Port-au-Prince

I just spent the last two days in PAP. I thought after all the media pictures and visuals that it wouldn't be shocking. I was wrong.

Five minutes after arriving in PAP, I wanted to go back to Jacmel. Like any other large city, PAP is loud (maddeningly so), dirty, colourful, and, as a Haitian city, poor. PAP was not exactly a picturesque city before the quake, one can quickly tell. But now, it is just awful. Walking anywhere you have to dodge dirty water running in the street, piles of garbage left to rot, and now, mounds of rubble and debris. Not to mention long lineups of people, waiting for food or water. Another long lineup outside the Canadian Embassy, no doubt people who have been going there day after day, hoping to get visas to leave.

The night that we arrived, I met a journalist at our hotel who had recently been to a camp just an hour outside of PAP. Apparently, the 5000 people at this camp had been sent there because of the "no space" in PAP. But no one has seen them since. They live in a field with no trees (ie. no shade from the brutal Haitian sun) in tattered tents with no access to food, water or medication. Mothers are feeding their kids paint chips mixed with dirt; mothers cannot produce milk for breastfeeding because they are so dehydrated. Unsurprisingly, the kids are suffering from diarrhea. I sent a couple of emails to people I knew and the journalist managed to get an organization (I won't say whose....apparently it's top secret, so I won't blow the whistle, but it's someone famous!) to send a mobile clinic there. This same organization is providing the medical clinic for a camp of 70 000 people. Seventy THOUSAND. I spoke with the people who supply the meds for this large camp, and hopefully they will be able to do the same for the smaller one.

It's been 2 months since the earthquake. And still no one has seen them at this smaller camp. As inconceivable as this may seem, I can believe it. You cannot drive more than 2 minutes without happening upon another camp. Some are organized on large fields with big tents and these seem like paradise next to most I saw. Camps have sprung up in every nook and cranny in PAP. In parks. Near garbage dumps. On the median on the highway leading out of PAP. This last was possibly the most startling. Little kids washing on the street as cars and trucks zoom by in and out of PAP. Deaths waiting to happen.

The worst thing about these camps is the tents. Most people here seem to have missed out on the tent distribution, so that instead of strong, wind-resistant tents tethered to the ground, people are living under sheets stretched across poles of wood, with more sheets making up their walls. The sheets come loose easily in the wind, and most already have big gaping holes in them. With the rainy season coming soon, you can be sure that many of these people will not make it through.

I spent yesterday going around PAP, first accompanying some new friends on a quick meds drop-off to a local hospital (the story here is a good one....the surgeon here has nothing to do, which means most acute people in the area have been seen), and then going to check out their warehouse of meds (also a nice sight to see it almost empty, which means their large container of donations has been mostly distributed). Their driver, a UN driver who drives the Clinton Foundation delegates (and Clinton himself) around, took me through PAP for the rest of the afternoon. What can I say about this drive? I cried.

We drove through Cite Soleil, an area once known for it's violent crimes and general anarchy (we still took precaution to lock the doors here), and here I saw the real slums of PAP. Piles and piles of houses made out of corrugated tin, with crowds everywhere, obviously the poorest of the poor, with fallen buildings all around. this area mostly evokes a feeling of wanting to get out of there. Our next destination made me want to go back. We left Cite SOleil to drive through the main street of downtown PAP, the area most badly hit. Left and right, everywhere you look, buildings flattened to the ground, rubble spilling out onto the street, sometimes blocking most of the way through. Some building have been cleaned up, which is heartening to see (some recovery/rebuilding in place), but most are not. The ones that are not....you know there are bodies still trapped there. Electrical wires are dangling everywhere. Vendors are back on the street, selling their wares, ignoring (or maybe inured to) the devastation around them. Apparently they came back onto the streets within days of the quake - they needed to make their living. Most of these vendors are not educated. Apparently, when the quake struck, many didn't understand what was happening and they ran INTO buildings. Multi-story buildings. They died, unnecessarily. The driver told me that he walked this street in the days after. Bodies everywhere, a leg here, a hand there.

We drove by some hills or ravines where houses were built, steeply, one just above the other. People were warned not to live here because of the loose soil, but they were poor and had nowhere else to build before the quake. PAP is a congested city but that is where the work is. They couldn't afford to build outside of the city because they don't own cars. When the quake struck, houses slid down the ravine, one on top of the other. An avalanche of houses.

We drove by the presidential palace, also badly damaged and no longer in use. The president, Rene Preval, is not well-regarded here, not least of why because of his reaction after the earthquake; instead of stepping up and reassuring his people, he lamented his loss and told the people that his situation is just as bad as theirs. When Haitian citizens planned a demonstration to protest the scarcity and price of food, instead of doing something about their plight, he told them he was hungry too and would join in their march. He lives in a large mansion near where I stayed.

My driver described where he was when the quake struck. He had just left the main UN compound and was driving to another. He left the first compound at 4:50pm. The quake struck at 4:53pm. That main UN compound was destroyed, killing most within. He had just entered the second compound when he felt the steering wheel veer increasingly strongly. He realized it was an earthquake, and opened his car door, keeping one hand and leg inside the car, in case he needed to make a quick getaway by car, and one leg on the ground in case he needed to run. When the quake was over, he started calling his family to make sure everyone was ok, and then the ground started shaking again. And again. Every few minutes. He said every time it started again, people would scream. It sounded like the entire country was wailing in unison.

On our way out of PAP we drove through Leogane, the epicentre of the quake. This city is destroyed. If PAP was essentially leveled, then Leogane has essentially disappeared.

Perhaps the way the driver put it explains it best: "After the 36 seconds of the earthquake, I stepped out of my car, and my entire country had changed. After 36 seconds". He shook his head and we drove on.