Day Three: Life in the Camps
Photo: Grant Fuller
I called my interpreter this morning, wondering why she was running late. "I’m just waiting for the driver," she said. "I should still make it on time." That’s when I realized I’d been operating an hour ahead of Haiti for the past two days. Sigh. Definition of a boneheaded mistake. But seriously, who’d have thunk that two countries sharing the same island would be in different time zones?
Anyway, we finally got to work and visited a few different camps around town. At the first one, set up on a tiny plaza between two roads, families slept on hard concrete, having received no official aid. One woman who lost her daughter in the earthquake complained about the smell of death still wafting down from a nursing school across the street. She wondered why those people couldn’t have been rescued, since only a few floors collapsed but the overall structure was largely intact. She and her friends were nice, so I took her over to the car and quietly gave her a selection of supplies from my goodie bag. I just can’t give to everyone and I’m trying not to start a riot.
At St. Louis School, many thousands of people have set up a monster camp, overseen by Doctors Without Borders (MSF). I watched the tent distribution process, which was handled in orderly fashion. Get a card with a letter on it, get in line when your letter’s called, hop on a bus to an offsite storage place, take your family tent and tarp, sit back on the bus, return to camp and set it up wherever you want. The only problem is that they may never have enough tents for everyone. Some sleep on the ground underneath a strung-up sheet, while right next door rests a family who already owns a small tent and just lucked out by getting a giant, white MSF tent.
And in some cases, those who lost the most are receiving the least. I met one man whose wife and daughter both died in the quake. His only surviving daughter has nightly fevers. But he’s sleeping outdoors in St. Louis camp, and has been there for three weeks. It seems that large families take priority over single men. If you happen to have lost your entire family, you just might be out of luck. An old woman sat on a sheet by the side of a parking lot, watching the world go by. She was alone, sick and hungry. With no teeth, she couldn’t have eaten any of the food I brought, and I couldn’t give her anything in that environment anyway. On our way out, we passed a seafood truck with a chaotic crush of people swarming its back doors.
Just outside the collapsed palace’s gates, refugees said they were waiting for instructions from the government, or anyone else. Sitting, and waiting. A now-homeless college professor lamented the loss of so many of the nation’s brightest students that were the hope of the future. In addition to the thousands who died, many have simply fled to greener pastures. My interpreter was a middle school teacher. Out of 350 students at her school, only 12 remain in Haiti.
These are the scenes of Port-au-Prince in limbo. With each new day’s experience, I’m getting a slightly clearer picture of what it all means. But right now, it’s still pretty fuzzy and hard to sort out. And if I feel that way, I can’t imagine what the Haitians must be thinking.
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