Before moving to Haiti, I heard the predictable litany of reasons why I shouldn’t — unrest, poverty, disease, hurricanes — usually accompanied by sputters of incredulity. “Earthquake” never made even the most thorough lists. As it turned out, the one thing no one thought about was the only threat that mattered.
The irony of this is not lost on me, nor is the irony of the fact that I originally went to Haiti to help trauma survivors, only to become one myself. In the fall of 2008, three tropical storms and one hurricane swept through central Haiti in five weeks, devastating the region; Gonaives, Haiti’s third-largest city, was underwater for weeks. Hundreds of people were swept out to their deaths in the resulting floods, and many thousands are still considered “missing.” Aid was slow to arrive from the government and the un mission in Haiti, leaving survivors to fear that though they had lived through the storms they would eventually die of dehydration or starvation. Although there were legitimate reasons for this slow response — namely that the roads and bridges leading to the area had been washed out — it is also accurate to say that the response was too slow, mostly due to poor organization and planning on the parts of the various authorities. Looking back, the mishandling of the 2008 hurricane season was a frightening portent.
But when I arrived for my first visit to Haiti in December 2008, I was not thinking of such frightening presentiments. I was instead thinking of how these storms and their attendant devastation represented an opportunity to improve mental health services and policy in a less-developed country, which happened to be the topic of my planned doctoral research. I went to Haiti three months after the last storm and met with survivors from Gonaives. Their stories confirmed my suspicions: Hundreds of people in the area were exhibiting symptoms of emotional distress that often follow a traumatic event. Unfortunately, no one in the area was prepared to handle mental health issues, so I agreed to work with a Haitian ngo to design and implement a community-based trauma recovery program. However, while a number of funding agencies expressed interest in such an idea, none were prepared to put up the cash needed to make it a reality. After several months it became clear that our program, although needed, welcomed, and innovative, was not going to happen.
Despite this setback, I decided to move to Haiti in July 2009. During my work on the trauma recovery project, I had rather unexpectedly fallen in love with one of my best friends, a Haitian doctor named Stephane whom I had first met when I was doing mental health work with Darfurian refugees in Chad. In a move that was pretty out of my pragmatic, “business first” character, I relocated to Haiti to be with a guy.
I may have gone to Haiti for a guy, but I came to love the country entirely for itself. Haiti is a place of fascinating contradictions: Wealth and poverty live next to each other in sickening juxtaposition; the island’s dramatic natural beauty is somehow undiminished by the filth that surrounds it; Haitian people are at once proud, resourceful, and generous, but also volatile, shortsighted, and often unable to put the needs of the many ahead of the immediate needs of their individual selves. This tightly woven texture of contrast and incongruity appealed to me. For me, Haiti is a place of color, energy, and a palpable spirit that one reads about in stories but rarely encounters in real life. I settled into my life in Haiti with no effort, feeling more at home there than almost anywhere else in the world I had lived.
By january 12, 2010, I was content with my new routine as a “stay at home partner.” Unable to find work in the tight job market of Port-au-Prince, I found myself burnishing my limited domestic credentials. To the unending surprise of my friends and family (and myself), I was enjoying my new life of home economics and seemed to have some talent for it, though I continued to look for outside work. On that particular Tuesday in January, I had spent my day cleaning the house, then helped Stephane edit a few reports. At 4:53 p.m., I was standing in my kitchen, still clad in my cleaning uniform of tiny shorts and tank top, puzzling through homemade bread crumbs I planned to use for that evening’s dinner, black bean burgers.
Then I heard the noise — at first a low, rumbling growl. I thought it was a large truck going too fast down our steep street. When it continued and got louder, our dishes started to shake, and I thought that the truck had hit something, maybe even the gate to our high-walled compound. Around this time, I looked up to ask Stephane what was going on and saw him running, shirtless, out of our front door. The shaking became so intense that I grabbed the countertop to steady myself, my only thought being that our house was falling down. Buildings in Haiti fall down sometimes, even nice-looking ones, because they are made out of the same flimsy concrete and erected without the least concern for safety. With the idea that my house was falling down, but that everything outside would be safe, I opened our back door, which led to a narrow alley between our house and the 12-foot concrete wall that surrounded the compound. Only when I opened the door and saw that wall swaying back and forth as if it weighed no more than I do — only then did I realize that the whole world was falling down.
I took a small moment to evaluate the chances of being crushed if I attempted to run between the newly mobile wall and our house versus those of being crushed if I ran through the house to the front door, which led to a more open courtyard. Seeing that there was no preferred alternative, I decided to move from where I was, sprinting down the walkway to our front courtyard. Waiting there was a significantly unnerved Stephane, whose hands gripped my arms hard as I reached him, along with our landlady and daytime guard, both of whom were flapping around and squealing to God prayers whose shrillness must have made Him want to turn away. The unthinkable word — earthquake — fell out of my mouth as we stood there, and even though we acknowledged in that moment what had happened, it was impossible to take the next step, to consider what was waiting outside of our gate.
We stood staring at each other, staring at the cloud of dust that had been raised by the simultaneous collapse of thousands of concrete buildings, a dust so thick that it blocked out the towering specter of the modern office building, one of the few in Haiti, at the end of our street, causing our landlady to declare in a panic that the building had fallen down. As the dust thinned a bit, we could see that it had not fallen. This displaced giant of Western engineering was still standing, its emergency lights flashing like a macabre disco. The six-story hospital across the street, however, had disappeared, its entire front half sheared off, leaving the impression of a dollhouse that had been left open: One saw half-rooms that were perfectly intact, their other halves — and their occupants — buried in the rubble below.
The streets quickly filled with thousands of people rushing uphill, somehow thinking higher ground was safer. Uniformed schoolgirls passed in clumps of tears and plaid, some holding broken limbs, abrasions, or friends. A man passed carrying a tiny, slumbering toddler, explaining to everyone and no one that she had not known to get out of her crib and he could not get to her in time, and we realized that she was not really sleeping. One woman, delirious with pain or grief or both, came running into our compound, holding her arm. When she moved her hand we saw the jagged ivory point of her ulna bursting through her dark skin. We attempted to give her water and to find a towel or cloth for the wound, but she ran back out of the gate as wildly as she had come in, probably without knowing she had been there at all. In a moment of surreality, a member of a well-known Haitian music group passed us on the street, apparently trying to find someone. He stopped to ask Stephane for information, then continued on his way. Thousands of people passed by our house, filling our usually quiet street with the confusion and despair of the wounded and the searching.
A few cousins and family friends had joined this throng and stumbled over to our house. As aftershocks continued, some quite strong, we began eyeing with some concern the tall trees and still-standing, multi-level houses of our neighbors. Our own courtyard was not really safe, but finding an open space in the middle of the concrete morass of Port-au-Prince is no easy matter, especially when security concerns made the obvious choice — Champs Mars, the large public park downtown, next to the National Palace — infeasible. We settled instead on the small golf course of the Petionville Club, a swank country club located about three miles from our house. Having gathered some nonperishable food, blankets, and water, we prepared to set out for the club on foot and in the dark, the sun having set not long after the quake and the ever-tenuous electrical grid having been completely disabled.
The city was dark, but noisy, as people everywhere continued to rush around, looking for safety and loved ones. We picked our way slowly through debris, fallen power lines, and puddles that could have been water, vomit, or blood. It was during this walk that I saw the first of many dead bodies: a woman lying face down next to a collapsed school, the school itself swarming with families trying to dig out their children. Finding the most direct route to the club blocked by a heap of concrete that had once been several houses, we had to turn around and backtrack, heading through other neighborhoods we had once known well, but which were now unrecognizable. We stopped at the top of a cousin’s street so that she could retrieve a few items, but she returned moments later in tears, her house having totally collapsed with all of her worldly belongings — and possibly her maid — inside. On all sides there was only ruin, despair, and fear; I had the sensation that we were wading through the topmost level of hell, as if it had bubbled over and shown up here on Earth.
Upon our arrival to Petionville Club, we were greeted by the sight of several expatriates and wealthy Haitians helping themselves to pasta, soda, and alcohol at the terrace restaurant; the overall atmosphere seemed quite unaffected by the evening’s events. Mistaking them for the managers or owners of the place, we asked if we could spend the night on the golf course, a request they freely granted us. After marking out a spot that was far enough from all trees and buildings to allow us to feel safe, we lay down on our blankets and listened to the city, which stretched out below the plateau of the mountainside golf course. Around 11 p.m., we could hear whole neighborhoods begin to sing; a few hours later when there was a particularly large aftershock, we could hear the whole city screaming in terror.
Around 3 a.m. my very light sleep was interrupted by the arrival of some un peacekeepers, who wanted to use the course as a landing area for their helicopters to airlift their many injured members. We later learned that the un head of mission and most of his top deputies were killed in the collapse of the un headquarters, which also left scores of people severely injured. When we had approached a un station for information on our way to the golf course, the soldier we spoke to was wholly overwhelmed, explaining that he could offer no immediate help or information since he was having enough trouble trying to locate and assist the un’s own people. Almost all Haitian government buildings had collapsed, and every hospital in the city was either gone or unusable in the immediate aftermath. Thus, in a mere 30 seconds, the quake knocked out what little civil authority had existed and gutted the limited health infrastructure as well.
A team of un peacekeepers arrived on the course a couple of hours later to secure the perimeter and await the expected helicopters. What landed instead were several private helicopters, sent to pick up wealthy expatriates. Among these was the actual manager of the club, who had locked himself in his room immediately after the quake. He hopped on the first chopper with a free seat and left the club with a business partner. Seeing the un group and the series of helicopters going in and out of the club, neighboring residents, most of whom came from an adjacent bidonville (hillside slum), began to converge on the golf course, believing that food and water were being delivered. Although they were not yet aggressive, we began to realize that we could not spend another night at the golf course, particularly when un personnel indicated that they would not secure the club against an encroaching mass, much to the chagrin of the business partner left behind by the club manager. That golf course quickly became one of the largest, most unruly camps for the displaced; it is now makeshift home to more than 40,000 people. With no other options, we decided to return to our house.
The first sight that greeted us as we emerged from the seclusion of Petionville Club’s quiet road was a funeral procession, the body wrapped tightly in a white sheet and placed on a plank of wood being shouldered down the road by a number of men. We continued down the hill into town, passing crumbled wrecks of homes, some with the bodies of their occupants lined up on the sidewalk out front. As we walked by a un outpost, a woman visibly pregnant was lying on the ground writhing in pain, either from labor or injury, possibly both. Making a slight detour, we went to the homes of Stephane’s mother and aunt, who had been neighbors for more than 20 years. His mother’s house was empty, but his Aunt Titi informed us that his mom had gone with Stephane’s elderly grandmother to wait at our house, which she felt was safer than her own. Titi then began a long list of the people she knew who had died or been injured or otherwise affected, naming and explaining tragedy after tragedy until Stephane told her he could not listen anymore. We asked if she was going to go to the U.S. Embassy, as she is an American citizen and all of her children live in the U.S., but she said no, shrugging toward her house, which was still standing, but whose staircase had collapsed, cutting her off from the actual living quarters, which had been on the second level. She later had a change of heart about evacuating and wisely decided to join her husband and children in the U.S.
Arriving back at our house, we found Stephane’s mother, grandmother, and a few more cousins and friends. Our group by this point included around 20 people, and we learned that other family members were safe; somehow, in an earthquake that killed one in 50 people, all of Stephane’s rather large family were not only alive but also physically unharmed. We later learned that a number of close friends had died, however, and many in the family no longer had homes. While we knew ourselves to be remarkably lucky, no one particularly felt that way.
That night we all slept in the courtyard of a neighbor with whom we had never previously spoken, along with roughly 25 other people, some of them obviously injured during the quake. Just as I began to fall asleep around 10 p.m., there was once again the sound of panic in the main street below ours and we emerged from the courtyard to find thousands of people surging uphill, just as they had done the evening before. When someone tried to ask what was going on, we were told that the ocean was coming into the city, so everyone from downtown was trying to run to the mountains. In an effort to get more sensible information, Stephane approached a police truck, itself covered with people hanging on as it attempted to barge through the thick crowd. He was told by the officer driving that they didn’t really know what was going on, but they were getting out of downtown just in case. This ridiculous response was no more surprising than it was helpful.
After locating a radio, one cousin who works for the un was able to call his base to ask what was happening. It turned out that the public works department, concerned that people were not getting enough water, had turned the water on full blast, not considering that their weak infrastructure had been devastated by the quake and was leaking all over town. When they turned the water on at full capacity, it came rushing out of broken pipes into downtown, an area whose sea-level elevation and poor drainage systems cause it to flood during something as minor as a passing shower. In essence, the public works department inadvertently flooded their own city and sparked a panic among the already overwrought populace, the result of good intentions unsupported by planning and common sense.
The next morning we located our vehicle, which had been out with one of Stephane’s co-workers at the time of the quake, leaving us without a means to get out of town and with no knowledge of this person’s status. Fortunately, the co-worker had exited a building to make a phone call just seconds before the quake and survived as a result. We gathered up a few more food items, water, and people and began to make our way out of the city, heading north to what we hoped would be a safer location. The 20 mile journey took the better part of the morning, as the roads out of town were absolutely crammed with vehicles. Even the backs of dump trucks were filled with people fleeing the city that had just collapsed around them. They had each paid less than one U.S. dollar for their ride to safety. That price was nonetheless too dear for many of Port-au-Prince’s impoverished residents to afford.
Most people living in Port-au-Prince before the earthquake were not originally from there. Many were among the millions who had come to the city over the last 25 years, seeking nonexistent jobs and following false hopes for a better life created by the various administrations that rotated in and out of power after the ouster of “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986. In the days after the quake, those who could afford to do so returned to their original homes; many carried the bodies of loved ones with them, shrouded feet hanging out the back of suvs or trucks beds. Occasionally, a vehicle would pass on its way into Port-au-Prince, speeding along in a bizarre reverse commute, as people from the provinces rushed to find out what had become of family members or to take them out of harm’s way.
When we arrived at the relative safety of a charity organization just north of town, the psychological effects of the ordeal began to emerge. With the immediate physical danger removed and basic survival assured for at least a few more days, people began to process the magnitude of what had just happened, the fact that they had lost everything, that their country had just experienced the worst chapter yet in its long history of tragedy. People who had been stoic, calm, and even jocular over the past < span class="smallcaps">48 hours started to crack, some breaking down in tears, others entering near catatonic states of silence and looking without seeing.
When I was approached about providing some mental health support to one of the staff members at the charity with whom we were staying, I had to fight off a panic attack, my chest tightening, my vision blacking out around the edges. The thought of speaking to someone in detail about his experience being trapped under a dead body in a collapsed school was more than I could handle at that moment. Despite years of working with trauma victims, whose stories are by definition horrifying, I could not muster the internal resources necessary to effectively work with this person so desperately in need. My own trauma work was just beginning and I was in no shape to provide help to others.
By the evening of the 14th, our numbers had swollen to almost 30. More than half of our group were Stephane’s family members, all of whom looked to him to find an answer to the questions of food, shelter, and long-term planning. In addition to this responsibility, he needed to mobilize his agency, a large American aid organization that had been working in one of Port-au-Prince’s most impoverished areas — now one of the most devastated areas in the city. We spoke at length for the first time in two days, a welcome moment of intimacy and calm in an ongoing struggle. Stephane confessed that he did not feel capable of doing the things he needed to do while I was in the country; he was spending the bulk of his mental energy worrying about my safety and making decisions based strictly on that concern. Against my inclination, I agreed to return to the U.S. the next morning on an evacuation flight, trying to put the needs of his family and clients above my own desire to stay with Stephane and to stay in Haiti.
When I arrived at the airport to await my flight, I felt like I was taking the coward’s way out. I was going to the security of the U.S. when so many others could not even afford to get out of Port-au-Prince. I felt ashamed and weak, and I was angry that I was apparently unable to manage my own trauma and start working to help others. For weeks, guilt ate at me, the guilt of not only being alive when hundreds of thousands of others had died, but also of being surrounded by material comforts in the U.S. when millions were left with nothing back in Haiti. Every time I ate I felt like I should not, or if I had to, like I should not enjoy it. Although I had arrived in the U.S. with only the clothes I was wearing, I didn’t want to go buy anything because it seemed obscene to spend time and money in shiny, happy shopping malls when I was haunted by the image of people camping in front of their wrecked homes without even the most basic necessities. By a fortunate accident of birth I am American, and I was allowed to find succor in the United States while others, whose lives are no less valuable than mine, were forced to simmer in deprivation and misery simply because they did not have the right passport. I knew that I was lucky, but I did not feel that way. To walk away from so much suffering was the most painful, conflicted decision I have ever faced, and the transition back to life in the U.S. was jarring.
Unable to sit for long idle in grief, I searched for ways to help Haiti from afar. I wrote an op-ed piece about how to proceed with reconstruction, and I wrote a policy brief about how best to address the mental health needs of Haitians in the short- and long-term. I also spoke to several schools that were having fundraisers for Haiti to try to make them understand what they were working for. After I spoke to their class, one group of Maryland seventh-graders raised $12,000 by doing chores and donating the money they earned. When Stephane called one evening saying that there were children in the camps running around naked on laundry days because they had only one set of clothes, I organized a donation drive, collecting clothes, toiletries, and other items to ship down to him for distribution. For a month, the living and dining rooms of my friend’s house were filled with donations while I worked on sorting and inventorying the thousands of items we had received. Any opportunity that presented itself as a way to help Haiti, I took, and as I began to get my own mental distress under control, I started applying for jobs in Haiti, too.
I happily took a psychosocial position with an ngo and arrived back in Haiti on April 26, more than three months after I had left. Upon landing at the Port-au-Prince airport, I was immediately swept up in memories of the day when I had spent nine hours in the sun on the tarmac waiting for the plane. I saw the section of wall in front of which I had stood for most of that time; it was easily identifiable by the huge crack in the shape of an “x”. The airport is a wreck, most likely unsalvageable, so we deplaned and took a shuttle over to the cargo warehouse cum temporary immigration and customs center. Driving to my new office with the chauffeur, we passed sections of town that seemed almost normal — people were in the streets, sidewalks were crammed with women selling produce and clothing, traffic was almost as bad as it had been before. But we also passed vast tracts of town that were nothing but rubble, and as we passed a group of men breaking up the hulking pile of concrete that had once been my favorite grocery store, the memory of my former life seemed like a different world altogether.
Looking forward, i’m not sure what I expect. Certainly, I am hoping for the best, and in some ways, this devastation represents an opportunity to start fresh, to rebuild southern Haiti into something far better than it was before. Reconstruction — good reconstruction that makes a concrete, lasting difference in the lives of Haitians — is not impossible. But the realist in me is skeptical. Although I love Haiti and its people, I realize, too, that people are impatient for results and the government is too quick to throw up the fastest, easiest solution to appease the masses. I am not convinced that the various actors here will be coordinated and firm enough to insist on something better than returning people to neighborhoods that were unsafe even before the quake. I have been extremely moved by the generosity of donors around the world, and in truth, the money collected and pledged is more than enough to give a solid foundation to the improvements needed to help Haiti overcome its deep poverty. But how that money will be in spent in practice remains to be seen.
Perhaps the most influential factor that could hinder progress in Haiti is simple interest. Most obviously, the world’s attentions — and its financial donations — shift easily, from one disaster to the next; Haiti is already falling out of public consciousness as other situations arise and receive their share of media focus. The interest of donors, especially that of large ones such as other countries and international organizations, tends to wane as the popularity of a cause diminishes and as the magnitude of the challenge they took on becomes more apparent. Sadly, the interest of Haitian people in their own plight is also declining as survivors do exactly that — survive. In a country where strife and deprivation have been the norm for generations, there is a sort of resignation, the acknowledgement that this is now life as they will know it, possibly forever.
Used to the unfulfilled promises of their own government and of outsiders, Haitians are wary of the robust rhetoric now being bandied about. They continue to be alive, to find ways to feed themselves and their children, to carry on as best as they can. This has sometimes been referred to as resilience, but that is inaccurate. Resilience is the ability to recover from a terrible event and return to a previous level of functioning, or to use the lessons learned from past experiences to improve the previous level of functioning. What is happening in Haiti is what has happened there for decades: the downward readjustment of expectations and standards that comes with each successive upheaval until finally there is no motivation to demand better, to work together for something better. Because “better” seems just another promise that will be left unfulfilled, a distraction from the more important business of just staying alive.
It is critical that the people now working in and with Haiti recognize that their actions and decisions can have consequences that shape an entire society, for better or worse. Plans need to be actionable, sustainable, and sensible. Most importantly, they need to actually happen, rather than remaining in the realm of talking points. By incorporating Haitians into this process, through employment and education in particular, it is possible to rekindle the amazing Haitian spirit into the burning fire it once was, to show them that better is possible, to help them become truly resilient and not just survivors of yet another tragedy.
