Haiti Day 1: Surveying the damage

[bcholmes]

Yesterday, I arrived in the morning and found out what's been happening here since the earthquake. Initially, as I was flying in, things seemed relatively normal. As the plane came in over Site Soley, the neighbourhood seemed pretty-much intact, but I'd already heard that Site Soley didn't get much damage from the quake.

I caught a glimpse of a smallish army camp at the airport. A bunch of tents and vehicles, plus two helicopters.

And at first, I thought that the airport was going to be normal. From a distance, it looks like it hasn't really been affected by the quake. We did connect to the airport, and disembarked, after walking through the relatively recent addition, we were herded on to an airport passenger bus and driven to another building -- a former storage building, it seems, that's now doubling as the new customs and baggage claim section. It was interesting seeing how the baggage claim conveyor belts had been disassembled at some point and reassembled in this new building.

Baggage claim has always been a bit chaotic in this country; it's still chaotic. But chaotic in a normal, expected way.

There have been a lot of changes at Matthew 25. Pat and Vivian, who have been here since the house re-opened in 2006, had already made plans to end their volunteer stint at the end of March. So they're gone. Sister Mary has a short term helper, Sister Margaret -- she's only here for six weeks, and can't possibly fill Pat and Vivian's shoes. But mostly other staff from the house are picking up the slack. Ricardo, who speaks passable English and who can drive, picked me up from the airport.

Sister Mary has also gotten pretty frustrated with the security staff. She recently fired Eric, who I recall as a really friendly guy. Sister Mary thinks that the security people should do more than sit around listening to the radio. Just yesterday, there was a robbery in the road across the street from the house and Sr. Mary is a bit incensed by the idea that she found out about this third-hand. The security guards didn't tell her that it happened, and certainly didn't intervene. I see her point, but a part of me will miss Eric.

Sister Mary has also become more protective of her Wifi. So many people come by here for the free Internet, that she's starting to resent the extra charges to her Satellite Internet provider. She had an easy Wifi password, and she told two friends, and they told two friends, and now everyone leeches off her Internet access. Today, I reconfigured her network -- I had to reset the router because no one knew the admin password for it -- and gave her new passwords, et al. Not a hard job, but one that was complicated by non-existent notes about the existing configuration. Pat previously did all the computer stuff, and it's beyond Sister Mary's skill set.

The house, itself, suffered damage. I took this picture, back on New Year's Day:

That whole part of the building is gone. That section contained some of the rooms that visitors to the house would stay in. Most of the rest of the house is fine, but that was kind of shocking to see.

Next door, there's a soccer field that's part of the house property. It's become something of a camp for people who were made homeless by the quake.

This space became an impromptu medical centre in the days immediately after the quake. Haiti has a number of doctors and health professionals -- those people were impeded by lack of supplies. Sister Mary has a large stockpile of supplies. Last night she was telling me about a stockpile that she'd been holding for over a year -- a medical project had been floundering, and the organizers were Matthew 25 regulars, so Sister Mary had been storing their stuff until they could get the project off the ground. She was telling me that she'd gotten well past the point of asking, "how much longer am I going to have to hold on to this stuff?" Then the earthquake hit. Instant goldmine.

Te, one of the staff, here, did a lot of the organizing of the community as the space transitioned from a medical relief centre to a tent city. It sounds like a good-news story. Once tents arrived, they got community leaders together to decide who were the neediest people in the neighbourhood. This part of the story seems pretty consistent: when you engage the community, everything works so much better.

There's currently around 800 people living in that space. The tent city has been shrinking, as people have been figuring out how to move on from the devastation. Other, similar tent cities in the city are being forcibly evacuated; this one is being allowed to shrink at its own pace.

The house is kind of north-east-ish. And this neighbourhood is relatively intact. But still, there are a number of collapsed houses. This house:

is just about half a block up the road. I'd guess one in ten houses in this neighbourhood have been affected. One of the big annoyances seems to be that several of the roads are partially obstructed with piles of rubble -- the detritus of former houses, et al. Traffic is far worse than I recall -- and traffic was never great in this city -- because a lot of side-streets are really choked.

Later in the day, I went down to the One Stop, a local grocery store where I traditionally change my American dollars into gouds (Haitian Gourdes). Here's what that looks like now:

Obviously, after six months, things have developed a comfortable normalcy here. For my part, I find the normalcy jarring. The people are mostly the same; it's just that the city around them is destroyed. But there's the same domino players, the same ti machann (little merchants) out selling stuff on the side of the road, the same wild goats and chickens. Life just continues because it has to.

Yesterday, I met a woman named Sasha, who works with a group called SOIL. SOIL makes toilets -- composting toilets, outhouses, etc. Fascinating to talk to. Completely happy to talk about turning poop into compost. I'd heard of their group before; it was neat to talk to her.

Anyway, if I'm gonna get downtown today, I should go now-ish. I meet up with the HODR people at the airport this afternoon.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Oh wow. The contrast between these pictures and the ones from your last trip is just heartwrenching.