Haiti After the Earthquake (57 page)

On the other bed a man is snoring. He inhales loudly, his whole body shaking. I've never seen anyone sleeping so hard. It's the first time I've seen someone in a coma.

I always come into this tent. I like the medics. They are not complicated like the doctors. They are always courteous—and all business. They work constantly, on some days treating more than two hundred people. I feel badly that I can't help them. Every time I've been here I have asked what they need. Every time I've relayed the message to officials at DART or the Embassy. And every time I've come back empty-handed.

I go out the backside of the tent. A small black truck, with rusted metal sides wired to the frame, is parked in the courtyard. Two men
standing next to it are engaged in earnest discussion. They need to evacuate the man in a coma, but they are afraid that the ride might kill him. I call the number of the ambulance service that Joseph gave me, the one that USAID, through OIM, has a contract with. Sure, they'll come. But they don't know when they can get here, and we must have six patients to pick up, and we need to transport them ourselves to a pickup point some six miles from here.

I find the van and we send the man in a coma to Port-au-Prince. Then I find the motorcycle taxis and tell them to keep working; we have money coming. They believe me. After all, they think I'm with DART.

I go out back, to a field behind the building, and sit down in the grass where no one can see me. I bury my head my hands. Now I get it. Before I arrived ten days ago, Boga was here, in his own country, trying to help. When the organizations finally started arriving, he greeted everyone and did whatever he could to assist them. How frustrating it must be for him, knowing that he could do something if the foreigners who came to help—the doctors, paramedics, aid workers, and DART officials—would just make use of him. They didn't. They were too new, too poorly organized, too confined in their rules, and too captured in their own bureaucratic trap to do the obvious.

It is now January 26, two weeks after the earthquake. OCHA, the United Nations coordinating body, has arrived and set up a tent in Léogâne. Everyone is there: representatives from the Canadians, Japanese, French, Spanish, Austrians, Germans. The Dominican doctor is there. Chris from World Wide Village is there, lying on the grass at the entrance to the tent. A woman is explaining the coordination process. There are three important items. “First we need taxis to run between the different hospitals…”

If there was a happy ending, for me, it was this: A donor sent $2,500 to pay for the taxis.

 

 

 

L
eslie Voltaire was in New York,
just about to leave the United Nations Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti shortly after 6 P.M., when he got word of the earthquake. The director of the National Library of Haiti called from Port-au-Prince. “This is hell. Bad things are happening. I cannot call your wife, I cannot call your family, but everybody is panicking. I saw my house trembling and I saw a lot of dust in the sky.” Leslie begged her to go to his house about a mile away, but she could not leave her children and feared that the roads would be impassable.

Leslie and I are colleagues at the UN, where I work as Paul Farmer's chief of staff. As envoy to the secretary-general of the UN, Leslie Voltaire serves as our first and primary link with the Haitian government. Born in Haiti in 1949, Leslie earned his architecture degree at the University of Mexico and was a Fulbright Scholar at Cornell for a master's degree in urban planning. He has served in every Haitian administration since 1990 in many different capacities, including minister of education, director of urban planning, and chief of staff to President Aristide, making him a politically savvy expert on Haitian history and governance.

After receiving the news of the earthquake, Leslie began frantically calling Haiti, to no avail. He went to the Haitian Mission Office at the UN, desperate for information about his family and his country. As CNN began showing horrible images and the news carried stories of thousands upon thousands dead, he feared and imagined
the worst: his family was crushed to death in the rubble of their home. Finally, late in the afternoon the next day, he got a message from someone who had talked to his wife, Carole. She was alive and at home with two of his three children, but their eighteen-year-old son, Luigi, was missing. Carole was terrified. Luigi had been with a friend, and they had plans to go to a new restaurant for dinner. Carole made her way to the restaurant and saw that it had collapsed. She spent that night filled with dread. Luigi finally got in touch with her the next day, but Carole wasn't able to reach Leslie and let him know that Luigi was alive for another thirty-six hours.

Leslie was getting many calls from people all over the United States and Canada asking for information about their families in Haiti. Because he held a high-level official government position, they assumed he would have information. This was far from the case; like everyone else, he was hearing the news as it slowly trickled in. He got word that his mother, who lives in the mountains, was alive, but the rest of the news he received was terrible. Many friends were dead or missing.

Leslie told me of the death of his close friend and business partner, Phillippe Dewiz, a Belgian engineer and infrastructure expert. “President Préval had nominated him as my partner, to help me in my mission. I was supposed to go with him to a meeting at the MINUSTAH headquarters at the Christopher Hotel, but instead, I was called to New York. Otherwise, I would have died with him there.” About a hundred of our UN colleagues died at the Christopher, including the secretary-general's representative and head of the UN Mission in Haiti, Hédi Annabi, and his deputy, Luis DaCosta. In the coming months, there would be almost daily memorial services at the UN Headquarters in New York.

Getting in and out of Haiti for the first few months after the earthquake was very difficult. The airport had been taken over by the U.S. military, the daily volume of flights was tripled, and landing slots were hard to come by. It would be more than a month until commercial flights would resume, and the only way in and out was on a private plane. About three days after the earthquake, Leslie
called me, trying desperately to find a ride to Haiti. We arranged for him to travel with Paul out of Miami. At Miami International Airport, I gave Leslie two duffel bags containing tents for his family, chocolate for his wife, baby clothes for President Préval's threemonth-old grandchild, and supplies such as masks and pharmaceutical products.

When Leslie landed in Port-au-Prince, darkness covered the city. The ride to his house took twice as long as usual. There he found a large group of people seeking refuge with his family. No one would enter the house; they were frightened that the house would collapse, especially with the many strong aftershocks occurring day after day. They had been sleeping outdoors in the garden and in the car. Carole was adamant: “You cannot go into the house.” Although Leslie had designed and built their home and felt sure it was safe, he kept redoing the calculus in his head, recounting how the structure was built and how many rebars he had used. Leslie's family members counted among the very lucky: They had water from a rain collecting system and food from a friend who owed a restaurant.

Early the next day, Leslie asked a friend to drive him around Port-au-Prince. “It was a shock,” he said. “It's not the same thing when you see it on the TV as when you see it in 3D. The smell was overwhelming even though I was wearing my mask. All my references were gone. The most shocking thing was to see my school, where I spent fourteen years, down.” He went immediately to the government palace, which had relocated to a police station next to the airport, to see what he could do. Ministers were arriving on motorcycles, and he asked them to tell him what happened on the first days. Their losses were staggering. One minister lost both of his sons. Another both of his parents.

Leslie was worried about President Préval. Reports on TV said Préval was “not showing up and there was no government.” Leslie found President Préval at the police station. He no longer had a home or an office. Many members of his administration were dead, injured, or distraught over the deaths of family members. They had no way to communicate with each other or the outside world. The supermarket had collapsed, and food and water were scarce. The
banks were closed; there was no money. The radio stations were down. President Préval had to decide what to do with the tens of thousands of bodies piling up on the street. He ultimately made the decision to bury the bodies of the Haitian dead in mass graves without identification, forgoing the burial rituals of the community. Excruciating as his decision was, the stench was overwhelming and rescuing those trapped in collapsed buildings and caring for the living had to be given a priority. “The trucks were full, and going on and on and on and on,” Leslie remembered, “and the only thing you could think is, ‘What about my friend? What about my sister?' Days were spent just counting victims and seeing who was alive.”

In the midst of this chaos, President Préval nevertheless immediately organized a reconstruction task force. Leslie joined the task force and gathered as many architects and engineers as he could find to brainstorm about what could be done. He worked closely with NGOs and the UN shelter cluster to find tents and tarps to offer even the most basic shelter to the 1.5 million people living outside. Leslie made multiple visits to resettlement camps. “I sometimes talk to people in the camps about their futures. I'm trying to tell them that they will be better, knowing that it can be better. But I don't see the resources, and when you are under a tent, you don't understand the notion of patience.”

In Leslie's view, Haiti was the least organized country in the hemisphere before the earthquake. An estimated 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings were destroyed by the quake. The majority of municipal buildings were severely damaged or ruined, including the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly, City Hall, and the main jail. Half the primary and secondary schools were destroyed, along with the three main universities. Leslie estimates that only 5 percent of the buildings in Haiti are built by professionals; the rest are self-constructed. And these self-constructed structures came tumbling down in a matter of minutes, killing more than a quarter of a million people, and injuring and maiming countless others.

Complicated reasons exist for Haiti's incapability to build and maintain adequate systems of infrastructure. To begin with, countries with extreme poverty are always marked by a lack of infrastructure.
Two aspects of infrastructure development are particularly relevant to Haiti's situation: historicity and interdependence. Haiti's slave revolution in 1804 set the country on a course like no other. Since that time, political violence and the resulting instability have plagued Haiti, creating less than ideal circumstances for infrastructure building. Because systems are constructed over generations and tend to evolve and improve over time, Haiti's changing paradigms for governance and management have repeatedly interrupted or ruptured the development of infrastructure. Leslie explains, “When we had a colonial society, there was one set of infrastructure. Then we had a rupture, [which] destroyed everything: the institutional, the physical, and the economic platform of that colonial society. So it reinvented a new society of free slaves, and reorganized the country around a few cities with the vast majority of people liv[ing] in the countryside without infrastructure.”

Leslie claims that the Haitian mindset militates against the concept of interdependence. “Haitians will do everything to avoid being controlled or dominated, even when you are an equal partner.” Given Haiti's history of slavery and radical oppression by numerous forces, it is easy to understand this way of thinking, although it is not necessarily helpful in building the interdependent relationships that are so common and useful in the global world. This thinking forges what Leslie calls “intentional isolation.” He believes this attitude is slowly changing. In the last twenty years, Haiti has developed a new openness to entering into “globalization and international relations with other countries.” Leslie believes that to enter into “the capitalist world, we need to be self-sufficient in food and energy, at least, with strong exportation. For these things to happen, Haiti needs institutional and physical infrastructure.”

A far greater aspect of the tragedy than the problem of failed infrastructure was the loss of thousands upon thousands of Haitian students who died at schools and universities. “Because the earthquake struck in the afternoon,” Leslie says, “a lot of schools and universities were filled with students; the losses of these young people were great. At a school where I taught, six hundred students died.” When the seminary fell, all the seminarians in Haiti died. The loss of
the national treasure of an entire generation of Haiti's best and brightest is a loss that cannot be measured or replaced. The school system, Leslie argues, must be the first priority when rebuilding infrastructure.