by Paul Farmer
“Edwidge, are you home?” asked my former sister-in-law, Carole, whose birthplace—Kingston, Jamaica—has a history with earthquakes.
“No,” I told her. “I’m in the supermarket with the girls.”
“You haven’t heard then?” she asked.
“Heard what?”
“There’s been an earthquake in Haiti.”
“An earthquake in Haiti?” I said this so loud that a few people stopped to look at me. Being in Little Haiti meant that many of the people working and shopping at the supermarket were Haitian. One or two nodded as if to confirm what I was hearing. They already knew, I realized. Others immediately began dialing their own cell phones as if to get further clarification for themselves.
Although I had been hearing and reading about a possible massive earthquake in Port-au-Prince for years, it always seemed beyond the realm of possibility. It simply seemed inconceivable that an earthquake could rattle the country—my country, even though I had not lived there consistently for thirty years, since I was twelve years old.
“I’m watching CNN now,” Carole said. “They’re saying the earthquake is 7.0.”
The significance of that number did not immediately register. A 7.0 earthquake might cause little damage in one place, while it could devastate another. It all depended on the population density and the capability of structures to withstand the shaking.
“They’re saying it’s catastrophic,” Carole explained.
Catastrophic, I could understand.
“Just get home,” she said. “I’ll call you later.”
Soon after she hung up, my cell phone started ringing nonstop.
My husband, ever so cautious, asked when I picked up, “Where are you?”
“In the car,” I said, not sure how I had gotten myself and the girls and the groceries in there.
He wasn’t sure I knew and he didn’t want to worry me. I brought it up myself while keeping my ears tuned to National Public Radio.
“I’m calling everyone in Haiti,” he finally said, “but I’m not getting through.”
During the drive home, I looked out the window but could barely see the brightly colored homes and storefronts of Little Haiti. Dusk comes quickly on January nights, and this night was no different. Still, it felt as if dark clouds had swallowed the day a lot faster than usual.
My heart was racing as I started running down, in my mind, a list of the people that I would need to call, e-mail, text, or fax to check on in Haiti. At that moment, the list of aunts and cousins and friends in different parts of the country seemed endless. Most of them lived in Léogâne (the epicenter of the earthquake), Carrefour, and the eye of the storm—because of its population density and its ever precarious buildings—Port-au-Prince.
I tried to think of the most efficient way to learn about the greatest number of people. It would be best, I told myself, to call several people who would have news of everyone else, the family leaders, if you will. My cousin Maxo was one of those people.
Maxo had lived in the United States for nearly twenty-five years before returning to Haiti in the 1990s. At sixty-two, he had been married several times and had eleven children ranging in age from forty-two to fifteen months. He was a generous, lively, and overindulgent soul who had taken over the family homestead after his dad had died in 2004. Maxo and five of his youngest children and his wife were living in Bel Air, the poor hillside neighborhood where I grew up. Maxo’s was the first number I dialed at a red light on the way home. I heard a strange sound on the other end of the line, not quite silence, but not quite a busy signal either, something like air flowing through a metal tube or thick cloth.
When I got home, my husband was in front of the television watching CNN as he dialed and redialed his mother’s cell phone number in Les Cayes, a southern town more than a hundred miles from Port-au-Prince. The television screen showed a map of Haiti with a bull’s eye on Carrefour, where my husband’s two uncles live. There were no images yet of the devastation, just phone and studio interviews with earthquake experts, journalists, and the occasional survivor (often via Skype) by the ever-changing news anchors. The Haiti-based eyewitnesses were describing a catastrophic scene, in which the presidential palace and several other government buildings had collapsed. Churches, schools, and hospitals had also crumbled, they said, killing and burying a countless number of people. Aftershocks were continuing, prompting a tsunami warning. The earthquake, we learned, had probably been caused by a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slides past the other. It was barely six miles deep, leaving little cushion between the fault and the houses precariously perched upon the earth. (Later, we would find out that the earthquake was caused by a previously undetected fault, leaving the potentially cataclysmic danger of the other faults intact.)
“It was as if the earth itself had become liquid,” one survivor said, “like the ocean.”
On Twitter, the Port-au-Prince-based hotelier and musician Richard Morse announced that the Hotel Montana was gone. My husband and I had stayed at the Montana several times, often with our oldest daughter in tow. Entire neighborhoods had slid downhill, others reported, each row of houses pressing down on the next in a deadly domino effect. Daniel Morel, a veteran Haitian photojournalist, sent out some of the first pictures online: pancaked buildings and dust-covered silhouettes stumbling out of the rubble, many bloodied and nearly dead.
My husband and I kept dialing the phone numbers of friends and relatives in Haiti and getting no response. While keeping an eye on the television and an ear to a local Haitian radio program, we managed to get some dinner together for the girls, who at first did not seem to understand what all the fuss was about.
Before falling asleep, however, my oldest daughter, Mira, asked if her grandmother was okay. We tried to reassure her as best as we could, but we did not know ourselves whether my mother-in-law—who often traveled from Les Cayes to Carrefour—was alive, or whether anyone we knew was alive.
The routine became (1) dial phone numbers of friends and relatives in Haiti; (2) go online—including social networking sites—for a bit more information; (3) dial friends and relatives all over the United States and Canada, who were also dialing and checking networking sites, and ask, “Have you heard from anyone?” They had not.
No new information was coming through the radio or television. The news was breaking all evening, but the same information was being repeated. U.S. State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley told CNN that we should expect “serious loss of life.”
Occasionally, my cousin Maxo’s phone would ring when I dialed it.
I tried texting.
No reply either.
I then got a call from the producers of AC360, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s signature show. They had found me through my publisher and wanted to know whether I would come on the show.
“What will I say?” I asked my husband.
“What you feel,” he said.
What I was feeling was nearly indescribable even for a writer. I was extremely worried about my loved ones, but I was also feeling a deep sense of dread, a paralyzing fear that everything was gone, that Haiti no longer existed, that the entire country had been destroyed.
We had been watching Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, on CNN and other media outlets. He had explained not only the gravity of the current situation but also a bit of Haiti’s history and how Haitian fighters, after they had gained their independence from France in 1804, had traveled throughout the world, including to Greece, Latin America, and the United States, and had helped others gain their independence.
“This is the worst day in Haiti’s history,” he said. Haiti has helped the world before. Now it was the world’s turn to help Haiti.
“Ask for help, too,” my husband said. “The country’s going to need lots of help.”
Ask for help, I kept telling myself, as I sat in the satellite studio in Miami Beach waiting to go on Anderson Cooper’s show. I had no word from a
nyone in Haiti. The phone calls were still not going through. We had only heard rumors of some famous Haitians having died in the earthquake. Many of those rumors would later prove untrue.
Also on AC360 was Wyclef Jean, the internationally known musician, who had also moved from Haiti to the Unites States as a child. I felt like sobbing when Anderson Cooper turned to me on the monitor and said, “Edwidge, I know you have been trying to get in touch with your family as well. Have you had any luck?” I explained that I had not.
In some circles, many of us who were asked and went on television that night, the next morning, and in the days that followed were accused of trying to make heroes of ourselves. However, I will never regret this particular media outing because one of my maternal cousins would later tell me that he had somehow managed to see that program on his cell phone while lying on a blanket on the street in front of his flattened house in Léogâne. Before that, he said, he’d thought that the earthquake had happened all over the world and had feared that even if we’d managed to survive it in Miami, we might still be in mortal danger from the announced-then-called-off tsunami. He had been as worried about me as I’d been about him. We laugh about this now, but it makes perfect sense because one of the first videos broadcast after the earthquake was of a young girl watching a cloud of dust rise up to the hills from a broken Port-au-Prince and screaming, “The world is coming to an end!”
“This is probably one of the darkest nights in our history,” I managed to tell Anderson and his viewers that night. “We’re going to need an extraordinary amount of help in the days and months and years to come. I think the whole country basically is going to need rebuilding. And people who are the poorest of the poor, least able to withstand something like this, are suffering. And we absolutely need help. We desperately, desperately need help.”
After the program ended and other programs began, the dark night dragged on. My brother-in-law came over with some friends and we put together a kind of command center, trying to make our efforts at reaching loved ones more efficient. We were still watching the television news programs, but some of us were now delegated to the phones and others to the computer and the radio stations.
Around midnight, we managed to reach my mother-in-law on her cell phone in Les Cayes. There had been no damage where she was in Les Cayes, but she was still feeling tremors.
“The ground is shaking,” she kept saying. “The ground is shaking.”
Her radio transmission had gone off that afternoon and she knew very little about what was happening in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas. We told her the little we knew and she was shocked. Before she could ask about her brothers in Carrefour, we were cut off. We would not be able to reach her again for five days.
With daylight the next morning came the first vivid images of the devastation. Piles of rubble were everywhere, many with both frozen corpses and moving limbs peeking out of them. Watching a video of one trapped little boy reaching for his mother from a pancaked house, I saw the little hand and cried. Little did I know then that my cousin Maxo and his ten-year-old son Nozial had already died and that three of Maxo’s other children—including the fifteen-month-old—would be trapped in the rubble for two days before being rescued.
Perhaps because the images of the helplessly trapped were so hard to take, a lot of the television news coverage quickly shifted to successful foreign-led professional rescues. Many months later, I was surprised to learn that fewer than two hundred people had been rescued by professional rescuers. The rest, like Maxo’s wife and children, had been saved by their Haitian friends and neighbors.
As for the foreign-led rescues, even if the rescued person died an hour or a day later, that person’s predicament needed a dramatic arch, not unlike the short stories and novels that someone like me might write. The viewer needed an ending, and it had to be uplifting so that he or she could continue to watch the heart-crumpling rest. Of the many stories that might have been too devastating to watch are some that my family members told me: of hundreds of people who individually or in small groups kept vigil near a pile of rubble and spoke to their buried loved ones as they slipped away, dying an agonizing death so close, yet beyond reach. Of the trapped loved ones who exhorted their family members to go and leave them behind, to go on with their lives. Among the many things that are haunting about this disaster is to think about how many people could have been, might have been saved, if only love and good will could have rescued them all, if only there had been the right equipment ... if only ... if only ...
Since January 12, 2010, I have often been asked what it was like to experience the earthquake from a distance. Was it traumatic?
Frankly, I have seen too many people who’ve been irreparably scarred by both physical and psychological wounds to say that I have suffered many. It would be disrespectful to equate my pain and bereavement with that of those who nearly lost their lives and sanity to the devastation.
The Sunday following the earthquake, I took my girls to a service at a large Protestant church in Little Haiti. I had not attended church for some time and was craving that sense of community and solace that it could offer at moments like this. An earthquake survivor, a Baptist minister, had found his way to us and was telling what had now become the familiar story of hundreds of thousands of corpses, most of them picked up with earthmovers to be carried to mass graves.
As the minister was speaking, the woman sitting in front of me, in her early forties and the mother of two small children, like me, became increasingly upset until she was doubled over and convulsing with grief. That woman had lost twenty-five family members. Because she was not a legal resident of the United States, she couldn’t go back to Haiti and try to find and bury her parents, without risking not being able to return to Miami.
There are degrees of trauma and loss I suppose and if you get invited on television programs and are asked to write articles about yours, it seems bigger. However, so many people have suffered much more, are still suffering much more, and I surrender all the blank spaces in and around these words to them. I surrender these spaces also to the dead, to the lives unfulfilled, to the stories untold. We will never know all the stories. Mine is only one—and it is from far away, from lòt bò dlo, “the other side of the water,” three Haitian Creole words which evoke both migration and death. Separation, no matter how it happens, is earth shattering. But even for families accustomed to necessary ruptures, this was the most catastrophic. Like the woman in church, they would never be able to say good-bye and would never even learn the fate of their loved ones who were buried, unidentified, in mass graves.
In the weeks and months following the earthquake, many journalists, visiting dignitaries, and even casual observers praised the extraordinary resilience of the Haitian people. Indeed, that resilience is inspiring. For the first hours and days after the earthquake, Haitians were pretty much on their own. Their government, paralyzed by its own losses, was incapable of assisting them, so they dug their loved ones out of the rubble with hammers and axes and even their bare hands. As food and water became scarce, they divided small rations among themselves.
Haiti, which is often referred to as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, had yet another crucial lesson to teach the world: a lesson in resilience. If some of the more sensationalist broadcasts were any indication, the world was expecting something else. Journalists eagerly jumped in the middle of chaotic food and water distributions, allowing themselves to be bumped and shoved for the cameras. Such was the fear of looting that Haitian policemen shot hungry young men to death over bags of rice. However, the massive, large-scale looting that was anticipated never took place. Instead, Haitians buckled down for what will surely be a long and difficult road. They set up temporary shelters with sticks and bedsheets, making public places their homes. When it rained, they stood up and let the muddy water flow between their legs.
After three post-earthquake visits to Haiti, I began to ask myself if this much-admired resilience w
ould not in the end hurt the affected Haitians. It would not be an active hurt, like the pounding rain and menacing winds from the hurricane season, the brutal rapes of women and girls in many of the camps, or the deaths from cholera. Instead, it would be a passive hurt, as in a lack of urgency or neglect. “If being resilient means that we’re able to suffer much more than other people, it’s really not a compliment,” a young woman at the large Champs de Mars camp in downtown Port-au-Prince told me.
As friends and leaders both in Haiti and in the international community shape their reconstruction plans for the country, they will be remiss if they misinterpret as complacency the grace, patience, and courage that Haitians have shown for more than a year and a half since the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Haitian history teaches us otherwise. Haitians were resilient against the brutal Napoleonic code of French colonial slavery until they started a revolution that created their republic in 1804. Haitians endured thirty years of the Duvalier dictatorship until they ousted Jean Claude Duvalier in 1986. It is now only a matter of time before their post-earthquake endurance justifiably wears out.
In the meantime, that resilience has shown itself in many homegrown efforts, in the beauty parlors and barbershops in the camps, where people who wake up and go to sleep in the midst of inevitable squalor refuse to let it define them. In the letters dropped in the suggestion boxes in which tent city residents plead for food and water and jobs and schools for their children. In the faces and voices of the men and women who read to, sing with, and draw with the orphaned children in the displacement camps, where they are also living. Often unrecognized, some extraordinary leaders are rising out of the makeshift displacement camps. I know a woman who from one day to the next had a hundred people in her yard. She would have never considered herself a leader before the earthquake. She is sixtynine years old and has lung cancer. Another man was feeding and organizing an entire neighborhood after the earthquake. He is a painter. Haitian-Americans have also stepped up to the plate. Some have rushed to Haiti with larger aid organizations, and others have just picked up and gone on their own. From the young doctors and nurses who arrived that first week, to the teachers and therapists for whom going back and forth to Haiti has now become routine. And yes, also the artists, singers, painters, poets, and novelists too.