Haiti After the Earthquake (47 page)

When the earthquake occurred, Haitians used the descriptive term to convey what it was:
tranbleman tè,
or “earthquake.” In the early days, they also called the earthquake
bagay la,
“that thing!” This vague, amorphous term struck me because it underscored that what had happened had no name and was so outside what we considered livable or bearable, that it could not be named. Yet, people had ascribed this un-namable thing,
bagay la,
anthropomorphic qualities: It had killed their loved ones, demolished their homes and often their businesses. Most of Haiti's population is Christian. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, to name something is to have power over it. Labeling the earthquake
bagay la
was for me indicative of the sense of collective powerlessness that people felt during the very first moments following the earthquake. Not being able to name or define what had happened, while recognizing the full force of its effects individually and collectively, bespoke the sense of utter despair and desolation that immediately gripped the survivors.

As people regained their center, in the chaotic aftermath of the earthquake, they slowly began to ascribe names to that terrifying noise, those tremors that shook the Mother of the nation, as we Haitians consider Port-au-Prince. It had to be named, and for the healing to begin, the name had to echo what shook our very core in those thirty-five infernal seconds.
Tranbleman tè
(earthquake)
,
though descriptively correct, was not quite culturally accurate.
Bagay la
(that thing) was the ambiguous word expressing our post-traumatic
stupor; it was merely an interim label. Creole is the language of our glory, the language of our fury; a vehicle to codify both our resistance, and resilience. As we began to awaken, the name for
bagay la
was coined, a neologism was created in accordance to Haitian norms and tradition: using the onomatopoeia
goudou goudou.
The disastrous event had been named. We, the people, were somehow, on our terms, regaining our bearings after the catastrophe. The first time I heard someone say
goudou goudou,
I shuddered. But then, I sighed. I understood. For me as a Haitian, this was the first step onto terra firma.

Gripped by nostalgia or perhaps a strange premonition, I decided to bring my family to Haiti for the holidays back in 2009. For the first time, we did not stay in my hometown, Cange, where our work is based, but rather stayed in the capital city of my birth, Port-au-Prince. We visited many landmarks, including the National Palace, which we had never before taken the time to see. It was as if we had known that this might be our last chance to appreciate them before they were destroyed.

Political and familial circumstances had kept me away for a long time. I left Haiti for the first time in 1995 to pursue my studies in Europe. I was not ready to leave my homeland, but I had to take advantage of the opportunity available to me. In my heart, I never really left home; a profound love for my country remained with me. Each year, I would travel home for the long summer break and for the Christmas holiday. During my time away, I missed everything—the country's beauty, the sun, the beach, the warmth of the mountains, the landscape, the food, the music, my friends and family. I felt I needed to stay connected to my roots in Haiti to survive in Western culture, so I returned at every opportunity. Haiti's image abroad was never a positive one, but Haiti nonetheless remained my country, my home, and I remained fiercely devoted to it.

After completing my education, I returned to Haiti, determined to contribute to its renewal. But when an opportunity arose to move to Rwanda, I didn't hesitate. Despite the reservations some friends expressed about my living in a place with such a tragic history, I believed that I had something to learn from Rwanda. In September 2006, I moved there with my daughter Catherine—then only eight years old—to serve as the Director of Community Health for Inshuti Mu Buzima, Partners In Health's sister organization in Rwanda. After that our family grew by two more children, first with Elizabeth, a beautiful baby girl from our adopted home in Rwinkwavu, who joined our family at just one week old, and then with Charles Sebastian, who was born six months later. My family in Haiti often expressed regret that they did not have opportunities to become better acquainted with their grandchildren, nieces and nephew, and cousins. No matter how far away we are from our homeland, one's roots are one's roots—
lakay se lakay
.

Now at last I was bringing my family, as well as one of the young women helping us care for the children in Rwanda, to Haiti for a two-month stay. Close friends helped us to find a small apartment in the capital city, and I began to rediscover Port-au-Prince. We visited the Pantheon Museum and the Parc du Souvenir, went to the beach, spent time with family and friends, shopped for beautiful Haitian artwork, and enjoyed all the dishes that I had missed in Rwanda. At the end of our stay, we went to the northern city of Cap-Haïtien with my sister, her husband, and their sons, and an adopted Haitian daughter. We spent New Year's Eve there with friends. In Cap-Haïtien, I visited for the first time one of Haiti's historic sites, La Citadelle Laferriere, and also went to Labadie, the beautiful resort town that welcomes visitors from Caribbean cruises.

With my husband, “Dr. Paul,” along, we certainly could not fail to pay a visit to the Cap-Haïtien Hospital, where we observed the hospital's staff struggling to provide high-quality health care to the people with the meager resources available to them. During the visit, we met a newborn boy who had been left for dead in a trash can in front of the main gate of the public hospital. The baby was found, rescued,
and kept at the hospital to be treated for severe malnutrition. I was tempted to welcome him into our family, but we decided instead to pay for his care until he could be formally adopted by someone in his community.

At the end of the trip, as I packed my bags full of mementos from Haiti, I felt that I was bringing a little bit of home back with me. Little did I know that Haiti would follow me all the way back to Rwanda, that the baby boy we had just left would be only one of many children in danger whom we would be working to support from abroad, or that all the artwork and souvenirs I was carefully packing for friends and family would soon be auctioned to help pay for a desperate relief effort. Little did I know how narrowly my husband, children, and I were escaping disaster.

We returned to Rwanda on, of all days, the 12th of January. We landed in Kigali at 7:55 P.M. after a two-day trip via Miami, New York City, and Brussels. By the time we cleared customs and arrived at our house, it was nearly 10 P.M. As the younger children prepared for bed, I e-mailed my family to let them know that we had reached Rwanda safely, and called some local friends, the Germain family, a Haitian couple with two children who also worked for international institutions in Rwanda. At 1 A.M., with everyone finally in bed, I turned off my cell phone and set my alarm clock for 6 in the morning. Catherine had already missed a week of classes, and we would need to get going early the next day to purchase her school supplies and get her to school.

The next day, after my morning prayer, I walked into the living room, turned on my cell phone, and discovered twenty missed calls from my Haitian friend Margalie. I wondered what could be wrong and became anxious that I had missed an opportunity to provide assistance to someone in trouble. I quickly dialed her number. She answered on the first ring, and asked if I had heard the news. “What news?” I asked. My heart started beating faster as I thought about my family in Haiti, my father. She replied, “
Nou pa gen peyi ankò, Ayiti kraze
”: Our country is gone, Haiti is destroyed.

I could not speak. A few days previously, I had been there; my country had been standing on its feet. My friend was crying so hard that I could not understand her. I told her that I had to go, that we would talk later, and hung up the phone. Then I began shaking with grief. For a few hours, the world stopped. My daughter, who turned twelve that day, got neither a happy birthday wish nor a birthday party. Instead, she came home from school close to tears, asking, “What will happen to the children we met in Haiti? How will they go to school? How will this affect them?” I couldn't answer her. My heart was in pain. The torment had begun.

Words of sympathy were sent to me and my family by Rwandese friends and acquaintances: President and First Lady Kagame; members of the government; members of the different Ministries, especially the Ministry of Health; partners; members of our church; parents and teachers from our daughter's school; colleagues; other community members living in Kigali, Kayonza, Kirehe, and Burera. Phone calls and e-mails came in from around the world: sympathy and solidarity from Christine and Pat Murray from Zanmi Paris, Sylvie and Jamel, friends from Paris, my Danish classmate from grad school, Camilla, others from Holland, Senegal, Burkina, and Mali. Haiti was at the forefront in the news and the topic of every conversation. People came to us with expressions of compassion and empathy on their faces, though it was still difficult to control our grief.

I became panicked about the family and friends I had just seen in Haiti: my father and his second family, with their five children; my youngest sister, a nurse-anesthetist, and her husband, an obstetrician-gynecologist, and their young sons; the Lafontant family; members of the Zanmi Lasanté administration; Loune; members of the local staff who came from Port-au-Prince; all the doctors that I have known for years. I was worried about Manmito, Tatie-Flore, Sindy, and their children Victoria, Cassandre, and Luidgi, who came to Haiti for the holidays. I was worried for my friend Zette; my classmates Yonide and her sister, my aunt Catherine and her daughter and grandchildren, my cousins Guy, Ricot, Kerline, and Baby and their mother Carole; my friends Nancy and Harry; our adopted daughter Natacha, who had started nursing school in Port-au-Prince; Clerveaux; all the PIH drivers;
all our friends and family… In that moment, all I could think about were the people dear to me and not about the bigger picture, the broader catastrophe and its effects on the country and people, which would soon consume every thought to come.

First, I tried calling Paul, still in Miami recovering from knee surgery, for news of the situation. Although he'd been calling every number he knew, he couldn't get through to Haiti and had almost no information regarding my family or colleagues from Zanmi Lasanté. But he believed that the UN headquarters had collapsed, killing the UN's country representative, whom I had met a couple of weeks earlier at a dinner hosted by the Prime Minister. He was sure that the Central Plateau, my home town, had been spared, but he was concerned about staff members, including our indefatigable Nancy Dorsinville, who had flown to Haiti the same day for a meeting with one of our partners in Port-au-Prince. None of my phone calls to the country went through, either.

On January 13, the news was full of images of death in the capital city. All main federal buildings, including the National Palace, had collapsed. Just days before, with my children, I had taken pictures in front of the Palace, which had been beautifully decorated for the holiday season. Now the caption to these photos reads, “Palace,
before
the quake.” It is the event that has split our lives in two; everything is now
before
or
after
, every small memento, every vacation, every family photo.

For me, the tragedy that hit Haiti on January 12 has changed everything. After the tragedy, my two young nephews, one eleven months and the other two-and-a-half, joined my family in Rwanda. Their father was injured in the quake, and the family lost everything they worked hard to build over the years. All over the world, Haitian families have welcomed or adopted Haitian children and sheltered them through these difficult days; but the difficult days haven't ended yet, it seems. More than a year later, Ricky Ryan and Richard Jaden are still living with us in Rwanda, missed terribly by their parents.

Catherine too was deeply affected. Literally overnight, she went from a relatively happy and carefree eleven-year-old to a deeply concerned twelve-year-old with a mission. Catherine did everything she
could in those months after the quake to help our relief effort. She mobilized friends, Rwandese and Haitians, in building donation boxes out of cardboard and decorating them with brightly-colored flowers and hopeful inscriptions. “Kigali Stand Up with Haiti!” the boxes said; Catherine seemed to take this on as a personal motto. She spoke of the injustices of a world in which she could go to school, sleep with a roof over her head, eat three meals a day, and enjoy the love and attention of her two parents, while children in Haiti were being herded into camps and orphanages, enduring terrible hardship and with uncertain futures. Catherine didn't limit this talk to home or to school—she spoke of Haiti to anyone who would listen.

It is largely because of my daughters, I believe, that I have been so affected by the plight of young girls in post-quake Haiti, who suffer more cruelty and injustice than even Catherine could possibly imagine. Whenever I hear of the plight of a young girl in a place such as Camp Parc Jean-Marie Vincent or Carradeux, I can't help but think of my own family and the terrible nightmare of trying to raise a daughter under such wretched and dangerous conditions. These thoughts—and images of my own daughters' faces peering out from under a tent somewhere in Port-au-Prince—haunt me. But they also motivate me to keep pushing, keep working for a better future for women and girls in Haiti.

Immediately post-quake, however, our focus was not on the future but rather on helping our countrymen survive in the terrible and desperate present. The day after the earthquake, the small Haitian community in Rwanda—six Haitians and two adopted friends of Haiti—met at my home to see how we could raise funds to support relief and rebuilding efforts after the earthquake. We launched a six-month long “KIGALI STANDS UP FOR HAITI” campaign. With support from other Partners In Health staffers based in Rwanda, we organized a number of fundraising events, starting with a cocktail party at Heaven Restaurant, continuing with a Haitian brunch at Republika Restaurant, and ending with an Ethiopian and Eritrean dinner buffet at Lalibela Restaurant. The support of our Ethiopian and Eritrean friends and colleagues in Kigali was a particularly valued resource; they quickly mobilized their extensive
expatriate community to fundraise, host events, and generally aid our efforts. The earthquake was a call to action for a diverse group of expatriates and Rwandans alike, who came together in a remarkable show of solidarity for the sake of Haiti.