HAITI LETTER:The dust has not yet settled and landmarks are missing, but the human spirit struggles on, writes ELIZABETH HEADON
IT IS pouring rain in Port-au- Prince. Sheets of cold water, the kind of rain we used to like to listen to from bed.
I can hear the rain falling through the leaves and I know it is falling on the million people living under tarpaulins and bed sheets in tents. It is washing the rubbish and sewage into the streets, creating puddles for mosquitoes to breed in, dampening down the dust.
The target is two tarps for everyone by April 1st, but does it seem enough, three months after you lose your home, your possessions and people you loved? That you are expected to begin to rebuild your life with two plastic sheets? We are shifting from emergency into the new reality.
Food and medical care seems to be getting to the people who need it. The signs saying “Help: we need food and water” are still up. Another reads simply “We need everything.”
Having arrived here in November, working for Denis O’Brien’s Digicel Foundation, I had got to know the city a little before January 12th. Away when the earthquake hit, I am adjusting to an utterly changed place.
Landmark buildings gone. New vistas on a destroyed city; makeshift shelters crowded together on scarce sections of unused land; women silently queuing for food, hospital ships off the shore. But I can’t see Gonave, the large island in the bay. The dust that still hangs over the city blocks it.
There is a ritual to meeting people again for the first time: a hug, how are you? And your family? And what about your house? Did you lose anyone close?
When they tell you their mother died, five of their friends died, their wife died, their colleague sent a text from the rubble of her home saying ‘I will die here with my two children’ and she did, you nearly have to remind yourself to say “I’m sorry”. It’s so normal.
You listen to their story – where they were, the noise, the search for their children, the 28 aftershocks that night, the chaos and panic and desperation, the people they tried to help. You keep almost having to remind yourself to say “I’m sorry”. It doesn’t even begin to touch how you really feel or how they must feel.
I’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I say to people it is never going to be the same, but it is going to be okay. In time, it will be different, but it will be okay.
We are used to rubble now, paths are worn through it. Seeing some places delivers the same shock every time. It’s like that feeling when you see a badly crashed car, but imagine wrecks in your driveway, all along your route to work, at your children’s school.
We live and move among these tombs. Burial mounds. Some upper storeys remain intact having pancaked the lower floors to the ground, looking as if they were always bungalows, built askew. Others are immense piles of dust, bodies still within. What a way to die, to be buried in your home, at the local shop, to wait for someone to find you, to suffocate in the dust, alone.
Those we lost are everywhere and nowhere. I opened a cupboard in my kitchen and stood and stared because none of my mugs was even chipped and I perversely wanted them to be smashed and destroyed, because really, what were they doing sitting smugly in my cupboard like that, when all that love and life is gone.
The big topic is still aftershocks. People look at you intensely and ask “Did you feel that?” When there is one, text messages flurry . . . It’s all about who felt it, where, a wave or a shake, how long . . . We are all amateur seismologists now.
There are noticeably fewer people, much less traffic. Between the dead and those who have left, the population is one-third less. People with houses sleep outside with the rats and mosquitoes, too afraid still to sleep under a roof. People look thin and tired.
Perhaps most surprising is what has returned to how it was.
The guy who sells paintings is back – he has propped them in among the rubble. In the worst-hit area, I walked past the stalls that have returned and not one person asked me for money.
Such dignified people, sitting in their ruined city, striving for normality. What else can you do, two months later, except what you used to do, where you used to do it.
What else is there to do?
So that’s the news from Port- au-Prince, a changed city, a serious and sad place but not yet despairing. It’s going to be different, but it’s going to be okay.