We Settle in to Our Base in Léogâne

14 May, 2010

Destruction is everywhere. In fact, seeing an intact building is such a novelty that you really notice it, just as I myself am noticed as a rare white person. Very little rubble has been cleared. Thus much of the landscape is frozen in time, exactly as it was on January 12th in the first few minutes after the shaking subsided. Except that the dust has mostly settled. But even the dust gets stirred up when the wind blows or when traffic goes by on the crowded streets. The night we arrived, our headlights picked out a man walking towards us on the side of the road. Despite the heat he was wearing a suit coat, white shirt and tie. In his hand he held an old misshapen leather briefcase. He was framed by swirling clouds of dust; when a big truck passed he was lost from sight, as if in a snowstorm.

Tent cities are omnipresent. Because the seasonal rains have just begun the collections of tents seem like huge and somewhat sinister flowers. Or mushrooms. Some encampments are orderly, with reasonably-spaced sturdy camping tents. But most are haphazardly arranged combinations of scraps of tarps and palm fronds and cloth cobbled together over branches and old lumber.

One of the biggest hospitals in the city of Léogâne, where we’re working, is (or, perhaps more appropriately, was) Hopital St Croix. It was partially destroyed in the earthquake. Parts of the structure left standing are severely cracked. The laboratory was destroyed, so the salvageable lab equipment was moved into the chapel. The pews had been piled up by the raised platform in the front. So the dirt and gravel floor was freed up to accommodate old wooden tables on which microscopes, centrifuges, and primitive analytical equipment sit. The doors gape open—they can’t be closed because the metal door frames were twisted by the tremors. As the lab techs do their analyses chickens wander in and out and peck amid the debris.

> A fancy European car, which somehow escaped damage, sits nearby a raggedy tent. A series of torn tarps extends from the tent to the car roof, combining them into a single structure. The owners of the car had obviously come way down in the world after the earthquake.

> Occasionally a person could be seen on top of the pile of rubble that was once his home. He slowly fills a small bucket with chunks of concrete and carry it out to the street, where he dumps it. Some streets are almost impassable because of the accumulating debris.

> In some clearings and empty lots are big tangles of rusty rebar, like giant lurching spiders. Clinging to the legs, like poorly strung gray pearls, are clumps of concrete, testifying that the rebar wasn’t nearly strong enough to withstand the awful force of the earthquake.

> We pass a large cemetery. Most of the gravestones have toppled over and the mausoleums are severely damaged, some flattened, others leaning at crazy angles. A second indignity to the already-dead.

> In a bitter irony, in one village we drove through virtually the only building left standing was a funeral home and morgue.

> I saw an 11-year old girl at our first mobile clinics who had a stomach ache. For how long, I asked. I correctly anticipated her answer. "Since the earthquake." Did you lose anyone you knew? She was very quiet. "I lost my best friend." Repeat this story, with variations, about 8 million times and you have the story of Haiti after January 12, 2010. Healing will not come from medicines, and will take a very, very long time.