Haiti. Day 2.

Continued from Day 1.  Please forgive typos– I’m sure they are many.

Day 2

The effect the vibrant-hot morning sun made through the dust and filth that was kicked up across the city of Port au Prince was foreboding and ethereal.  It turned everyone on the horizon into shadowy figures.  My drowsiness faded and I sat up in the back middle seat of the SUV we had driven into Haiti.  I craned my neck to look around at the site that was around me.

I’m more familiar with the layout of the city now, but I can’t now remember what part of the city we were driving through those first few minutes.  I just remember seeing a line of people on the side of the road as far as the eye could see, walking nearly single file, as if a mass exodus of the city was taking place.  People gripping their children, holding their wounds, many people carrying their possessions.

The city had awakened to nearly the same desolation 4 days after the quake as it had the day the disaster had struck.  And for my part, the reality of the physical devastation transferred itself from the pages and flickering images of The New York Times and CNN into first-hand experience.  There’s something about actually standing in the midst of tragedy that is so effecting.  Whenever I’ve been personal witness to human suffering—whether it’s been the Internationally Displaced People camps of Northern Uganda, the brothels of Southeast Asia, or with North Korean’s in hiding in China—I’m never fully prepared for the heavy, morose feeling that has a tendency of creeping over you when all of the smells and sounds, the dust, the filth—the pure physicality of the situation—invades your comforts and breaks down your walls of safety.

You have all seen the photographs coming in from Reuters, CNN, Associated Press, so I won’t spend too much time describing in detail what the city looked like upon my arrival.  Primarily I would just like to corroborate what you were seeing.  I was witness to it—and it’s real.  It’s as bad—worse—than the images you have seen.  Building after building after building lay in ruins.  Some structures seem to have collapsed inward, with visible layers lying on top of each other like a stack of pancakes.  Other buildings seemed to have fallen, and then been tossed around like popcorn, resulting in piles of cinder-block that resemble nothing of the structure that existed before.

Richard was directing the driver to take him to the Citibank offices in the city.  For reasons that, to me, were a little bit surreptitious, Richard had made some kind of a commitment to stop by their offices to check and see if there were any survivors—or anyone trapped in the rubble.  And after a brief tour of the city, we finally arrived at the building.  It was a typical case-study of a post-earthquake Port au Prince structure—several stories high, constructed crudely out of cinder block.  We stepped out of our car and I watched Richard approach the building carefully.  He was somber, and seemed to have forgotten I was with him.  Our traveling companions waited back by the car, and I followed Richard at a discreet distance.

My foolishness and naïveté made itself most apparent during certain occurrences that first day.  I had brought with me a thick pair of leather gloves.  I supposed they would come in handy at some point but looking back I’m not sure what I thought I was going to do with them.  Nevertheless I strapped on my fanny-pack-first-aid-kit, pulled on my gloves, and after seeing Richard disappear within the rubble, I followed him in.

A good fifty percent of the building was still standing.  I climbed through a mess of dangling cinderblocks and rebar, and into an office.  The room looked like any American office—cubicles, filing cabinets, gray carpeting.  However, it looked like someone had gone on a rampage.  Under the sagging ceiling the filing cabinets had been tossed opened and there was papers everywhere.  In some places it was hard to believe that much paperwork even existed in one building.  Probably decades of statements and data were tossed and shoved in waves all across the floor.

Richard had was out of sight, so I started calling out his name.  Our driver poked his head in and asked where my “father” was (people just assumed we were father and son and we let them—it was easier then explaining anything else).  I moved slowly and carefully from one room to the next, stepped over bits of cinderblock or collapsed office furniture.  I continued calling out for Richard but heard no reply.  “Mr. Richard,” our driver kept calling out from behind me.

I walked into a room in the back and the walls had were so crumbled that there was probably a 6-foot pile of cinderblock in the middle of the room.  It’s amazing what this earthquake did to places.  Buildings sometimes look less like they collapsed and more like some giant fiend came in and crushed them between his fists and then dripped them back out through his fingers like he was spreading flour over a pie crust.

Standing on the pile of cinder blocks I look around me.  I called out for Richard again.  No answer.  I stood in silence.  Then it came over me—for the first time and not the last—the awful stench of death.  Somewhere beneath me, under a pile of rubble, was… someone.  I covered my mouth and nose with my t-shirt and crawled my way back to the safety outside the building.  Outside I found Richard standing and looking up at the twisted corpse of a building.  I stood next to him and looked up at it.  You would have thought he knew someone that worked there.  Maybe that was the case—if it was he didn’t tell me.  “Nothing?” I asked him.  “Nothing.”

Our traveling companions were now urgently begging us to leave.  When I looked over at our vehicle I could see why.  A small mob of young Haitian men had formed around the SUV and were in a hot dispute with our driver.  They had seen Americans, and they could see inside the vehicle—they wanted water and food.

The time at which I had arrived in Port au Prince was somewhat volatile because people—who had been hungry and thirsty before the quake—were now becoming increasingly less hopeful of the future.  They were uncertain if food would come or not.  Fear and rumors were causing people to believe that the situation was only going to get worse and that soon no food or water would accessible at all.  In desperation—probably even with less violence than New Yorkers would use under similar conditions—they were beginning to get aggressive for the sake of their wives, mothers, sisters, children.

Meanwhile, near where we had parked, a woman with a violently severed and infected leg was moaning on the ground, holding her child.  Richard, his Citibank mission behind him, moved on to the similarly grim task of trying to save people.  Looking back, knowing what I know now, I can infer that that woman definitely lost her leg, and most likely died.  However, I wouldn’t be able to find out for sure because I was about to split from the group.

Richard approached me and told me he needed to get the woman to a hospital.  There was one a few miles away in Croix des Bouquet that he was planning on volunteering at.  But there was no more room in the SUV.  He looked at me, pleading eyes.  I looked at the woman and her child and I understood.

“Well drop me off!  I’ll be fine!”  Richard immediately agreed.

“Okay, get in the car.  Hurry.  Pack up your stuff.  We need to get out of here, because we’re getting mobbed.”

I squeezed in through the passenger door and began scrambling for my things.  I shoved everything back into my bag.  First aid kit, t-shirts, clif bars.  Water bottles?  I looked around me.  They were beginning to shake the car.  Faces were pressed against the window.  I stealthily transferred two water bottles into my backpack.  They then lowered the woman and her child into the front seat—the crowd parted for her—and the rest of our crew jumped into the car.  We began to try and pull away but were unable to get around the mob that was enclosing us.  The back right door wouldn’t shut because hands were grappling inside, reaching for whatever they could grab.  A hand made it to my backpack and began pulling at it with all it’s power.  For a moment I made eye contact with the young man pulling it out—we locked eyes, and then he kept pulling at it.

Our driver hit the gas and people dove out of the way and we left the crowd standing in the dust.  We were all quiet as we drove down the hill.  After about a mile of driving we reached an area that was less crowded.  At this point I was practically sitting on Richards lap.  There were 7 of us in the car.  I hopped out, grabbed my bags.  Richard stepped out.  We looked at each other, smiled, hugged, said good-bye.  The men who were driving us were urging Richard to get back in.  They saw what kind of safety these white guys brought them—and they didn’t want us standing around where people could gather and reproduce the scene we had just escaped.  So I jotted down Richard’s info, he hopped back in the SUV, and they drove off.

And I was there standing in Port au Prince, literally in the dust.  When recollecting moments when I’ve felt completely isolated in the world—and I’ve been in some remote places by myself—I have never felt so alone as I did at that moment.

The sun at that point was beginning to bake me.  My bags were a burden.  I repositioned them and began walking.  The airport was about one-third of a mile away.  I could see what looked like an airstrip in the distance.  I cut into a large field that had probably once been a park but had become a tent city.  As I walked, eyes would turn toward me.  People would stop what they were doing and stand up to look at me.  They all looked starved.  But not 4-days starved.  They looked like a starving people.  They looked like a people that had already seen a great amount of suffering.  There was an expression on their faces that seemed to be commonplace almost everywhere I went.  It was an expressionless expression.  A blank stare.  You can see it in some of my pictures.  That expression was one of the most saddening things I experienced while I was on the island—because it was the look of someone that had nothing left.  It was lifeless—dead.

Children of course were nearly incapable of such a look.  Children, in such a situations, as you can imagine, are silly.  Can’t they see that people are in pain—dying?  Can’t they see that their aunt, their sister, their mother have all been crushed by the fist of the devil?  But no, they have the audacity to play soccer.  To run around, to play games.  Or, sillier still, to lie legless in bed, paraplegics for life, and still smile.  To, in fact, grin ear-to-ear.  For no reason at all, they still smile.  I certainly can’t understand it.  But after spending a week in a city that seemed to be bereft of hope, I can tell you with conviction that I am, without a doubt, thankful for the foolishness of children.

I worked my way through a small lake of people, all staring at me, some begging me.  In my backpack I had two large water bottles and a stack of clif bars.  Barely enough to feed me for a few days, certainly not enough to help these people.  Yet I felt the weight of my things.  My pack might have weighed 300 pounds.  Fatigue, uncertainty, and a bit of my own hunger and thirst were beginning to put me into a fog.  I sat down somewhere but felt unsafe.  People would always begin to gather.  So I continued walking through the tent-city until I got to what I thought was the airport but turned out to be an international press compound.

Outside the gate of the compound was a sea of Haitians.  They were gripping the bars to the gate, staring at journalists drinking water, eating food—the thing they were desperate for just a few yards away.  I saw one Canadian man inside the press area—hot and sweaty from being in a sun that he was unaccustomed to—open a water bottle and douse his face with the entire bottle just feet away from dozens of starving men who watched silently.

I needed no passport.  Didn’t have a press badge with me.  Had no credentials of any kind on me.  But I had the golden ticket to get past the gate: the color of my skin.  I didn’t come upon much racism while I was in Haiti.  But the unfortunate differentiation between the people of Haiti and the people that came in from elsewhere was that we were (mostly) white, and they were (mostly) black.  So as I approached the crowd at the gate, a guard saw me and ushered me through, and they squeezed the gate open to let in the white guy.  This would be repeated everywhere I went.  Any hotel, any press area, any embassy. The UN headquarters even.  I got in because I looked important.  Because I was white.

Once inside I was beginning to be unable to think straight.  Going on almost no sleep, food, or water, in the heat of the sun, I wandered around the press compound—making a couple of passes of the layout, and then I lay down on a spot of grass under the shade of a small tree.  International journalists were scurrying around me and the ground was periodically shaking—I’m not sure if from after-shocks or from the runway that sat several hundred yards away.  After a quick, hidden guzzle of water and a clif-bar, I felt into an uneasy sleep.

I woke in cold sweat.  It was noon.  I tried phoning some of my contacts (my iPhone’s service proved to be almost better in Haiti then in Manhattan).  No answers, no responses.  Cut off.  I wondered around the press compound.  I pulled out an old t-shirt and tore it up to make a face mask for myself.  I walked over to the airport down the road.  The airport was a depressing site, surrounded by Haitians desperate but hopeless to get out.  It was also swarming with Haitians wanting work as translators or guides for foreign journalists.

I hadn’t come to Haiti without a plan of any kind—I had made numerous contacts with various organizations.  I was there, first, to help in any way that I could, and second, to document.  To attempt to tell the story through images—without agenda or assignment.  However at that point, wandering around the airport in the hot sun, I was starting to question why I was there.  I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just head back to the Dominican Republic, get a hotel room, and then wait quietly there until it was time to fly back to the States.  I was already exhausted and the people and sights I was seeing were already depressing me in a way that left me paralyzed to make decisions.

I made my way back to the press compound and sat in the entrance out of the heat to think.  I ran my finger over the notes in my notebook.  I read and reread through my plans and backup plans, through all of my contacts with individuals, orphanages, and organizations.  There was so much information in front of my face but I couldn’t seem to form an articulate strategy.  My mind kept drawing a blank.

I believe I had resorted to staring at the wall for a few minutes when two loud spoken men broken the hushed scuffle of the room of European journalists.  One was a black man in his mid-thirties—confident and friendly.  The other, a relatively haggard, stout man in a cargo vest, covered in patches, gray-bearded, with a massive stack of badges hanging from his neck, and the foulest mouth you’ve ever heard.

I overheard the latter man—Doug— conversing with one of the journalists about trying to assemble a rag-tag rescue team.  And at that point, though I was uneasy about almost any plan, I didn’t want to sit around either.  So I offered to join in.

If I was to attempt to describe in detail all of the events that happened over even the next hour, I would be setting out to write a novel.  This is why:  Doug, a rogue rescue worker from Canada who has worked in basically every major disaster around the world in the last 25 years and has a list of a pseudo-credentials a mile long, was constantly blabbing his way into and out of troublesome situations.  He was the kind of man that I can hardly even begin to describe.  Larger than life.  Mythical.

At one point, after having left Doug to his own devices for only a matter of minutes, he had managed to gather a mob of probably a hundred Haitian men.  He told them that if they all signed his list, they would be notified about where and when they could find work in a rescue team with him as the captain.    The problem: Doug meant a volunteer rescue team.  They just wanted to be able to make money—and understatedly so.  So Doug was passing around a piece of paper to get a list of names for “volunteers”—and he gathered over a hundred—while the U.S. military and U.N. officers tried to calm the mob that was forming around him.

Every story, every fact that came out of his mouth was so violently inflated that it was always difficult to determine the reality from the fluff.  For example, a man with many illnesses—some allegedly from his time serving on the rescue teams in 9/11—Doug told me on a couple of occasions that he had to take six cereal bowls of medications every morning just to stay alive.

But it wasn’t all exaggerations.  Doug would be in the middle of a story—usually about some act of heroism on his own part that had saved hundreds of lives—and he would just suddenly and inexplicably vomit on the ground.  Moments later he would continue telling his story, as if he had simply coughed or hiccupped.

Doug’s unlikely companion was a man who has since become a good friend of mine.  By the time I left Haiti, he was like a brother-in-arms.  Ben was a family man, a successful and proud American who had been born into a tin hut in Haiti and has since risen to a successful career in the entertainment industry.  Ben was friendly, good-humored, and got things done. I liked him right away. He had traveled to Haiti because his mother was living there and he wanted to make sure she was alive and safe.

When I met Doug and Ben I knew almost immediately that they were my best lead.  They weren’t journalists—I did not want to be embedded with journalists.  They wanted to help people—and I wanted to help people.  And they had resources that I did not.  For example, Ben, though essentially raised in the Northeast of the United States, spoke Creole, which turned out to be a valuable resource for us throughout the week.

What’s interesting to me is how naturally I joined their efforts—and how naturally Ben accepted it.  He didn’t think twice.  Here I was, some strange photographer of whom he knew nothing, following some random civilians, and we just accepted it.  Because we were all we had.  We were a team.  It just made since.

Ben flagged down a truck for us, we hopped in, and we headed off for his mother’s house.  There he would be able to see his mother, we could regroup, and devise a game-plan to be able be of help in the decimated city.  I felt a wave of peace come over me as we began bumping our way down rocky, dilapidated side-roads.  I watched as new bits of crumbled infrastructure whizzed past me.  I looked out over muddy markets crammed with people.  At puddles of dirty water that had become public baths.  At a people that had had almost nothing, and still lost it all.

By the time we arrived at Ben’s mother’s house, evening was approaching.  I watched Ben embrace his mother tenderly, kneeling down to her level and holding her close to him.  Doug inspected her house—which Ben had built for her—and assured her that it was sturdy and would most likely remain so.  And we ate.  We ate a beautiful, home-cooked, Haitian meal.  Since my stomach is the center of my personal universe, I could not have been happier.

Ben’s mother is an incredible woman, filled with faith and joy, and overflowing with generosity.  She had opened her beautiful home up to the people in the neighborhood whose meager dwellings had toppled.  These people became familiar faces over the next few days, and treated me with the same kind of humbling hospitality that I encounter in almost any third world culture.

After eating a hearty meal, I befriend some of the local young men who were eager to give me a tour of their village.  They warmed to me immediately, and I to them, and we even shared quite a few laughs over some hilarious misunderstandings with the big Canadian, Doug.  As the sun began to sink and evening approached, I took, I believe, some of the most important photos of my trip.  I met the families whose lives had been tipped upside-down.  I photographed them with their remaining family members, surrounded by what things they had salvaged. They were heart-breaking family photos that will stick with me forever.

In the course of the tour of the village, my Haitian brothers showed me a woman and girl who were lying, nearly unconscious, under a canopy.  They seemed to have broken bones and were in agony.  Helpless to do anything before we had a vehicle, we began devising a plan to possibly help them in the morning.

After nightfall I sat chatting with Ben by candlelight in his mother’s living room.  I took a luke-warm, utterly refreshing bucket-shower.  And then, under a beautiful sky filled with stars, I crawled into the tent his mother had set aside for us, pulled my sheet up tight around me, and tasted some of the most grateful hours of sleep of my life.

Continued tomorrow.