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You are what you eat

(NOTE: What came out of this blogpost is not what I intended when I sat down to write it. Nevertheless, writing this has been important for me. It's the first time I've put down into writing some of the things I experienced and felt on and after January 12th. It is not intended to be sensational, but rather a way for me to process my experience and to share it with people that love me.).

Cheese whiz and chicken nuggets. These are two of the things I've eaten since January 12th that should indicate to you what my life has been like for the past month. Where do you even get cheese whiz in Haiti?! I didn't think twice before devouring these not-food products. My sister's response? "At least you are taking the time to eat."

The cheese whiz. The earthquake was on Tuesday. On Wednesday night, we were taking friends to the embassy to evacuate. Ben and Matt found them at the hospital in Canape Vert, hours after we discovered that their 5-story apartment bulding had collapsed, and we assumed that they were dead. Until then, sometime late Tuesday night, I was emotionally atuned to the horror around me - fear watching Ben climb into crumbling houses to help people out, tears as I hugged a woman who lost her children, tears when I pronounced a young man's wife and baby dead, urgency as we dug people out of rubble with our bare hands. I had to suppress the urge to vomit so many times - crushed limbs, crushed bodies. I had put a pair of medical gloves on, but they were useless almost immediately. We were choking on cement dust and our hands were raw. We cursed and cried and prayed while around us, it seemed like the entire city was screaming. Our phones didn't work and at some point, we decided we needed to check on the rest of our MCC team. We drove down to Canape Vert on the motorcycle. It's impossible to describe that drive. It felt like we were in an end-of-the-world horror movie. Place Canape Vert was a sea of scared and wounded people. When we turned the corner and saw Joel and Rachel's building reduced to a pile of rubble, I went numb. I sat on a concrete block in the middle of the street while Ben took a MINUSTAH soldier from Benin - legs crushed - to the hospital. Eventually we made our way to Matt and Esther's. I stayed there and spent a lot of time hugging Gabriela until Ben and I finally went home at 4:00 AM and slept for about 2 hours.

I don't even remember what we did during the day on Wednesday, except that we were carrying around backpacks packed with our passports, first aid supplies, cash, snack food and clean underwear. It's amazing what becomes important when you think you'll lose everything. There were still consistant and large enough aftershocks that we were pretty sure our house wouldn't be standing when we returned to it. If we could have put Luna in a backpack, we would have. We learned that the US and EU were evacuating citizens. We heard rumors of another earthquake, rumors of a tsunami, rumors of looting and impending violence.... If it hadn't been for Ben, his strength and calm, I probably would have gotten on that flight. I barely slept those first nights, afraid of tremors, afraid of thieves and unable to get images of Tuesday night out of my mind.

The chicken nuggets. The earthquake was on Tuesday. By Saturday, I was working non-stop at the UN logistics base (and once in awhile, eating in the cafeteria there). If I'm completely honest with myself, it was a relief to be able to do something to help without having to face the people that actually need help, the smell of death, the mass graves, the growing camps of displaced peoples, the rubble of this city that I love. There were between 6 and 15 people sleeping on our driveway every night and so it felt safe to sleep. We had no idea when and where we would be able to buy food and water in the city again and I was irrationally worried about our supply of cat food. Matt and Esther left - they were leaving in February anyway - and saying goodbye to Gabriela was one of the most emotional moments I've had all month. We started having team meetings, started distributing rice, corn and beans purchased from the Artibonite Valley.

We've moved on from cheese whiz and chicken nuggets. A couple nights ago, we made turnip, sweet potato and carrot soup. Last night, Sharon made hummus. Our favorite sandwich shop, Epi Dor, has reopened and we're eating big lunches at the MCC guesthouse during the day. Much to our suprise, yesterday the electricity came on. We were able to pump water and take real showers. Sporadic as it was before the earthquake, we were prepared to spend the rest of our time in Haiti without overhead lights. So, watch out for dangling power lines if you're in Haiti - they're live now! Damaged buildings are being demolished and the rubble is being cleaned up. The government has designated semi-permanent areas for internally displaced people. There is rebuilding. We are working harder than ever.

And, we are looking forward to whole wheat waffles and eggplant lasagna, along with hugs from our families next week. Tuesday a month will have passed since the earthquake and Tuesday we fly home for two weeks to rest, think and plan. We're confused about a lot of things right now. We're confused about much of the international community's response to the earthquake. We're unsure of what exactly our jobs will look like for the next year and 1/2. We love Haiti and we have a home and a community and a cat, but the reality is that our lives here - as well as the lives of the almost 4 million Haitians affected by the earthquake - will never be the same.

Clean Water, sweet

Medjina Morise drinks a cup of water from a filter given by MCC to provide her Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp with drinking water. Morise is living with her family and 60 other people who are taking refuge in a half-built church that survived the earthquake in Petionville.

A Time of Mourning

Most of us here haven't had time to mourn since the earthquake. We've been too busy trying to deal with the effects of the earthquake and most Haitians have been too busy surviving. I came across this poem yesterday as I was writing reflection questions for the volunteer engineers and nurses that MCC is hosting right now. Reading it forced me to pause, reflect on everything that's been lost and make a little bit of space to mourn.

A moment of silence please,

A time of reflection on

The casual destruction

And near immolation

Of much that we love.

Whenever the reason please,

Cease from absconding with

The mutual horror

And engorging on murder

Of much that we love.

I planted a tree please,

And watered the roots for

Many long months

Hoping for mangos

The kind that I love

It was gone in a moment please,

Flattened by debris from

Nearby explosions.

It died in the earthquake

Like much that we love.

So a moment of silence please,

A time of reflection on

The abs/presence of Deity

And responsibility

For much that we love.

- Will Fitzgerald

Life in Port-Au-Prince These Days

• As much as is possible, life has returned to normal. Ti machann (street vendors) are everywhere, tap taps and buses are running and the grocery stores that weren’t irreparably damaged are open with limited hours and heavy security.

• As much as is possible, our own lives are returning to normal. We’ve cut down from 12-15 to approximately 10-hour work days. We are shopping in the market again, taking public transportation and wondering why the news is reporting a "security situation."
  
• Speaking of which, Haiti is now host to 34,000 troops: 20,000 American, 12,000 UN Peacekeeping, 2,000 Canadian (more on that later).
• We thought traffic would get better because so many cars were smashed under rubble. Unfortunately, traffic is as bad as ever - the problem of too many cars on too few streets being compounded by military trucks, earth- (or in this case, rubble) moving machinery and a superabundance of aid vehicles.
  
• Port-Au-Prince is experiencing a massive influx of aid and development workers. They’re everywhere and, as in the past, are doing a lot of good and a lot of harm.
• This increase of development workers post-earthquake makes me sad on several levels: In the days following the earthquake, many organizations evacuated their personnel that live in Haiti, speak Creole and understand Haitian culture and are now shipping in hundreds of personnel that don't speak the language but can “manage an emergency situation.” It also makes me sad that the thousands of people coming to Haiti for the first time in the context of this earthquake (not only development workers but journalists, too) will only ever know and see Haiti in this context. It feels like Haiti is finally getting tourists, but that they’re here for the body count and rubble. The public parks (Place St. Pierre, Place Canape Vert, Place Boyer and others) have become IDP camps. Port-Au-Prince lost a number of iconic churches and monuments - including the Iron Market and the Saint Trinite and National Cathedrals (see photos below) and I mourn that newcomers to Haiti will never get to see these. Lastly, the services that serve these people and their generally exorbitant salaries (hotels, restaurants, international schools, elite clinics, gyms) will almost certainly be the first ones to be rebuilt; while it will probably be years before the population as a whole has access to many basic services.
  

More on us:

• We’re still sleeping outside. Although our house has been officially okay’d by structural engineers (we’re even told that it will withstand a second earthquake), we’re still getting daily tremors that freak us out.
• Bryan and Sharon have come in from Desarmes to help out and are staying with us, usually along with another friend or two.
• We are eating enough.
• We’ve had city water twice since the 12th, but it seems that our main water cistern cracked in the quake so for the time being we’re using our rainwater cistern for water to bathe, do dishes etc.
• During the earthquake the wall came down between our house and our neighbor’s house. This has facilitated lots of neighborliness and we’re drawing power from their generator every night via an extremely long extension cord. We suspect that it will be months before EDH (Electricite d’Haiti) is functioning again.
• Luna is doing well and has been an unexpected source of comfort for many of us over the past few weeks. For a viewing, look at her cute, tiny self peering into an empty flowerpot in the photo below.
  
• I have lost not one, but TWO phones since the earthquake.
• We know that we can’t sustain the pace at which we’re working without processing our experience during and following the earthquake. We’re planning to take a two-week stress leave in February to see our families and work through some things.

Damage Assessment

Click on image to enlarge:

Amy Wilentz does it again

If you've read The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (highly recommended if you haven't...) or any of Amy Willentz's features and articles on Haiti, you'll agree that her perspective is pretty well spot-on.

This article, The Haiti Haters, was published in The Nation on 21 January and is one of the best things I've read since the earthquake. Go Amy.

Please Treat Haitians with Dignity

Wall Street Journal

Dear Editor,

Down the street from the house where I have lived in Port-Au-Prince for a year and a half (which thankfully survived the earthquake unscathed, though most of my neighbors homes did not), is an IDP (internally displaced people) camp. As in camps all over the city, residents of this camp began to organize themselves immediately after the earthquake. A residents’ committee is securing food and relief supplies for the 400 people there, digging latrines and building temporary shelters. Food distributions to this camp and hundreds of others like it have been respectful of residents’ dignity. Decision-making is done through community-selected leaders.

Articles like Gina Chon’s “UN Faces Mobs at Food Aid Sites” not only do not reflect the greater reality of what is currently happening in Haiti, but stereotype victims of this mind-numbing tragedy as criminals. Food distributions that do not respect local and communal structures rob disaster victims of their dignity and incite the kind of sporadic violence that the media portrays as the norm.

It’s unfortunate that images of looting, fighting at food distributions and reports of violence make for sexier news than people helping each other survive. This kind of reporting insinuates that the situation in Haiti is somehow the fault of Haitians. On the contrary, Haiti has long been subjected to external interventions such as international trade policies, food dumping, military interventions and paternalistic charity that have perpetuated the nation’s structural poverty.

We have never seen such a staggering outpouring of solidarity as we have over the last two weeks.Our neighbors rescued each other, comfort each other and share with one another. Most of the Haitians that have been rescued from damaged buildings, received food aid and been given shelter have been helped by other Haitians. I would ask that in your coverage of this catastrophe, The Wall Street Journal tell these stories. Please do not cast Haitians as criminals. Instead represent them fairly and tell their stories with the dignity they deserve.

Sincerely,

Alexis Erkert Depp

Mennonite Central Committee Haiti
Port-Au-Prince
alexiserkert@haiti.mcc.org

there are still flowers

On Sunday Ben and I went hiking in Kenscoff. We haven't spent any time alone together since the earthquake so it was the first chance we've had to process together how we're doing. It felt so good to be out of Port-Au-Prince, to talk and rest and really cry for the first time.

Seeing flowers instead of rubble and IDP camps, smelling eucalyptus and pine needles instead of cement dust and smoke we were reminded that there IS still beauty in Haiti. It was incredibly healing to be able to see and feel the presence of the divine around us in ways that have been much more difficult in Port-Au-Prince since the earthquake.

media coverage

A good article on the earthquake coverage. There is great reporting happening here, but unfortunately the bad reporting is definitely outweighing the good.