Haiti. Day 3.

I apologize for the delay in getting day 3 up here.  It’s both time consuming and personally exhausting to write these.

Continued from Day 1 & Day 2.

Day 3.

At approximately 5 o’clock in the morning I heard the panicked and urgent voice of Doug.  He had ripped open the zipper of the tent that Ben and I were sleeping in and was staring down at us through the darkness.

“We have to get those girls to the hospital or they’re going to die.” He urged.  “They’re sitting there under that sheet with basic injuries that are easily treatable and yet they’re going to die.  We gotta do something!”

“Okay,” Ben said, quietly, attempting to shake away his sleepiness.  “I’m up.”

I grappled for my t-shirt and iPhone and stumbled out of the tent.  Still head-heavy with sleep, I brushed my teethe, splashed water on my face, and began packing my day pack with the essentials: a water bottle, meager medical supplies, my camera, and some Clif bars.  I then walked out into the courtyard of Ben’s mother’s house.  The entire property had become (and still is) a safe-haven for families in the community that had lost their homes.  Strewn across the yard where I had slept were blankets, cots, and mats.  But by 5:30 everyone had awoken and was gathered in the far corner of the courtyard.  They were singing Haitian praise songs.

I walked over and sat down on the ground in the midst of the small service.  They were in a rough circle, some standing, some sitting.  Their voices were raised, but still felt hushed in the still of the morning.  The sun had not yet emerged and faint stars still peppered the sky.  I closed my eyes and let their upbeat Creole singing—the words dancing in the air—drizzle down over me.  The night before, I had been sitting with these same people when they had learned the news that more of their family members had been crushed in the quake.  I had seen them wave their arms, asking the sky for unfulfilled consolation.  And now they were raising their arms to that same sky, praising God.

When thinking back to the things I saw in Haiti, it seems trite to make suppositions or formulate axioms that can be garnered from the tragedy I witnessed.  I can’t seem to put pen to paper and write sentences that involve “hope amidst tragedy” or “resilience” without feeling like I’m making lightness out of the great suffering the people of Haiti have endured.  The cost of any lesson learned, of any scales that have fallen from the wealthier West’s eyes, is great—and impossible to justify.  But certain moments while I was in Port au Prince spoke loudly to me.  Certain instances seemed to tear through the story of Haiti’s recent earthquake, and alluded to the larger story of a land that was once referred to as “The Pearl of the West Indies.”

I don’t hope for consolation—just as the people of Haiti don’t hope for some kind of an explanation.  None would suffice.  But they hope—if they hope at all—for a greater, stronger future.  They hope—if they can bear it—for wholeness and opportunity.  Nothing, no amount of media attention, no act of compassion, no donation of time or resources, will replace what they’ve lost.  Nobody can look into the face of the man I met who lost every single member of his family, his home, and give him any thing, any words, that will begin to console his great loss.

So I don’t hope, on behalf of the people of Haiti, simply for the playing field to be leveled—for their misery to be assuaged or quality of life to rise back closer to our standards.  Instead, since I believe in my core that they are children of God, I hope that a greater story will burst through this one.  Because this Chapter seems purposeless.  This Chapter has done such violence to humanity that it’s hard to not put the book down.  But my hope, and I think the ultimate hope of these people, is not that this part of their story will someday feel “worth it,” that they will all be able to look back and say “See—we didn’t even know how great things would turn out!”—because 200,000 lives are not easily replaced, reconciled or accounted for.  No, hope will have to mean something greater that escapes words.  Something we can’t write about or articulate.  Something that can’t be argued, synopsized, or summarized.  Something no poetry or prose could convey.

That is why it was unexpected moments like that 5:30 AM worship service where I sensed hope.  It would cleanse me in a way that I couldn’t plan, extrapolate or articulate.  But it was there.  And I’m trying to carry it with me.

That day went on to be one of the longest of my life.  Ben’s mother had arranged a truck and a driver for us.  We filled two large water jugs with water and I used up my ration of water-purification tablets on one of them.  Several of the young men from the village joined us.  And after two hours of slowly readying for the day, we headed out.

A few houses away four people lay waiting for help.  An elderly woman who had been electrocuted, a middle-aged woman with several broken bones, a young pregnant girl, and a child.  With Ben, Doug, and our driver in the front of the cab, Ben’s mother, myself, and one of the young men from the village in the back of the cab, and a couple others in the back, we headed over to load them up and try and get them to a hospital.

As we made them as comfortable as possible in the back of the truck for what would turn out to be a long day of driving and waiting, I took out my camera to take a photo.  It is strange, to me, the relationship a photographer has with the people in his world.  It is strange how acceptable it becomes to take images of people in the midst of pain or anguish.  In my travels as a documentarian I’ve had to learn the delicate balance that exists in those situations, and in Haiti it seemed like the line on which we photographers walked was as narrow as a string.  In situations like the earthquake in Haiti, mere storytelling can easily become exploitation.  Even the most well-intentioned journalist or documentary photographer can cross lines.  I know I did it while I was there.  But I tried to do my best to keep in step with what I feel is the ethical way of telling a story of this nature through photographs.

For my part, that means thinking through the environment, the position of my body with theirs, the meeting of our eyes, the acceptance of the camera, and the understanding that it’s a give as much as it’s a take.  That when I lift my lens, theirs an unspoken contract there.   That their privacy and their rights are just as important as the best-paid supermodels’.  Greater photos come out of that kind of an exchange.  And the other photos—great or not—aren’t worth it if they rob the subject of humanity—especially when their humanity already seems to have been ripped from them.

So I clicked.  And hope (though I know I failed at times) that those images were gifts to me and to us from the person staring back from them, and not something I took.  And I hope that I was always willing to put my camera down if necessary.  That these two hands were used as best as they could be used—whether that meant holding a child, or holding a camera.

Our rag tag team spent the better have of the morning darting around Port au Prince, attempting to find a place where we could take the injured people we were transporting.  Doug, Ben, and I were in and out of so many places throughout the course of those eight hours it’s hard to keep all of the facts straight.  We stopped by a UN Hospital and were told there was no more room—check the Israel Hospital.  But no one knew where the Israeli Hospital was.  Somebody said their might be room at General Hospital, but somebody else told us it was horrific scene there—practically just a morgue.

We were short on gas—the whole town was—but we kept following as many leads as we could.  We stopped at a compound near the airport called Sunapi.  I’m not sure what exactly Sunapi was.  But inside it’s gates were multiple clinic operations, food, and water.  It also appeared to be the base for several of the rescue and aid teams.  A mob had formed outside of its gates and as we tried to drive our makeshift ambulance through the entrance, young men began piling on top of our truck.  We made it through with the aid of several UN soldiers, and once past the gates attempted to find a place where our patients could get care.

Waiting.  So much waiting.  Hurry up and wait.  We parked our truck near a group of exhausted Dominican rescue workers while Doug ran off to get us in and out of trouble three times with officers from four different countries. And we waited.

While we were waiting a white Jeep pulled up beside us with a small family—a father, mother, grandmother, and child.  The child’s foot was wildly bandaged—bulbous and white with tape and cloth.  He was reclining in the back seat.  Ben spoke with the mother as she explained that something had fallen on his foot during the quake and it appeared to be infected.  Ben told her we would do our best to help her find medical care for the boy.  After that, Ben went to look for Doug.

I poured some cups of water from the jug we had purified, and slowly tipped the cup to the boy’s mouth.  Someone had given me sweet crackers, so I ripped open the packaging and handed a few to him.  He looked up at me with curious but trusting eyes.  I lifted my camera, he gave, and I received.

After some time, Doug reappeared.  “Where’s Ben?!” he bellowed.  I wasn’t sure.  “I found a place that will take them.  Follow me.”  Doug cut off through the compound and I instructed the driver to follow the big loud Canadian.  As we drove through the crowded road that led back toward the front of Sunapi, our vehicle got lost in a sea of buses, cars, ambulances, UN vehicles, and people.  I turned around and saw that the white Jeep with the boy in it was not behind us.  I got out of the car and ran back to where we had been, but the Jeep was nowhere to be found.

We reached a medical tent near the entrance and Doug was enraged.  “Where is Ben?  We have to stick together!”  I told Doug I would run and get him immediately while Doug attempted to find care for the three women and girl.  I ran back through the throngs of people to attempt to find the Jeep and the boy.  I checked every white SUV, but couldn’t find him.  Finally I saw Ben walking toward me.

“Ben!” I grabbed him, “The boy! I can’t find him!”  We were one in thought.  We ran through Sunapi frantically until we finally found the white Jeep.  The facts are fuzzy, but if I remember it correctly the following is what took place:  the boy was now lying on the ground amidst a group of badly injured people.  Authoritatively, Ben grabbed a couple of nurses and brought them to the attention of the young boy.  The boy was probably eight years old.  His parents hovered over him helplessly, seemingly paralyzed to do anything for their son.

The nurses unwrapped the gauze and tape and revealed a foot that had been deeply severed from his toe straight back towards his heal.  The gash was massive and left the smaller, severed portion separated and his bones visible.  Having been untreated for days, it was a mess of tissue and oozing with puss.  The de-bandaging had already put the boy in convulsions of agonizing pain and now the nurses needed to give him a shot—straight to the bone—I  assume to ease the pain.

With his parents hovering over us, and a desperate man nearby grabbing at us for attention, we strapped on gloves and I set down my camera—after snapping a quick shot of the whole scene.  My head was getting heavy.  I don’t handle blood well.  But I focused my attention and gritted my teethe.  The nurses were exhausted and were unable to keep the boy still so they could administer the shot.  So Ben looked at me assertively and said, “Grab his upper body with all your might.”

In Creole, Ben began coercing the boy to be still, an impossible task.  He was, fatherly, stern.  “Hold still, if you ever want to walk again!”

“I don’t want to walk again!!” The boy screamed.

“If you ever want to play football again.”

“I hate football!”

“If you ever want to run!”

“I HATE RUNNING!!”

At this point the boy was grabbing my neck, pulling at my bandana and slapping at my face.  Staring up at me with near-hatred in his eyes as if I was the source of the pain in his foot. I wrapped by arms around the boys upper half, bracing my arms parallel to his torso, lowering my chest over him to try and brace him.  Ben continued urging him to be still and holding his lower half.  Finally we had him still for a moment and nurse quickly stuck the needle deep into his severed foot.

The boy arched his back and bent his head backwards and his screams of pain turned into a silent wheeze.  Tears were pouring down his face and a pool of urine expanded outward from under him, soaking the cardboard under him, as well as my arms and sleeves.

After what seemed like an eternity, the nurse pulled the syringe out of the boys foot and he collapsed onto the cardboard and his wheezing transitioned into exhausted whimpers.  My muscles relaxed.  Ben and I stood.  I had a lump in my throat.  I pulled off my gloves and tossed them to the ground.  I walked away and rinsed my arms off in a puddle of water that had formed from a broken water line nearby.

The location in Sunapi where the boy had received the shot was essentially a holding area.  A pile of cardboard had become bedding for a group of desperate patient overflow.  So Ben lifted the boy from the spot on the ground.  We were now intrinsically tied to that boy, Ben and I.  For Ben’s part, he had a son the same age back in States.  And we both felt a deep sense of responsibility for him.  So we ploughed our way through the crowds of people, weaving our way through a mish-mash of vehicles, towards a medical tent where Doug was impatiently waiting.  All the while I ran ahead of Ben to clear a path for the boy and for his foot that was sticking straight into the air, dripping with fluids.

The boy was given priority and disappeared into the bowels of a dark and smelling tent of injured people.  Meanwhile, Doug informed us that our patients, who were still waiting, exhausted and in pain, in the back of our truck, were not going to be admitted at Sunapi.  Mission failed.  Piling back into the car and exiting the compound I felt numb.  And the rest of the day played out like a blur.  Everyone had different information.  I was in communication with other photographers, aid workers and documentarians from the States.  Texting madly, we tried to find the best place to go for medical care with the limited amount of gas remaining in our tank.

As quickly as Doug was able to get himself into trouble, I must admit he had an uncanny way of emerging heroic in certain situations.  A mile or so down the road from Sunapi we stopped at the UN headquarters.  Doug climbed out of the truck and we all waited, afraid of what kind of problems he might be getting us into.  Minutes later he emerged and waved towards a UN vehicle, instructing us to follow him.  And for the next ten minutes we had a UN escort vehicle that lead us through busy, crowded, panic-ridden Port au Prince to the Brazillian UN a few miles away, right through the gates.

However, they, too, informed us that they had no more capacity for patients.  The excruciating heat of the sun was beginning to bake us.  We resolved to try General Hospital, at last, when the engine wouldn’t turn over.  We were completely out of gas.

Everyone climbed out—all but Ben’s mother who had been waiting patiently inside the truck this entire time—and we pushed the truck outside of the inner gate of the UN, off to the side of the road, and our driver walked off with a gas can.

More waiting.

Outside of the gate of the UN there was a small crowd of starving people spread out in the shade near the wall.  They had been told that at 2 PM they would be allowed in and given food.  While we waited for our driver to return, we chatted with a group of street kids—orphans—gave them some water, and tried to explain (feeling like quite the silly Americans) that we didn’t have any money we could give them.

I took some photos of the boys I met there.  One of which—though it isn’t a very clear photo—struck me as particularly poignant.  A young boy in a baggy t-shirt, a boy with an energetic and humorous extroversion typical of kids that are used to hustling in the streets, had wandered off toward a UN tank about a hundred yards away.  The tank was piled with UN soldiers who were staring down at him.  The part of Port au Prince that we were in was desert-like, dry, flat, and at that moment, very windy.  The boy stood in the center of the road looking up at the soldiers with his arms outstretched, the hot breeze flapping at his baggy shirt.  Though the picture I took is from pretty far away, the image it burned in my memory is vivid.  Pleading and vulnerable, small and desperate, arms wide open in surrender against the might of the world, and yet he will sleep in the street tonight and possibly, eventually, starve.

After about a half an hour of waiting in the sun, Doug, whose health was troubling him, disappeared into the UN compound.  After another half an hour, he re-emerged with an ambulance.  Additionally, Doug himself had been given some medical attention, including a vaccination, and he now had a bag of water bottles, masks, and pills.

After a long day of trying to find care for four desperate Haitians, we finally watched as they were loaded into an ambulance and carried away into the UN compound to receive much-needed medical attention.  Shortly thereafter our driver returned with a canister of gas and we headed out for a grim tour of the city to see if there was anything else we could do before sundown.

For roughly two hours before dusk, we drove through the piled ruins of Haiti’s capital.  We stopped here and there to ask if people needed help.  I took pictures whenever I could.  Ziz-zagging through the dusy streets of the city, my t-shirt-bandana pulled up tight over my mouth and nose, we bore witness to the a crumbled piece of civilization—a city laid to waste.

Bodies had been pulled from rubble and covered with blankets, and many  were still buried under cinder blocks.  The smell of death that resulted filled the air, which was already thick with dust that just never seemed to settle.  With Doug and Ben in the cab with Ben’s mother’s, I sat facing forward on the back tailgate with my two Haitian friends.  I photographed the destruction from my seat in the truck, and sometimes just closed my eyes and let the dust, smells, heat, and wind hit my face.  I wanted to touch and smell the destruction around me—to allow myself to be covered in the dust of these people’s homes.  It felt almost baptizing, the filthier I became.

At one point we passed a yellow tour bus that was arriving in the city from Santo Domingo.  It was filled with doctors, aid workers, and journalists who were just arriving on the site of the destroyed city.  I watched as some of them took pictures and others just stared.  “Just wait,” I wanted to tell them.  “Just wait.  You’ll see.”  A man ran up to the bus, beating his chest.  Ben translated what he was saying.  He’d lost his family—everything—and was pleading in desperation for help.  It was an awful thing to witness.  The man ran alongside the bus, waving his arms frantically, crying out.

In the course of our drive through the city back to Ben’s mother’s house, we saw a food storehouse that had been destroyed—and workers trying to salvage the sheet metal from it’s walls and roof.  Ben informed me the building had been a central distribution center that fed all of Haiti.

As the sun was setting, our truck and crew bounced it’s way down the rocky dirt roads that led back to home base.  Once there, Doug collapsed into a snoring slumber, while Ben and I sat back, taking a sigh of relief for rest, recalling the day’s events, and consuming a delicious Haitian meal thanks to Ben’s mother.

For the majority of my trip to Haiti I was contented to eat Clif bars.  But I was able, on a couple of occasions, to have a full meal.  And under the circumstances was always humbled and grateful.  With all of those that were starving around me, it was hard to imagine how I had stumbled into such luxury: home-cooked food made with the love of a mother, a comfortable mat and blanket to sleep on in the enclosed, walled safety of Ben’s mother’s courtyard.

The night was peaceful.  We all gathered around Ben’s computer to view the photos from the day, and after a bucket shower, I stayed up late exchanging stories and laughter with Ben, Doug, and Ben’s cousin under flashlight.  The light of Ben’s mother’s lantern bounced around the walls of the house as she bustled around us, busying herself with duties of hospitality.

That night it became clear to me how much Ben was revered in his community.  The young men we had traveled with hung on his words and watched him with respect and near awe.  The stars were explosive that night, and I snapped some photos of them before heading to my mat for another deep nights rest—my last decent night’s sleep of my trip, and last night sleeping at Ben’s house.