Bolton: Work and worry take a toll on relief effort in Haiti

This is the second of two columns from Haiti

Day 3

Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Last night I had a wrestling match with my tent. The tent won. As I was trying to fall asleep, I began to get irritated with the way one side was sagging down over my face. Trying not to be loud or wake up my neighbors, I fiddled with the pegs, the ropes and the poles, to see if I could fix it. But this only made it worse.

After several minutes of finagling, it finally collapsed completely. Eventually, I jerry-rigged it in place and managed to fall asleep, despite the cargo planes roaring all night over my little camp at the end of the airport runway.

In the morning, observing my fellow aid workers, I am noticing that exhaustion is beginning to set in. No one has had a good night’s rest in a while and everyone is overworking. In one meeting, the representative from the government’s Ministry of Education fell asleep – undoubtedly stretched to his limits by the extent of the crisis.

On the U.N. logistics base there is nowhere comfortable to sit. Vacant chairs are few and far between, and most coordination meetings happen with everyone sitting on the stony ground. I’m beginning to get bruises.

But despite the discomfort, our conditions are nothing compared to that of those living outside the U.N. base’s perimeter fence.

This afternoon, I rented a motorcycle taxi to move around the city. As we roared through the streets of Port-au-Prince, I was struck by the level of devastation and disruption. The city is checkered with makeshift camps, some orderly, with neat rows of white tents and others more disorganized and ad hoc, with shelters cobbled together from sticks, boxes, pallets, tarps and garbage bags. Everyone’s situation is precarious.

Even if my circumstances here are rugged, I have access to decent food, have money and can fly out at any time. Most of the people here in the earthquake-affected areas are not so lucky. I feel uncomfortable with my privilege and recognize I have done nothing special to deserve the accident of birth that put me where I am in life, rather than in the ruins of an earthquake-destroyed house in Haiti.

Day 4

Today I visited one of the schools Outreach International has supported for many years in Petionville, a Port-au-Prince suburb. Once a three-story building, it has now completely pancaked, the pile of rubble only just reaches over my head. Several children were killed in the collapse.

This is the second of two columns from Haiti

Day 3

Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Last night I had a wrestling match with my tent. The tent won. As I was trying to fall asleep, I began to get irritated with the way one side was sagging down over my face. Trying not to be loud or wake up my neighbors, I fiddled with the pegs, the ropes and the poles, to see if I could fix it. But this only made it worse.

After several minutes of finagling, it finally collapsed completely. Eventually, I jerry-rigged it in place and managed to fall asleep, despite the cargo planes roaring all night over my little camp at the end of the airport runway.

In the morning, observing my fellow aid workers, I am noticing that exhaustion is beginning to set in. No one has had a good night’s rest in a while and everyone is overworking. In one meeting, the representative from the government’s Ministry of Education fell asleep – undoubtedly stretched to his limits by the extent of the crisis.

On the U.N. logistics base there is nowhere comfortable to sit. Vacant chairs are few and far between, and most coordination meetings happen with everyone sitting on the stony ground. I’m beginning to get bruises.

But despite the discomfort, our conditions are nothing compared to that of those living outside the U.N. base’s perimeter fence.

This afternoon, I rented a motorcycle taxi to move around the city. As we roared through the streets of Port-au-Prince, I was struck by the level of devastation and disruption. The city is checkered with makeshift camps, some orderly, with neat rows of white tents and others more disorganized and ad hoc, with shelters cobbled together from sticks, boxes, pallets, tarps and garbage bags. Everyone’s situation is precarious.

Even if my circumstances here are rugged, I have access to decent food, have money and can fly out at any time. Most of the people here in the earthquake-affected areas are not so lucky. I feel uncomfortable with my privilege and recognize I have done nothing special to deserve the accident of birth that put me where I am in life, rather than in the ruins of an earthquake-destroyed house in Haiti.

Day 4

Today I visited one of the schools Outreach International has supported for many years in Petionville, a Port-au-Prince suburb. Once a three-story building, it has now completely pancaked, the pile of rubble only just reaches over my head. Several children were killed in the collapse.

Amongst the rubble, I could see twisted desks and chairs, a filing cabinet still with files in it. A single exercise book, with a child’s drawing of a heart fluttered in the breeze. It was sobering to see this place of learning utterly devastated.

In my broken mix of French and English, I spoke with a man on the site who was helping to clear away some of the rubble. He had lost his house and everything in it, though he was grateful that his family had survived. “Haiti is finished,” he told me with a shake of his head.

We began to walk around the surrounding community and spoke with some of the people we met. We saw the remains of a church, which had completely collapsed on a full congregation of mourners at a funeral. A mall lay in ruins, reportedly having killed some 100 people.

We met one man who was using his car as a changing room. He had lost his sister-in-law and his nephew. On the wall of the house by his car someone had marked the following epitaph:

“Adieu Babou cherie (Goodbye Babou my darling)

Au revoir Sherlyne (Goodbye Sherlyne)

Nous t’aimons (We love you)

Que Dieu vous benice (May God bless you.)”

As we left to go home, we gave a ride to some of the people who had been working to clear the schoolyard. We dropped them off at a variety of makeshift camps around the city.

As one man got out of the car, I wished him “Bon nuit (Good night).” He laughed and replied, “Bon nuit mais sans sommiel! (Good night but without sleep!)” People are afraid to sleep at night, afraid of the aftershocks, afraid of crime, traumatized by the earthquake.

To have the option of sleeping at night seems to me to be one of those human rights which is so basic we rarely think about it. When whole cities, whole regions of a country are so disrupted that a “good night” is a laughable notion, we as fellow human beings have an obligation to help.