streets at night. Within minutes he had moved enough debris to pull her out, and then I showed up.
Baby Jeanne’s parents had been in the house when it crashed, Pasteur Leni says. Her parents survived, but her grandmother was killed. Her uncle is here, too - Gilbert, and he says her mom, Nadine, thinks her baby is dead.
Things in Haiti hardly ever worked out so well. We exchange numbers, and I promise to be in touch so that Nadine can know where to visit her baby.
But when we get to the site of the triage unit, Baby Jeanne is gone.
She’d been sent out on a jet to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport about an hour or two earlier. According to Karen Schneider, Pediatric Emergency Medical Physician at John Hopkins, she had an adrenaline rush that lasted about an hour, then she crashed.
They were able to stabilize her and when they found out that there was an empty jet headed to the States, Barth Green, who heads up the University of Miami team, was able to pull some strings and get her on the plane.
Jenni, as I later learned, is her real name. She is the first Haitian to be accepted into the US for treatment. Other countries had opened their doors to medical emergencies, but not the good old US of A. According to Karen, Jenni smiled at her when Karen said goodbye. That made me smile, too.
So I am wrong. The day isn’t so bad after all. Among all the tears, there really is something to smile about.
For all stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to The Monitor's Haiti page.
A little girl living in the Central Public Garden in front of the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, January 15, 2010. Thousands have been left homeless, or are too scared to return to their homes for fear of a collapse. (Mary Knox Merrill / The Christian Science Monitor)
Haiti earthquake diary: You can't go home again.
It's Saturday, Jan. 16. I’ve been here three and a half days and it’s the first chance I have to get across town to my old neighborhood.
We travel different roads than the ones I’ve been on so far. Everywhere I look I’m seeing some new destruction. As we approach Pacot, my old neighborhood, I find myself clutching the seat belt. I try to relax. The damage has been done, nothing I do will reverse time, so I have to accept that it is what it is. Namaste. It’s not that easy. The temperature is cool but beads of sweat have formed around my brow, and I feel perspiration drip down the inside of my shirt.
I find Françoise (my French friend, whose daughter and my son grew up together, like brother and sister) running out the door to help clean up a clinic. She’s heard that I am here so she’s not surprised, nor does she stop what she’s doing to do more than give me the proverbial two-cheek greeting. She’s on a mission. I’m glad to see she’s on a mission, as opposed to the vast majority of people who are still walking around as if they are lost.
I drive by Martine’s house, my Canadian soulmate. She and her husband and her son have already left for Saint Marc, a coastal port town about 70 miles north of the capital, where she works. I don’t think she will be coming back anytime soon. Martine took Françoise’s daughter with her, too. Haiti was traumatic enough – a disaster of this magnitude could easily put the most stable kid over the edge.
The gate in front of Martine's house is intact, as is the wall around it. Haitians with means have lived behind imposing walls for years, building them higher with each political outbreak of violence and/or change of government. I hope that the walls that have fallen have a wider impact than just their physical crumbling, that their disappearance removes the division between the haves and have nots. Especially since there are now exponentially more have nots than before.
I don’t want to drive by my old house but feel compelled to. I don’t know why. Morbid curiosity? It’s just up the hill. I feel my chest get tight as we go over the small bridge that covers a dried ravine, a ravine that is a pit-stop of garbage for the pigs.
During the 1991-94 international embargo against Haiti, when the military regime that ousted President Jean Bertrand Aristide was in charge, when there was no gas, no electricity, no schools, and little to do, I used to walk down to that bridge with Kadja, my son, and make up stories about the pigs.
We’d look for goats and cows, too. I looked for anything, at the time, to amuse him. He so enjoyed the cows that he used to stand on his tippy-toes from the window of my bedroom and shout out, when they mooed: “pletil, bef” – What are you saying, cow? The only animal we tried to avoid was the dog because the only thing worse than being poor and homeless and hungry in Haiti is to be a poor, homeless, and hungry dog.
I can see, as I drive up the incline to my old house, that my bedroom is gone. I lived on the elevated first floor of a two-story house. My master bedroom, which was built on top of the overhang that served as a garage, is in a pile of dust on the driveway. The owner of the house, Nancy, lived above me, and her house is now where mine should have been.
I stand there not quite comprehending. Nancy’s plants, plants that she took such pride in, are still in their pots on the driveway, and a few are visible through what remains of the open metal grate that served as windows, but many are just bits of green peeking through dust and debris.
I can’t spend too long taking in the details. It’s too painful. I loved this house. Loved the person I became while living here. Loved the memories of raising my son here. It was the cornerstone for me, the safe place in the midst of years of chaos and turmoil that I could come home to and feel whole.
I can’t begin to imagine what Nancy is feeling like without her home. I’m crying by the time I get back into the car. Nothing is going to make me feel better today. But on the drive back, I discover that I'm wrong.
--- For all stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to The Monitor's Haiti page.
A Haitian orphan huddles on the ground of a tent set up by the Dutch Urban Search and Rescue team at the UN compound located in Port-au-Prince Wednesday. (Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters)
Haiti earthquake diary: Orphans and a sense of community
It’s Friday, Jan. 15. I am having a bad day. Last night was particularly difficult because there are so many planes coming and going from the Port-au-Prince airport now that there is no relief from the noise. There is increased security, too – everything is very tight now. To get in and out of the airport entrance is like battling crowds at a sports match.
Still, I feel a bit guilty watching the frustration on people’s faces as I move in and out like I own the place and they are stuck in line, sweating for a chance to talk to someone who might get them on a plane out. I’ve met a few people who were here doing service work, really important work building wells and clinics and they can’t get home and can’t get word to their families in the states. The lines only seem to grow longer during the day rather than thin out.
The story ABC is covering today is about an orphanage, people trying their best to make sure that kids in small orphanages receive enough food and water and are in safe conditions. We visit two different facilities – there’s minimal damage but no one wants to go back inside. It’s the same story being played out all over the city.
Putting a human face on the story, a kid’s face, increases the appeal. But I feel discouraged. Maybe I’m just feeling cynical: the press comes in, there’s this incredible international appeal for help, sensitizing people with horrific pictures and stories and photos of the damage. For a nanosecond in history, Haitians get a sense that people care, and then after a week or two, a month or two, the interests wanes. Then what? What can be done differently this time so that there is a sustainable recovery?
The kids at the orphanage are adorable. Alan, one of our security guards, shows a particularly soft side around the kids. He has nothing but business cards in his pocket and yet when he hands them one, they hold it like it is worth a million dollars. It's amazing what they are grateful for. Cliché, I know, but I’m always amazed by this inverse ratio: the more you have, the more you want, the less you have, the more you make do. I’m determined, when I go home, to clear out all the toys that Kadja, my son, has stashed in his closet and give them away.
The only thing I’m feeling good about today is the sense of community. I want to remember the feeling I had the first night when I arrived. Was it really just a few days ago? Everyone was in the street, sleeping side by side. Everyone was looking out for everyone else’s back.
That’s the Haiti that I believe in, and have to believe will prevail.
A coffin waits to be filled in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Saturday. (Mary Knox Merrill/Staff)
Haiti earthquake diary: A trip to the morgue
Tonight we go to the morgue. We want to know what is happening to the bodies that have been collected. It’s a good question to ask and I’m happy to leave the unbearably loud noise out on the airport tarmac, where we're camping. But I am also not wanting to do this.
The adrenaline of getting here has evaporated. I’m feeling light-headed and heavy-hearted. We haven’t had any real food. I haven’t really had a good night’s sleep in several days.
The morgue is in the back of the Port-au-Prince General Hospital, along the same street where my former husband Jean Raymond’s house is. It’s a green-and-white complex of multiple buildings, some of which are still standing.
We drive up slowly. Patients lie along the side of the buildings, some on makeshift beds, others lying under tarps, others just lying on the ground.
We see another television crew as we park the car. 60 Minutes. They are interviewing the person we want to see, the hospital's medical director, Dr. Lassegue. So we wait, and as we stand there, the smell of death in the air, a large dump truck drives by.
During our interview with Dr. Lassegue, another truck drives by. One of our correspondent's asks if we can go into the morgue, but the doc says there isn’t much electricity so it isn’t functioning that well. The correspondent persists, and eventually we walk with the director down to the end of the pathway and around the corner.
There is another dump truck and a loader, shoveling what I soon figure out are bodies. Hundreds and hundreds of them. About a thousand a day have come in, the doc says. And thousands of thousands more have yet to be picked up.
I am glad it is dark. Wish it was even darker. Wish that I can’t hear the sounds of the truck, the sounds of the loader as it scrapes against the cement. Wish that I didn’t know what the smell of death smells like.
People walk by the remains of St. Rose de Lima, a church in the Marce Simone (Simone Market) area of Leogane, Haiti, on Monday. (Mary Knox Merrill / The Christian Science Monitor)
Haiti earthquake diary: Sorry, your cousin didn't make it
It’s one thing to see the pictures on television – a broken building here or there – but another to see the collective devastation. It literally makes my windpipe close. I open my mouth wide, feel my chest push out as I take it all in.
Up and down the Port-au-Prince streets, rows of buildings that were as familiar as the rooms in my house are now lumps of concrete. Parts of people’s personal lives twist in the breeze.
And it’s so arbitrary. On one block, I count six houses standing, seven collapsed. No pattern. Two streets over, there are only a few houses down. The other side of the street every other house is a shell of what it had been.
A priority is getting over to the Bel Aire area to find news about the family of a dear friend, Pulitzer Prize- winning author Edwidge Danticat. Her first cousin, Rev. Maxo Danticat, has not been heard of since the quake.
When I get to the address, there is a pile of debris on the side where I suspect the house was. I start to feel a bit queasy. I get out of the car and ask around: Has anyone seen Reverend Danticat? A group gathers. No one has seen him, his wife, or their children since the night of the quake. They didn't make it.
I feel myself shrinking. My head pounds. Are they sure? I explain that I am a friend of Edwidge’s, that I have come from the states to find out about her family and they hand me a plastic folder with papers in it, important documents they’ve retrieved from the house – marriage and birth certificates.
They are talking all at once, asking me if I’ve spoken with Edwidge, if I can give her these things. Yes, I can.
My driver takes my hand and leads me back to the car. I don’t try to call Edwidge immediately. I don’t know how I am going to tell her. I send a text during the day to her husband and ask him to call me. I think it will be easier on me if I tell him rather than her. It’s going to be hard enough to tell him.
Edwidge’s poignant Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, "Brother I’m Dying," is centered on the loss of family, and her cousin, Maxo, the late reverend, was an integral part of the story. Now to lose him, his wife and the kids?
Later, I call Ms. Danticat's husband, Fedo. Finally, I get through on a scratchy line.
“It’s not good news, Fedo.” My voice breaks. He waits, not saying anything. I apologize, tell him I’m sorry that I have to tell him what I’m about to tell him. I want the phone line to cut off or go dead.
Fedo says very little and I assume that Edwidge is standing next to him, absorbing all this without hearing a word. He thanks me, and says they will be in touch, and I hang up the phone. Then I sit down on the cold cement, bury my hands in my face, and sob.
Haiti earthquake diary: Landing in Port-au-Prince
There were a lot of people around when we landed in Port-au-Prince – journalists, military, United Nations troops. Crowds of people camped out.
In my haste to leave for Haiti, I’d forgotten a few things, including a sleeping bag and flashlight. Big mistake. We were going to be sleeping on the tarmac and I could already see it was going to be a long, loud, night.
I quickly ran into journalists I knew and we commandeered a few cars. I sent one person to find out where my former husband, Jean Raymond, was, and in another I went with the ABC crew to see what was happening on the streets.
It was familiar: the empty, dark streets late at night. How many times over the past 20 years had I traveled through there? But now, because of the debris, the collapse of so many buildings, I didn’t know where I was.
At the major intersection of Delmas and Grand Rue, I couldn’t tell which street was which. I was totally turned around by the time we got to the first rescue site, where people were trying to free a young woman who had, the day before, been working at her desk at Citibank when the three-story building collapsed.
She was directing her own rescue, and the guys trying to free her were using the headlights of a car, a saw, and a car jack to lift the metal that entrapped her. It was terrifying and surreal and I wondered if this was happening at our house, if my former husband Jean Raymond’s three-story house had collapsed and someone was trying to free him.
For a few seconds I had a near melt down, wondering how I could possibly have thought that I could get to Haiti and start working without knowing if Jean Raymond was OK.
What an idiot. I should have waited for news in Miami first before getting on the plane.
The main streets were packed. No one wanted to be inside. On Delmas, there were people walking up the hill, people walking down the hill, people walking without direction.
They were crowded onto stairs, camped out on entrances to businesses that were now nothing more than chunks of concrete.
At one point, people who were headed down the hill were caught in a stream of people running up the hill. I asked a guy what was going on. "The ocean is rising," he said, and ran on.
I tried to stop people, tried to tell them that there was no more tsunami alert, that the ocean was flat and going nowhere, but it didn’t matter. They were running and I couldn’t blame them.
When I got back to the airport, Jean Raymond was waiting for me.
I felt faint with relief.
All the tears I’d held back poured out and I just held him. But, it felt like I was the one holding him up.
He looked empty, like the others I saw on the street who weren’t sure whether they were going up or coming down the hill. It was a look of bewilderment, one I expected to be all-too-familiar all-too-soon
A SH-60S helicopter assigned to the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) lands at the airport in Port-au-Prince to load water and supplies for distribution to earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince Monday. (Seaman Aaron Shelley/US Navy/Reuters)
Haiti earthquake diary: Flying into Port-au-Prince
Jeffrey Kofman, the ABC-TV correspondent who pushed for me to go cover Haiti's earthquake with the ABC crew, was pulled from the story at the last minute. I didn’t know that until I was in the taxi on the way to the Miami airport. I was more upset than he was.
I wanted to be working with someone who understood my passion for Haiti, but also knew my work there.
I didn’t know any members of this team: a few security guys, a camera crew, couple of producers and technicians. They were talking about Haiti, rightfully so, as the story they were going to cover. But I couldn't stop thinking about whether Jean Raymond, my former husband and the father or my son, was alive.
Was I going to be able to keep my emotions in check and do my job?
We’d waited so long for everyone to assemble that it was nearly dark by the time we took off. There was some question as to whether they would let us land in Port-au-Prince, because the airport had been damaged and the runways were full of planes that couldn't leave for lack of fuel and communications.
But we got the OK and started our descent.
I was glad it was dark: I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing too much too soon.
---- For stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to the Monitor's Haiti topic page.
A US Navy helicopter takes off in front of the National Palace after members of the US Army 82nd Airborne, front, landed in Port-au-Prince, Tuesday. (Gregory Bull/AP)
Haiti earthquake diary: Thoughts on the flight to Miami
The day after learning of the tragic 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, I caught an early morning flight from Boston to Miami en route to Port-au-Prince Haiti. I needed to see friends and family in the country I'd grown to love.
On the flight to Miami, I jotted this in my journal:
"It makes the perfect metaphor: the collapse of Haiti's National Palace, the crumbling of the one thing that seemed stable while the rulers inside changed places 10 times in the past 25 years.
Now that single, white-domed structure is not just cracked, it’s collapsed on itself, split in pieces, splintered and fractured like clay that’s been baked and left to dry in the sun too long.
The first time I saw the palace, 1986, I was amazed. There was a lot of traffic, foot traffic with people selling batteries, sunglasses, and gum, and music blaring and cars honking and there it was, white and solid and clean.
At 8:00 a.m. when they raise the flag and play the national anthem, everyone in the square – absolutely everyone – stops still in their tracks and waits for the flag to reach the top. They stop because raising the blue-and-red flag with the white square in the middle is the symbol of their independence, of being the first black republic in the Western hemisphere – one of the only country's to defeat Napoleon’s army. A people that could bring down Napoleon but could do nothing against the force of mother nature."
---- For stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to the Monitor's Haiti topic page.
Haiti earthquake diary: Cut off from family and friends
I heard about the Jan. 12 earthquake by voicemail; I was five days into my master's program for creative writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. This was the last of my required four nine-day seminars and I was really excited about the courses. My phone had been off for an hour. When I turned it back on there were 10 messages. Ten different numbers. Something was wrong.
I played the first message as I walked out into the cold. I detest the cold, warmth being of the many things living in Haiti for a decade had done to change me, but this time I didn’t feel the freezing wind on the way back to my room.
I just kept thinking: Earthquake? Haiti? Was Jean Raymond – my former husband (a Haitian) and father of our son, Kadja – OK? And my friends! Gisele, my closest Haitian friend of 24 years; Francoise, my French friend whose daughter and my son grew up together like brother and sister; and Martine, my Canadian soulmate. Were they OK? Was our house still standing?
Then I was in front of the television, hand over my mouth, listening. Had I just walked home?
I called Jean Raymond’s number, couldn’t get a connection. The networks were down. (A week later, they’re still down.) I listened to the rest of the voicemails.
Some were from friends in the states wanting to make sure that I knew about what happened. Others were from journalist colleagues asking first if my family and friends were OK, then quickly trying to hit me up for information and contacts. I was furious that some of them didn’t know me well enough to know that, for me, this wasn’t just a story.
This is a country I love, a place where I have family.
By the time I spoke with my mother in Cleveland, I was in tears, complaining of the insensitivity of the media, but mostly I was overwhelmed with fear and the frustration of not knowing what was happening to my friends.
Was Gisele’s handicraft store OK? Were Francoise’s dental clinics still standing? And how was Martine handling the fact that she was in the countryside while her son and husband were in Port-au-Prince. Had she reached them? Had all of them reached each other?
I wanted to be there, even as pictures were coming across the screen, even as I started to realize exactly what a 7.0 quake meant.
I’d suffered a few tremors in Haiti over the years, and larger tremors in San Francisco, but not a 7.0 in a country that was already fragile in every sense, including its infrastructure. I’d seen crumbled buildings but had no way of understanding that this was now going to be the new Port-au-Prince.
When ABC-TV offered to fly me back to Miami and get me on their charter flight the next day, I was past my ambivalence about leaving my master’s program early. Even if I stayed, there was no way I was going to be able to concentrate on the seminars. I loved all the discussions about voice, point of view, character development, but I wasn’t going to be able to talk about first or third person, the use of adjectives and adverbs, novella or novel.
So I said "yes" to ABC and spent the rest of the night on the phone, checking e-mail, calling Haiti, changing my airline reservation, calling Haiti, packing my bag, calling Haiti.
I finally got through to Martine, who was on her way back from the countryside. She was fine. Our other friends Jacky and Adrien were fine, and all of their immediate friends who lived in my old neighborhood were fine.
But still no word from Jean Raymond. And no word about Gisele, who lived further up the hill.
Around 1:00 p.m. I finally reached Gisele at her home. I could imagine her on her porch, her sister at her side. She’d survived a traumatic drive back up the hill after work and saw a gas station crumble in front of her. She was huddled on her front porch, she said, just as I thought, with others in the neighborhood. No one was going back inside.
But still no word from Jean Raymond. Not knowing that, not knowing what to say to our son or his daughter about his whereabouts, also drove my decision to go to Port-au-Prince.
At least from there I could go find him.
I didn’t allow myself to explore what I would do if I didn’t.
-----For all stories, blogs, and updates on Haiti after the earthquake, go to the Monitor's Haiti page.
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