Haiti After the Earthquake (42 page)

The theme of the Boston commemoration was “Remember, Reflect, Respond.” The remember part was difficult. The invasive images and sounds and smells and textures of those first few days after the quake had faded, which was good and bad and surely necessary. All of us tried to forget. But some memories were well worth summoning because they could remind us how much humans can offer one another in times of distress. These memories included heroic attempts at rescue and relief, and (when successful) the beauty, skill, and passion of these efforts. But they also included things no one would wish to encounter again: images we see in nightmares and intrusive thoughts; sounds like the slow creaking of a roof starting to fall, then the thunder of its rapid collapse upon the living, the cries of pain from underneath the rubble, the persistent groans of the injured and dying; and lingering impressions of touch, which in those days ran the gamut from the punch of bone-breaking cement, to the urgent tug of hands seeking to save those trapped, to the gentle or sometimes sharply honed touch of skilled medical care. Some, spared against long odds, can still taste January 12 as the unfamiliar flavor of relief or gratitude. Most still taste the bitter dregs of sorrow.

Whether gathered in Port-au-Prince, Cange, Kigali, or Boston, we survivors contemplated the pain of others. Some lost limbs, many lost family, and perhaps everyone lost a bit of innocence about the possible dimensions of a collision between bad luck and longstanding unfairness. Others found themselves transported over and over again to a house of pain, pinned under the fallen beams of oppressive memory.

Pragmatic solidarity from many corners of the world came to lift the weight of disaster from its victims. Haiti's plight inspired many efforts, some chronicled, however incompletely, in this book. All the doctors and nurses and first responders were grateful to those whose generosity allowed us to serve as best we could. We could have done better, certainly, and can do better in the future. We
must
do better at reconstruction than we have to date. We need to draw on every noble sentiment and every bit of technical skill to make Port-au-Prince a livable city and to make “build back better” more than an empty slogan.

Some recovery efforts are well underway. The new teaching hospital in Mirebalais is a third of the way completed, with hundreds of workers on-site already. To some, the hospital is just a building in progress, one project among many. But for me it's emblematic of both our aspiration to rebuild better and our respect for the Haitian people and their story. We hope it will be a temple that will reflect both our respect and love for the fallen, those named and unnamed, and our desire to make the fruits of science and the art of healing more readily available to Haitians. The scars left by the earthquake are lasting; may the effects of the solidarity it provoked be permanent as well.

I was in a supermarket in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood with my two young daughters when my cell phone rang.

“Edwidge, are you home?” asked my former sister-in-law, Carole, whose birthplace—Kingston, Jamaica—has a history with earthquakes.

“No,” I told her. “I'm in the supermarket with the girls.”

“You haven't heard then?” she asked.

“Heard what?”

“There's been an earthquake in Haiti.”

“An earthquake in Haiti?” I said this so loud that a few people stopped to look at me. Being in Little Haiti meant that many of the people working and shopping at the supermarket were Haitian. One or two nodded as if to confirm what I was hearing. They already knew, I realized. Others immediately began dialing their own cell phones as if to get further clarification for themselves.

Although I had been hearing and reading about a possible massive earthquake in Port-au-Prince for years, it always seemed beyond the realm of possibility. It simply seemed inconceivable that an earthquake could rattle the country—my country, even though I had not lived there consistently for thirty years, since I was twelve years old.

“I'm watching CNN now,” Carole said. “They're saying the earthquake is 7.0.”

The significance of that number did not immediately register. A 7.0 earthquake might cause little damage in one place, while it could devastate another. It all depended on the population density and the capability of structures to withstand the shaking.

“They're saying it's catastrophic,” Carole explained.

Catastrophic, I could understand.

“Just get home,” she said. “I'll call you later.”

Soon after she hung up, my cell phone started ringing nonstop.

My husband, ever so cautious, asked when I picked up, “Where are you?”

“In the car,” I said, not sure how I had gotten myself and the girls and the groceries in there.

He wasn't sure I knew and he didn't want to worry me. I brought it up myself while keeping my ears tuned to National Public Radio.

“I'm calling everyone in Haiti,” he finally said, “but I'm not getting through.”

During the drive home, I looked out the window but could barely see the brightly colored homes and storefronts of Little Haiti. Dusk comes quickly on January nights, and this night was no different. Still, it felt as if dark clouds had swallowed the day a lot faster than usual.

My heart was racing as I started running down, in my mind, a list of the people that I would need to call, e-mail, text, or fax to check on in Haiti. At that moment, the list of aunts and cousins and friends in different parts of the country seemed endless. Most of them lived in Léogâne (the epicenter of the earthquake), Carrefour, and the eye of the storm—because of its population density and its ever precarious buildings—Port-au-Prince.

I tried to think of the most efficient way to learn about the greatest number of people. It would be best, I told myself, to call several people who would have news of everyone else, the family leaders, if you will. My cousin Maxo was one of those people.

Maxo had lived in the United States for nearly twenty-five years before returning to Haiti in the 1990s. At sixty-two, he had been
married several times and had eleven children ranging in age from forty-two to fifteen months. He was a generous, lively, and overindulgent soul who had taken over the family homestead after his dad had died in 2004. Maxo and five of his youngest children and his wife were living in Bel Air, the poor hillside neighborhood where I grew up. Maxo's was the first number I dialed at a red light on the way home. I heard a strange sound on the other end of the line, not quite silence, but not quite a busy signal either, something like air flowing through a metal tube or thick cloth.

When I got home, my husband was in front of the television watching CNN as he dialed and redialed his mother's cell phone number in Les Cayes, a southern town more than a hundred miles from Port-au-Prince. The television screen showed a map of Haiti with a bull's eye on Carrefour, where my husband's two uncles live. There were no images yet of the devastation, just phone and studio interviews with earthquake experts, journalists, and the occasional survivor (often via Skype) by the ever-changing news anchors. The Haiti-based eyewitnesses were describing a catastrophic scene, in which the presidential palace and several other government buildings had collapsed. Churches, schools, and hospitals had also crumbled, they said, killing and burying a countless number of people. Aftershocks were continuing, prompting a tsunami warning. The earthquake, we learned, had probably been caused by a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slides past the other. It was barely six miles deep, leaving little cushion between the fault and the houses precariously perched upon the earth. (Later, we would find out that the earthquake was caused by a previously undetected fault, leaving the potentially cataclysmic danger of the other faults intact.)

“It was as if the earth itself had become liquid,” one survivor said, “like the ocean.”

On Twitter, the Port-au-Prince-based hotelier and musician Richard Morse announced that the Hotel Montana was gone. My husband and I had stayed at the Montana several times, often with our oldest daughter in tow. Entire neighborhoods had slid downhill, others reported, each row of houses pressing down on the next in a
deadly domino effect. Daniel Morel, a veteran Haitian photojournalist, sent out some of the first pictures online: pancaked buildings and dust-covered silhouettes stumbling out of the rubble, many bloodied and nearly dead.

My husband and I kept dialing the phone numbers of friends and relatives in Haiti and getting no response. While keeping an eye on the television and an ear to a local Haitian radio program, we managed to get some dinner together for the girls, who at first did not seem to understand what all the fuss was about.

Before falling asleep, however, my oldest daughter, Mira, asked if her grandmother was okay. We tried to reassure her as best as we could, but we did not know ourselves whether my mother-in-law—who often traveled from Les Cayes to Carrefour—was alive, or whether anyone we knew was alive.

The routine became (1) dial phone numbers of friends and relatives in Haiti; (2) go online—including social networking sites—for a bit more information; (3) dial friends and relatives all over the United States and Canada, who were also dialing and checking networking sites, and ask, “Have you heard from anyone?” They had not.

No new information was coming through the radio or television. The news was breaking all evening, but the same information was being repeated. U.S. State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley told CNN that we should expect “serious loss of life.”

Occasionally, my cousin Maxo's phone would ring when I dialed it.

I tried texting.

No reply either.

I then got a call from the producers of AC360, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's signature show. They had found me through my publisher and wanted to know whether I would come on the show.

“What will I say?” I asked my husband.

“What you feel,” he said.

What I was feeling was nearly indescribable even for a writer. I was extremely worried about my loved ones, but I was also feeling a deep sense of dread, a paralyzing fear that everything was gone, that Haiti no longer existed, that the entire country had been destroyed.

We had been watching Haiti's ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, on CNN and other media outlets. He had explained not only the gravity of the current situation but also a bit of Haiti's history and how Haitian fighters, after they had gained their independence from France in 1804, had traveled throughout the world, including to Greece, Latin America, and the United States, and had helped others gain their independence.

“This is the worst day in Haiti's history,” he said. Haiti has helped the world before. Now it was the world's turn to help Haiti.

“Ask for help, too,” my husband said. “The country's going to need lots of help.”

Ask for help, I kept telling myself, as I sat in the satellite studio in Miami Beach waiting to go on Anderson Cooper's show. I had no word from anyone in Haiti. The phone calls were still not going through. We had only heard rumors of some famous Haitians having died in the earthquake. Many of those rumors would later prove untrue.

Also on AC360 was Wyclef Jean, the internationally known musician, who had also moved from Haiti to the Unites States as a child. I felt like sobbing when Anderson Cooper turned to me on the monitor and said, “Edwidge, I know you have been trying to get in touch with your family as well. Have you had any luck?” I explained that I had not.

In some circles, many of us who were asked and went on television that night, the next morning, and in the days that followed were accused of trying to make heroes of ourselves. However, I will never regret this particular media outing because one of my maternal cousins would later tell me that he had somehow managed to see that program on his cell phone while lying on a blanket on the street in front of his flattened house in Léogâne. Before that, he said, he'd thought that the earthquake had happened all over the world and had feared that even if we'd managed to survive it in Miami, we might still be in mortal danger from the announced-then-called-off tsunami. He had been as worried about me as I'd been about him. We laugh about this now, but it makes perfect sense because one of the first videos broadcast after the earthquake was of a young girl
watching a cloud of dust rise up to the hills from a broken Port-au-Prince and screaming, “The world is coming to an end!”

“This is probably one of the darkest nights in our history,” I managed to tell Anderson and his viewers that night. “We're going to need an extraordinary amount of help in the days and months and years to come. I think the whole country basically is going to need rebuilding. And people who are the poorest of the poor, least able to withstand something like this, are suffering. And we absolutely need help. We desperately, desperately need help.”