Hurricane damage

Yesterday I went to Gonaives, the city most affected by the recent hurricanes. It's incredible how much water is still flooding the city. It's been six days since the last hurricane but rivers are running through the center of the town. People are drying out their belongings on their rooftops and cleaning up. In many places where there isn't water, there is mud. Somebody told me yesterday that it took three years for the mud to dry out after Hurricane Jean in 2004.

I went with three other people. We drove a truck for two hours until we came to a bridge partially falling down due to flood damage. Then we rode in the back of a pickup truck taxi for an hour. After that, we paid a taxi to take us to Gonaives, and this leg of the trip took two hours. We rode in Toyota minivan identical to my old one but with 4-wheel drive. Because of the flooding the normal road is now a lake and there is a new road that is still under construction. Our driver was awesome. The new road had puddles fifty feet long and some were two feet deep. At one point, we hit something really big under water and the spare tire fell off. When we were almost to the city, we came to a puddle that was probably a quarter of a mile long and waist deep. A tall dump truck ferried us across with others that could afford to ride. Everybody else was wading across.

We spent an hour and half in Gonaives and only saw a small part of the tragedy that has occurred there. The headline on BBC right now says "One million homeless in Haiti" the report also says 550 died.