Aid is getting through and some aspects of normal life are returning, but this is a drop in the sea of Haiti's misery as thousands of bodies lie in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, writes LARA MARLOWE
BEFORE THE earthquake, Haitian funerals were an occasion for celebration. Families splashed out tens of thousands of Haitian dollars on luxury caskets and new clothing for the departed. A pair of shiny shoes, rosary beads and a Bible were placed in the coffin. Married women left this world in their wedding dresses. It was important for the family to be buried in the same place, so their spirits could mingle in the afterlife.
“It was the last thing you did for your loved one,” says Luc Lysius, 57, chief gravedigger in the Frangoville neighbourhood. “Now we bury people like dogs, naked, the way we find them.” Lysius lives in a small house in the Impasse Tranquille, along the canal that comes down the hill from Pétionville, across the road from a mass grave.
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The city sent a digging machine on January 13th, the day after the earthquake. It gouged a hole 10ft deep and twice as wide. The bodies arrived by the truckload to be stacked in the hole. “At first they tried to keep a list, but there were so many bodies arriving, and it smelled so bad,” says Lysius.
He thinks there are 490 bodies in the mass grave, which sits beside the brightly painted, house-like crypts, decorated with dusty plastic flowers, in Frangoville’s old cemetery. Uneven mounds of earth and gravel are scattered with plastic gloves discarded by those who handled the bodies, litter and bones from those long dead, unearthed by the digger. “They didn’t have time to finish. They needed the machine for another mass grave at Titanyen,” explains Lysius.
Lysius and his neighbours have added another 50 bodies to the mass grave, among them his own sister-in-law and two nieces. Venel Joseph, 35, a mason, feels fortunate to know that his brothers Christophe and Doudou, both policemen at the nearby devastated Delmas commissariat, are in the mass grave. Tens of thousands of Haitians will never know where to go to seek a loved one’s spirit.
Not a day passes without new bodies. “People leave them at night, and in the morning we come out and cry and dig, cry and dig,” says Lysius. “Each time I think it could be me.”
Swatches of charred cloth are all that is left of a corpse that smelled so vile no one would touch it. The gravediggers doused it with petrol and burned it. On Wednesday, they buried Catherine, a woman who died from a heart attack in the most serious of 50 aftershocks that have kept the country on edge. It is as if an evil genie persisted in terrorising the population.
At our feet lay the corpse of an old man, his white hair protruding from the cardboard appliance box, held shut with wire, that served as his casket. “We don’t know who he is. We found him this morning,” said Lysius.
If estimates of 200,000 dead are accurate, and only 80,000 have been buried, that means 120,000 corpses are still rotting in the ruins of Port-au-Prince. Five days in a row, I drove past a pile of bodies beside Delmas, a main road leading into Port-au-Prince. Each morning I hoped they’d be gone, but each day another body was added. Finally, on Thursday, I saw the charred metal bedframe that had served as their funeral pyre.
Improvements this week were significant, but still a drop in the sea of Haiti’s misery. Food distribution began in earnest. Haitian police and the UN force, Minustah, finally appeared on the streets. Markets filled with produce from the countryside, though how long present stocks will last is doubtful. Telephones worked sporadically. Men sold fresh baguettes on the boulevard outside the Épi d’Or bakery. The World Food Program announced it would bring 40,000 litres of diesel each day from the Dominican Republic to alleviate the fuel shortage.
A sort of apartheid is starting, between residents of the food camps, whose basic needs are cared for by valiant NGOs, and those, like the gravediggers at Frangoville, who are left to fend for themselves. One of them, a dignified man of 66, told me he was hungry, then greedily ate the biscuits I gave him.
THESE IMAGES STAYwith me: the agony of six-year-old Faimi Lamy as a Cuban nun sewed the stub of her left arm, without anaesthetic; the long-suffering and compassion in the nun's glance when our eyes met; the horror of the tangle of bloated, blistered bodies stranded atop a collapsed wing of the nursing school; a man brushing his teeth over the gutter on the Champ de Mars; or the women who faced a wall to preserve their modesty as they bathed from plastic buckets in the street in Pétionville.
In my mind’s eye, I see the policeman whose wife paid to have him dug out of the Palais de Justice. “They uncovered his head first,” she told me. “He said: ‘I am saved,’ then lost consciousness. They told me he was dead, but I insisted I wanted his body.” Thanks to Evelyne, his tenacious wife, Kercy Borgelas survived, and was waiting to have his leg amputated when I met them in the anteroom of the operating theatre at the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital. Post-earthquake Haiti will be a nation of amputees.
There were bright moments: the euphoria of a Danish nurse when seven Haitian nurses, all volunteers, reported unexpectedly for work at the MSF hospital. On the same morning, a woman in labour screeched and held her belly, life continuing, amid so much death. My interpreter burst into tears of joy when we ran into a friend on the street whom she had believed dead.
There were extraordinary stories of survival. A 69-year-old woman was pulled alive from the ruins of the Catholic archbishopric, six days after the earthquake. After being buried alive for one week, a 25-year-old woman rescued by a Turkish and French team smiled and sang as she was carried to safety. But by the end of the week, foreign rescue crews were losing hope and began leaving.
Myrlande Manigat, a former first lady of Haiti, professor of constitutional law and candidate in presidential elections scheduled for next November, says her compatriots have reacted to the earthquake "with great dignity mixed with resignation; frustration that could turn to anger; an incredible talent for adaptation and the will to help each other". Manigat is appalled by the widespread belief that the earthquake was the result of a curse, "madichon" in Creole. "It was a naturaldisaster," she says. "The government needs to say so, to put a stop to this nonsense." President René Préval had not made a single address to the nation since the earthquake, though he's given numerous interviews to foreign media.
Manigat is scandalised that the Haitian leader told Radio Canada his first priority was “to find a bed I can sleep in”. Dissatisfaction with Préval seems universal here, and political instability could hamper what is certain to be a difficult reconstruction.
It is humbling to hear Haitians thank one for coming to tell their story, when we live in hotels with water and electricity. Every act of altruism, like the gravediggers of Frangoville working without pay, or the man who carried heavy buckets of water to women from a ruined handicapped centre, restores a modicum of faith in mankind. " Des gens de bonne volonté" – people of good will – pulled her from the rubble, Marquise Denis, a woman with a shrunken foot, told me when we talked under a tarpaulin on the Champs de Mars.
People of good will. How else to describe the 30 countries and hundreds of aid organisations that promised hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstruction and flocked to Haiti, to grapple with what President Barack Obama described as “destruction and suffering that defy comprehension”? The Irish Government dispatched 80 tonnes of blankets, plastic sheeting, tents, mattresses and kitchen sets, in a 16-truck convoy managed by Concern and Goal. The Catholic charity Caritas, under whose umbrella Trócaire channelled donations to the Catholic Relief Service (CRS), was particularly effective at distributing food aid and medical care. Oxfam was among the first to take drinking water to the tent camps, and Médecins Sans Frontières performed surgery on a level with European standards to earthquake victims.
Bill Canny, the head of emergency operations worldwide for CRS, says there’s been a “maturing of humanitarian response, whether government, UN or Catholic groups” since the Indonesian tsunami. And that means better co-ordination. Thirteen years ago, in the Kosovo crisis, aid groups marked territory with flags in refugee camps in Macedonia, he recalls. Though aid groups need publicity to obtain the donations that make their work possible, there has been no sign of rivalry in desperate Haiti. “The institutions are pulling together,” says Canny. “Everyone is doing what they can to treat the wounded, heal suffering and feed, clothe and provide shelter to the survivors.”
Like other relief experts, Donal Reilly, the Irishman who is responsible for setting up CRS’s food distribution sites in Haiti, had to move carefully to avoid food riots. “You can never have enough to meet everyone’s needs,” he says. This week, he began organising food distribution for up to 60,000 refugees who are camping on the grounds of a golf club in Pétionville, in co-ordination with Oxfam, who are doing the water distribution. Sanitation, rubbish collection and child protection services for orphans will come later.
“Driving around, I am surprised at how little aid agencies I see on the ground,” Reilly says. “I know they would be here if they could be. But a lot of the agencies were hit themselves.” CRS was fortunate that Canny equipped the Port-au-Prince office with satellite telephones last year. And their building survived with little damage.
In general, the aid effort was slowed by the absence of Haitian interlocutors, the breakdown in telephone and internet communications, roads blocked by debris, a petrol shortage and a dearth of vehicles and drivers. Five days after the earthquake, the World Food Program reported that distribution was going “very badly” and MSF said it saw “little sign of significant aid distribution”. Each day, more handmade signs saying “We need help” were posted along the roadside.
HAITI HAD A70 per cent unemployment rate before the earthquake, and creating jobs will be a major challenge of any recovery. In the slum of Cité Soleil, I saw young men plead for jobs as stretcher bearers. At the airport, they beg American officers for work in the relief effort.
Nelta Volmar has just completed a university dissertation on NGOs and Haitian sovereignty. “We need food and medicine now,” the young woman said, “but we mustn’t be prisoners of this aid. The international community must help us break out of this cycle.”
As Haiti’s neighbour, with a four-million strong Haitian-American population, the US has much at stake in Haitian reconstruction. “We want to stay here, but with an American standard of living,” Compère Vermon, one of the gravediggers at Frangoville cemetery told me. “We don’t want to be forced to become boat people. If President Obama keeps his word and helps us, people will stay. If not, we’ll set out to sea, and we’ll die in our thousands.”
On a fact-finding mission to Port-au-Prince, Rev Jesse Jackson, the US civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, said the real culprit in Haiti’s disaster was shoddy construction: “When there was a 7.0 earthquake in San Francisco, 63 people died. Here, 200,000 died. The problem is not the earthquake, it’s poverty. We know how to build buildings that resist a 7.0 earthquake.”
There are 42 African-Americans in the US House of Representatives, and Jackson is working with them to ensure that interest in Haiti doesn’t wane once the television journalists go home. “The emergency rescue donations are good, but they will go as soon as Christmas presents,” says Jackson.
“After the emotion of the rubble and the miracle survivors, we have to invest in roads, houses, schools . . . We have to let this be a teachable moment.”
