Haiti Post Earthquake

First impressions...

I was in Haiti 3 times in 2009 and the last time was 3 weeks before the earthquake happened. This is the first time I have been to Haiti since the earthquake so I thought I would record some of my first impressions this time around. Honestly Haiti seems in many ways the same. A friend made a joke the other day that people new to Haiti come down here and point to a building and say look at what the earthquake did. But they are really just pointing to an unfinished building that looked that way for years before the earthquake.

This is not to minimize the impact of the earthquake. Everyone I know was effected. Everyone had a relative die. Literally every single day for the past two weeks I have learned of another friend whose mom or dad or child died on January 12th. Everyone is also displaced now. My first day back in Haiti I took a walk to the "slum" that I hung out in last summer. I knew that one house had fallen down, but I was totally unprepared to see the place practically leveled to the ground. Where there used to be a small cornfield is now a field of dirt covered in tents. Even people whose homes did not fall down are sleeping in tents for fear of another earthquake. Some missionaries are even still sleeping in tents out of fear of another big earthquake which is supposedly coming sometime.

I never want to be one of those people who only reports on the sadness or hopelessness of a place. So many stories from Haiti and Africa make the places sound like hell on earth. In truth there is TONS of joy here. Haitians are fun, goofy, and vibrant people. Sometimes I think only in Haiti could people make jokes or laugh about an event that caused them so much pain. Sometimes when a loud truck goes by or a fan vibrates against a door all the Haitians will run outside, fearful that another earthquake is happening. They get outside and realize that it wasn't an earthquake and immediately collapse in laughter and begin to mock each other for the way they ran from a fan. Its terror and then hysterical laughter right next to each other.

I am going to try to write about Haiti the way I experience it... which for the most part is joy filled days and once in a while almost crippling moments of sadness.

Funny story

This is an excerpt from a final for one of my classes. I would rewrite the story... but I am tired. An update from Haiti is coming soon.

"I didn’t come to Africa to help anyone, I thought I came to live in solidarity with people, maybe even people who in the past I would have thought of as people who needed help, but I had a very strong gut reaction to being placed in a situation that put me on the other side of the line. A couple weeks ago I had a funny experience of being on “the other side” of the line. My family is constantly out of water. At the beginning of the semester we had a water tank hooked up to our gutters so we almost never needed to go to the well to collect water. A month into my time here our water tank broke. I am not clear on the details, all I know is that since then we have had to go get our water from the well and sometimes from Tech Park. By “we” I really mean my younger siblings, and once in a while me. A few weeks ago I took a couple jerry cans to Tech Park. I was unsure exactly where the tap was. I was wandering around the residential part of Tech Park, trying to follow the directions one of my siblings gave me. I had my younger sister with me, who also did not know exactly which tap we were headed to. A Ugandan woman, I assume a UCU staff member or wife of a staff member, stopped me and asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was looking for water. She asked, “Drinking water?” and I replied, “No, just regular water”. She looked at me and my sister and then said, “You have no water at home?” I told her we didn’t. She asked again, “You have NO water?” The way she said it almost made me laugh, it just made me sound so pathetic. She told me where the tap was and then told me to come back to her door and she would give me water if I couldn’t get it at the tap. I really appreciated her generosity. I was mostly amused at the complete role reversal I have experienced here. I have lived in places where kids come to the door and ask me for water. In that moment I was the person who was going door to door for water. And I did not feel pathetic or even poor. It was humbling to have someone else see me as that. It was more humbling, in a good way, to have the line gone. I am not on the side that helps, the side that has, the side that gives. I guess in some ways I am now on the side that receives, but mostly I feel like there aren’t sides now. Sometimes I give and sometimes I receive, the line is blurred."