Haiti – 72 hours in…

I’m 72 hours into a six-week  deployment in Haiti and it’s my first big emergency. What a one to come in on…

I left UK on Sunday morning from Heathrow. By Sunday night I was at the Intercontinental in Santo Domingo (last gasp of luxury!) and by Monday afternoon I was in a tiny 12-seater plane winging into Port-au-Prince. By Monday night, when people asked when I left the UK I was happily ready to answer two weeks ago…

My first impression of the city was that one, there’s a remarkable amount of resilience in earthquake survivors and two, aid has have travelled remarkably far since the quake, despite what the media might say. There’s certainly no lack of rubble and debris lining the streets and some of the roads are barely traversable, but there’s also plenty of canary-yellow t-shirts denoting UNDP cash-for-work programmes which is helping to shift some of the festering waste and concrete, and even the garishly painted public transport trucks are up and running again.

For the most part the city marches on around the remnants of where buildings used to be. I often see cars on the side of the road, abandoned after the quake, gently rotting and disintegrating into the fabric of the pavement. Some have become almost functional, with people salvaging detachable parts, or making use of them for temporary storage. It reminds me of plants which push up between slabs of concrete and before you know it there’s a tree growing through the middle of a decaying house.

In some ways that’s a pretty fair metaphor for how things are.  Life is an undeniably persistent tune, albeit with a highly syncopated rhythm.  Small market traders abound by the side of the roads, selling everything from bananas, mangoes, pineapples and watermelons to shoes, phone cards, cigarettes and dubious looking medicines. People make use of every scrap they can find, and piece together shelters, livelihoods and basic supplies from the most meagre of starting points. NGOs can be quite precious about their distributions and target areas, but when you see something like a temporary shelter in one of the IDP camps patched together from tarpaulins bearing the logos of Islamic Relief and a Buddhist relief agency, it adds a new dimension to the whole response and makes it feel human again. A tent is a tent and rarely (I would go so far as to hazard never, but that is merely a supposition) do people care who provides it.

One of the biggest frustrations is the traffic in the town centre, which is unbelievably slow, and takes hours to move the shortest of distances. For the first 48 hours it granted an excellent vantage point to get acquainted with many areas of the city, but whilst trying to find an unmarked office for a cluster meeting this morning armed only with hastily scribbled directions and my meagre French, I confess the novelty wore off. Try translating ‘I’m looking for a three-storey building with cascading bougainvillea on the wall’ into Creole with only 3 minutes to go…Today I genuinely saw a huge lorry moving so slowly because of the traffic  queues that it was not only worthwhile, but actually possible, to employ a  man to follow it up the hill and place a stone block under the wheels every time it stopped to prevent it from rolling back down. He didn’t even need to break into a light jog to keep pace with the driver…

Having been astonished at the ability of poeple to keep going in the most dire of situations, and impressed by the tenacity of aid efforts against extremely complex odds, I am equally astonished by how desperately poor the country was before the earthquake. Sometimes it’s not the piles of rubble and rubbish lining the streets or the makeshift shelters swimming in the mud after heavy rain that really gets me. It’s seeing destroyed clinics which looked pitifully inadeqaute before they were brought to their knees in a cloud of dust and concrete. It’s  seeing broken water systems which only provide dirty, untreated water for cooking, washing and bathing. It’s  smelling the lack of sanitation facilities that mobile toilets and pit latrines onyl make a dent in. It’s hearing about people unable to get basic supplies still generously hosting families and friends who have lost even more in the earthquake.  It’s feeling the heavy sense of coming rain in the air which hasn’t been quite enough in some areas to provide a good harvest to feed families.  And it’s knowing that people are going to go on piecing bits of their lives together when even before the earthquake they were sometimes only just coping one day at a time.

So it’s new and it’s hard, but it’s a great team I work with, and a beautiful country with spirit that puts me to shame and plenty of laughs to be had amongst the long working days. Watch this space…

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