'We dug for five hours, then we no longer heard him'

EYEWITNESS:"CA COMMENCE ici," says Claude, the Haitian driver. It starts here, at Ganthier, 50 km from the Haitian capital. Just one roof caved in, glimpsed behind a garden wall. Lush vines and banana groves, bougainvilla, framed by the stark mountain range to the north. Every few minutes, another collapsed wall, a staircase that has fallen off a building.

Brightly painted ‘taxis tap-tap’ with names like “Jesus Saves” and “God be Praised” still ply the highway, an impossible number of passengers clinging to the sides. Then more and more houses, as if they’d been bombed from the air, or dynamited.

Claude thinks a curse has fallen upon his country.

"If not, why us and not the others? It's because Haitians have no conscience. After Baby Doc left, we did terrible things. We threw petrol on people and burned them alive, because they'd been ton-tons macoutes(agents of Duvalier's secret police). God must do his work. This is the anger of God."

We have reached the outskirts of the city, and there is more and more devastation.

A crowd presses in around a water tanker, brandishing jerricans. People pace up and down the streets, purposefully, as if they had somewhere to go. But no one, not one of them, is smiling. About a third of them wear surgical face masks or bandanas, to keep out the cement dust, and the smell of rotting flesh.

Those who do not wear masks smear a stripe of white toothpaste on their upper lip, to attenuate the stench.

“We’re a people who resign themselves; who accept everything, like innocent children. I was educated by Salesian fathers in Pétionville. I am the oldest in my family. I understand things,” Claude continues wearily.

Buildings in every stage of demolition. Some appear untouched. Others are piles of rubble. No rhyme or reason. The arbitrariness of it. “Why us and not the others?”

At an intersection, the handpainted sign over the ground floor shop can still be read: “Where the customer is king.” Upstairs, the shopkeeper’s apartment has been shaved off like a doll’s house. A red armchair faces the television. A floral picture hangs in a gilt frame. The wrought iron gates on the ground floor are twisted and tossed into the street, bound by a useless padlock.

A crowd has formed on the slanting slabs of a collapsed building. Two men wear hardhats, and they are hack away uselessly at the concrete with sledge hammers. That smell again, of decomposing flesh.

Cars in driveways crushed by fallen balconies. A man sits on the back fender of a “tap-tap”, his head dropped down between his knees in desolation.

In Delmas 33, the road is closed because they’re clearing the ruins of the police commissariat where some 30 police died. A girl hobbles by on a crutch.

A child sits on the ground, her right hand wrapped in a bandage the size of a football.

From a distance, it looks like a colourful picnic. But closer up, one reads only desolation on the faces of these thousand or more Haitians who have crowded onto the lawn of the School of the Brothers of Saint Louis de Gonzague. The Collège Dieudonné l’Hérisson, the top sliced off and leaning backwards, opened like an oyster, a flag fluttering from the top.

At an intersection in Delmas, two Haitians play cards at a folding table on the pavement. A shiny, brand new bus, sparkling clean, glides by, surreal. It is filled with US Marines in full combat gear, wearing ray-bans, from a contingent of 5,000, just landed.

But the heroes are the Mexican rescue team I meet in their dust-covered red jumpsuits, exhausted from a day of battling broken buildings. They throw their shovels on the ground, sink down, exhausted, to smoke a cigarette. Oscar Oliva (36) from Cancun, is a giant of a man, with arms and neck as thick as tree-trunks.

“The nuns asked us to go to the archbishop’s office, next to the cathedral. This morning, we heard Father Benedict’s voice – Father Benedict, like the Pope – from under the rubble. We dug for five hours, and we couldn’t get to him. This afternoon, we no longer heard him.” Oscar Oliva is crying.