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Saturday, August 7, 2010
My alarm went off at what my brother would refer to as "Oh Dark Thirty," better known to the uninitiated as 4:30 AM. I threw on my clothes, did some more wrestling with my luggage, and made it to the lobby in time for the 5 AM shuttle to the airport. I met Amelia, my translator, and we wrestled with our luggage some more. I put my suitcase on a scale in a closed check-in lane and discovered it was overweight by a couple of pounds. There was no way my backpack could hold any more, so Amelia had to find nonexistent space for a handful of books.
As we stood in line, I noticed that there were generally two groups of people represented: people of Haitian extraction going home or to visit family, and relief volunteers. The latter were easy to spot. First of all, they (or should I say we) were, on the whole, white. Second of all, there were large groups of people wearing matching t-shirts that said things like, "God's messengers in Haiti."
Once we were on board the plane, I was sitting near a man who used to own a construction company, now is a full time missionary, and was going to put roofs on houses. He chatted with the other person in our row about why some buildings survived the earthquake while others right next to them did not. He said that often concrete had been mixed with dirt and improperly reinforced to save money. The buildings that survived had been built to what we would consider "code," but most of the buildings in Haiti had not.
As we landed in Port-Au-Prince I was struck by two things. The first was that, unlike what I am used to seeing in US cities, the buildings are not in neat rows or lined up along obvious streets. From the air, it looks like someone took a handful of Monopoly houses and just plunked them down without arranging them. There clearly was very little planning involved in building the city. The second was that, even from the sky, you can tell there are incredible numbers of tents. These are visible because a large percentage of them are bright blue -- a standard color for tarps -- and they are literally everywhere. After we got our luggage, went through customs and battled the various people eager to help us with our luggage for a small -- or not so small -- fee, we met a friend of Amelia's family and a friend of his. They were, for gas money and a small additional amount, to drive us to Léogâne.
As we pulled out into the city streets, I was immediately struck by two things you see everywhere: piles of rubble and tent cities. There are now fewer collapsed buildings than there were because the big pieces have started to be hauled away, but in their place there are still large piles of cement and bent rebar, sometimes blocking the street. There are also still a decent number of broken buildings, and it's easy, driving by, to forget that there were people in those buildings when that happened. It doesn't seem possible. Worse yet, we passed partially collapsed buildings where people were obviously still living in them.
You will note that I did not say that one of the things you see a lot of is construction. In fact, in the several hours we spent in Port-Au-Prince, I saw one single site with a lone construction vehicle on it.
The tent cities are rows and rows of tarps held up with poles. The tarps say things like "Buddhist Global Relief" and "US AID: From the American People." The latter made me think, "Really? Is that all we sent?" Along the edges of the tent cities, small businesses have cropped up. People were selling produce, providing banking and hawking used clothing. Seven months after the quake, they are making the best of what is becoming a permanent situation. There were places it was hard to know what was earthquake damage and what were poverty conditions that existed before the earthquake. Was this road in decent shape before
