*Editors Sylvie Barak and Marc Speir are in Haiti this week, filming a documentary about the rebuilding of the impoverished country’s telecom infrastructure over a year after the quake. Barak and Speir are exploring how mobile helped those in the wake of the disaster and how NGOs and non profits on the ground are continuing to work relentlessly to train, maintain and rebuild. The following thoughts are not necessarily telecom based, but give our readers a glimpse into a day in the life of our reporters*
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – There’s a lizard napping peacefully on top of my mosquito net as I type. He looks rested – almost as rested as I did this morning after a blissful seven hours of sleep.
And it certainly was blissful, despite Marc’s incessant, poke resistant snoring, the crickets chirping, the generator roaring and the fan click-clicking in the corner. Minor impediments to an otherwise deep and dreamless slumber.
After a protracted and rather embarrassing skirmish with my mosquito net, followed by a graceful “plop” down from the top bunk, and a “refreshing” cold shower, I was all set to start the day.
Nixon, upon arriving to pick us up, informed us sadly that he had suffered a crippling loss that morning – the air-conditioning in his Mitsubishi SUV had died. Apparently it had been a slow and painful death. “At least you can take better pictures now through the open window,” he said optimistically.
First stop for the day was Petionville market. As usual in Haiti, the roads were packed, with exhaust fumes from cars, busses and mopeds choking up the humid air all around us. With the windows down, the heat and grime clung to our skin like an oily film.
People carrying baskets of goods on their heads milled about, gleaming with sweet smelling sweat under the sweltering sun, selling everything from antennas, to chickens, bits of scrap metal, plastic, vegetables, eggs and salami. Plies of multi coloured clothes littered the sidewalk as merchants broadcasted their wares and old women picked through them with sticks, looking for bargains. The smell of over-ripe fruit added itself to the heavy, humid air soup.
In the side-streets, mounds of rubbish piled high, some of it smoldering, giving off a smell of acrid smoke and burning plastic, as pigs roamed freely, grunting and nuzzling their snouts through the trash.
We paused at a large empty field, with litter piled high over its clearly razed surface. “This was a graveyard, but the government destroyed it,” Nixon told us. “What do you mean ‘destroyed it?’” I asked, confused. “They want it for something else, so they brought their bulldozers and dug it.”
“What about the bodies? What did they do with the bodies?” I asked, puzzled. “Yes, people was very upset about that for a while,” he said pensively, surveying the junkyard that lay before us. “But we vote for that mayor a second time,” he added.
We continued down the street, just in time to see a wedding party – bride included – loaded into a big colorful taptap (pick up truck taxi), emblazoned with Argentinean footballer Messi’s face driving past us. Life and death juxtaposed on the same street. That’s Haiti.
We had to be careful with our cameras. People here hate them. “When the earthquake happen, all the press come here to take pictures of people dying and hurt. Lying in the street with no dignity. It was our terrible tragedy, but to the world, it was pictures to see on TV while you eat dinner,” explained Nixon. “So they think we’re just here to exploit their suffering?” we asked. Nixon looked at us, pursed his lips, and carried on walking.
Ashamed, I let my camera trail around my neck and lowered my eyes to the rubble and rubbish at my feet, contemplating the situation.
It’s actually amazing what you can find in mountains of trash. All kinds of randomness – from Miley Cyrus t-shirts to U.S. Army kitbags, plastic bottles, glass, scraps of clothing, car tires, World Food Program sacks and of course, the inevitable twisted metal and chunks of plaster everywhere.
We’re told there’s a national pastime in Haiti now called “rubbling.” The aid workers in our house explained it to us. “It’s when you take these big bits of debris, and smash them down into smaller bits.”
“And then you clear it away?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Where to?”
“Um, well, mostly to the other side of the street.”
That explains it then. The mess. The unending, far-as-the-eye-can-see wreckage. Haiti, over a year after the earthquake, is still a country in ruins.
One of the biggest ruins we visited that day was hotel Montana, previously a four-star affair, the largest of its kind in Haiti. The building sustained massive damage the day of the quake, killing dozens of people, including foreign tourists as the entire roof caved in. The parking lot had likewise collapsed, crushing everything beneath it.
A single squashed and almost entirely flattened car remained atop the debris – either forgotten or as a reminder, I’m unsure.
Before the quake, hotel Montana was a sprawling five-story compound on the mountainside with a vast shopping mall inside. Walking around today, we could see nothing but a strangely paradoxical swimming pool next to mounds of broken stone.
Next to it lounged a couple of foreign correspondents in swimming trunks reading books, and our Inveneo housemate Rohan, deeply absorbed in a meeting.
In the background, the incessant noise of drilling and sawing, blending into the background and becoming imperceptible as time goes by. But the hotel is not being rebuilt. At least not until the insurers pay up, and this, we’re told, is highly unlikely to happen. The workers are simply “rubbling” – shifting the wreckage from one place to another, like modern day Sisyphus carrying out a punishment from Hades.
We drove out of the hotel and through Monlaza, once a very high class neighborhood. Now, mansions lie toppled in ditches, pools are filled with debris, and spaghetti metal and meatball rubble litter the roads.
“On January 12, poor and rich were the same,” said Nixon as we stood gawping at what once was a magnificent mansion and now was just a mess of muddled remains.
“They had to stand out in the street crying like everyone else. It was a day we were all equal before God,” he added.
“Well, are they living in tents now?” I asked. Nixon gave a weak smile. “No they are not. When you have money, you never have to live like that for long.”
We got back in the car and headed to another foreign aid/press haunt, Hotel Oluffson, for lunch. We opted for the Acra starter – mostly, because we had no idea what it was. Lucky guess, it was good.
“What is it?” asked Marc. “I think it’s fish” I answered sagely, chewing on my piece thoughtfully. “It’s a root vegetable,” said Nixon, bursting my smug bubble.
For my main meal I’d ordered a croc monsieur, which I was informed came with Jambon. “Could you make it sans jambon, s’il vous plait?” I asked our server. He looked at me quizzically. “I’m vegetarian.”
He shrugged.
He returned a few minutes later with a croc monsieur covered in cheese, mustard and bacon. “Um … I’m vegertarian.” I muttered. “Yes, but even vegetarian cannot resist bacon!” insisted our waiter.
“I love it here.” I texted my husband. “Really? Well, if it makes you happy, I can build you bunkbeds and switch off the boiler so you can have cold showers every day at home too,” came his snarkastic reply.
In the corner, a bunch of French Red Cross workers chain smoked cigarettes and drank iced mango juice. It was like being in another world from the one out on the street.
Emerging into that world once again, we drove passed the ruins of Haiti’s palace – a kingdom fallen – and towards the collapsed cathedral. “You can get out and look from inside,” Nixon told us.
Slipping through a hole in the wall, we were confronted with a heart wrenching sight. Crippled, broken, festering figures lurched towards us like a scene from a zombie movie. They’d been rummaging through the rubble and had spotted our cameras. Some held their babies out to us, while others clutched at us, muttering in Creole. “Je ne comprends pas,” I kept repeating over and over, although it was less of a language barrier than a mental inability to understand the scale of the tragedy.
Gradually, the stories began to emerge, helped along by Nixon, acting as impromptu translator.
One woman, holding a child with dead eyes, explained how she had been injured in the quake and lost her husband, leaving her alone and homeless with five children. They all now live under a piece of ragged tarp opposite the place where her world came crumbling down. Her new makeshift “home” is about a meter wide and two meters deep. There she huddles with her babies trying to avoid the tropical rains that pour down and soak her only blanket.
Her babies don’t cry. There would be no point.
An old lady came towards me, thrusting her clearly broken arm in my direction. “Regardez, regardez …” she kept muttering, as I bit back tears. She had been wounded at the church too, and had also lost her husband when the building collapsed on both of them. She had survived, but a lack of medical attention meant that her broken bones went untreated. A dirty, bandage was tightly wrapped around the area where her bone protruded just below the elbow. The circulation had probably been restricted to the point where her fingers had withered and died. “Regardez, regardez …” She kept saying, even as our eyes fought to avoid doing so.
A man clutching a baby girl with two toddlers in toe told us his wife had died in the church collapse, leaving him a widow and single father. Lifting his baby’s shirt, we saw the little girl was covered in painful looking scars. She too had barely escaped alive that day.
“I used to work for Digicel, selling Pap Padap credits,” sighed an amputee, using his single metal crutch rather aptly as a makeshift leg. “I used to work. Make a living. But now my leg is gone. I cannot stand for long. So now I have to beg,” he told us.
Voila, the rival carrier to Digicel, had given him a chair which enabled him to sit and sell credits instead, but the chair had soon broken, and the firm did not replace it.
Behind him, begging Marc for some small change, was a man with the most festering wounds I’ve ever witnessed. The skin on his legs was literally peeling off his bones, in chunks of green mold and yellow puss. The infection was spreading to other parts of his body too. His scalp was rotting, and his decomposing hands clutched at us desperately as we beat a hasty retreat.
I gave one of the kids my last Juicy Fruit sweet. Suddenly, we were mobbed by dozens of cupped little hands.
We wanted to do something, anything, but there were just so many of them. “Nixon, what should we do?” I asked. “You can give them something … some money perhaps … to share. They will be grateful for anything.” I gave a 500 Gourd note to a man insisting he would share it with the others. The crowd of cripples burst into murmurs of thanks we hardly deserved. I could barely stop my tears.
This was a church very much haunted by living ghosts, unable to let go of their loved ones, still buried under the rubble, unable to move on, and with nowhere to go.
We drove back to the house in silence. There was nothing to say. Eyes stinging from the smog, smoke, dust and tears, we entered the gates and were once again jarred by the juxtaposition of colliding worlds; our housemates were gearing up for their one-year anniversary party.
Balloons littered the floor while bottles piled high on the bar. It was a contrast I found hard to deal with, but the others at the house seemed to find perfectly natural.
The balloons had “happy birthday” in Hebrew written on them. “Where did you get these?” I asked one of the volunteers. “The market,” he replied adding, “I think Haiti gets all the random miscellaneous stuff people order and never bother to pick up.”
Dinner, in true Caribbean style, consisted of carbs with a side helping of carbs; goat stew soup with potatoes, rice and bread. No Aitkins diet here. We grabbed a beer from a well stocked ice bucket in the center of the room and washed the day down in gulps.
We’d invited Nixon to the party. He arrived all suited and booted with his gap tooth smile and RayBans atop his head and joined in the house game of laziest keepy-uppy balloon football ever. It’s amazing how an hour of that can have a real bonding effect on people. That and alcohol, of course.
The AFH folks had set up a projector from the second floor balcony, aiming down, beaming silent black and white films from 1920’s Germany onto the improvised dance floor under the stars, on the terrace overlooking PetionVille.
As the party kicked off to an eclectic mix of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” “Suavemente” and miscellaneous Euro-trash, accompanied by much volunteer moshing, I sipped my beer and felt grateful. Grateful to be alive, healthy, employed and in the company of good people.
Today has certainly been a reality check for me, and I’ll certainly think twice before complaining about anything in my life from now on.
