Posts from Haiti
Jonathan Chan writes from a hotel room in Miami, collecting his thoughts from our last five days in Haiti.
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Back in the States, after quite a few disruptions in the Miami airport. All of us are weary, but I need to summon the energy to write. I think it's only now that the tragedy of what I've just seen is hitting me. While in Haiti, we were constantly on the move, fording rivers and climbing mountains, clearing a space to sleep and calculating how much water we needed to carry for the next few hours. The sheer weight of it all didn't really begin to land on me till a few hours ago.
As Jamie and I touched on earlier, our first stop in Port-au-Prince was a university building that had gone down with hundreds of students still in it. Getting out of the car, my stomach dropped. You could smell death in this place. While Enel spoke of God's grace in surviving the ordeal, a garbage truck pulled up to pick up the bodies that had been found in the rubble. Hundreds of years ago, tens of thousands of Africans were herded onto ships not fit for cattle and delivered into bondage on this island. Now necessity dictated that the dead bodies of their descendants receive similar treatment.
"From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
I have borne your terrors and am in despair."*
On Saturday, I drove through the small city of Leogane with Benajah, Abelard, and Zo, my hosts in the Haitian countryside and members of the Haiti Partners team. The earthquake's epicenter was close by, and the city looked like it had been carpet bombed. The police station had become a brickyard. Every road leading into the city was lined with USAID tents. We drove by the house of one of their friends, who had lost his entire family to the earthquake. "He just sits around smokes a lot of marijuana now," they said. In that kind of situation, I don't think I would be able to do anything nearly that brave.
"Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do their spirits rise up and praise you?"*
We stop at the opening of a new restaurant (or maybe the reopening of an old one, I might have missed something in translation) on the way back to their house in Darbonne. A number of the patrons are in wheelchairs or on crutches, missing arms or limping along. Some laugh and carry on. Others sit in silence with blank stairs
"Is your love declared in the grave,
Your faithfulness in Destruction?"*
All weekend we've visited schools that have been destroyed, fifteen years of work wiped out in forty-five seconds. We drive back into Port-au-Prince on Sunday and pass the Presidential Palace, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Finance. There's nothing left. I remember a conversation I had with some former U.S. policymakers in March. They can't remember a situation this bad in the thirty-plus years of experience they share in international development. Usually, they tell me, you have a good amount of central government capacity left to work with. Not so in Haiti.
As we wait in the airport this morning, Kent tells us of the heartache that lies deep beneath the surface as you get deep into relationship with people from all walks of life. A mayor who lost thirteen members of her family. A mother who lost her two-year-old. Sitting here now in this hotel room, I have no idea what to do with this. My guitar's sitting here next to me. The only notes that come are from a song I heard recently:
"And I can't understand
And I can't pretend
That this will be alright in the end
So I'll try my best
And lift up my chest
To sing about this . . . joy, joy . . . joy"**
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*Psalm 88, passim
**"Joy," by Page CXVI
Posted by Dave Zimmerman
at May 25, 2010 9:40 AM
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