Haiti Reflections: Day 1 - March 15

Shelagh dropped me off at Port Columbus and I left cold and rainy Ohio early in the morning, headed for Miami where I would meet up with a large part of the team.

Juliet Geiger, my professional counterpart from Pennsylvania and the one who suckered me into this trip*, did two things very important to this phase of the mission.  First, she kept everybody up-to-date with her blog (http://chantalhaitimission.wordpress.com/).  Second, she created a document with everybody's picture, flight number/time and contact information so that we would know each other when we got together.  It worked well and about ten or eleven of us met and started to get acquainted prior to boarding.  We would all become very familiar with each other in the next 24-36 hours.  Dr. Sarah John gave us a short briefing on what to expect when we got there.  *OK, so she didn't sucker me.  She's not that type.  She said she was going and asked if any other state trauma coordinators wanted to go, to which I said yes.  I'm very, very glad she asked.

I was a little nervous before leaving home because I was going on this trip without really knowing anybody.  Juliet and I had some professional interactions but we had no previous social contact.  I'm an experienced international traveller but I was going into this one on more faith than I normally put into my planning.  (But now that I type that, I realize that 'faith' and 'planning' are pretty much mutually exclusive concepts.  Deities, karma, kismet, luck and other similar constructs are all notably absent from the Emergency Management Agency's disaster plans.)

The flight was on a Boeing 767 that was filled to capacity but had very few Haitians.  I sat next to and had a pleasant conversation with a man named Bob Cox from Minneapolis who was going down to build a church and a school with his church group.

When we arrived in PAP (that's Port-au-Prince, but I'm too lazy to keep typing it out.  Get used to it.) and it was exactly what Sarah had told us in our briefing: a third-world airport.  There is one runway, no taxi strip (see picture).  That, for the uninitiated, means that when you land, you stop, turn around and then taxi on the runway to get to the terminal.  This also means that no other planes can land until you are out of the way.  (It works the same ponderous way on take off, too.)  It must have been a logistics headache of the first magnitude during early phases of the earthquake disaster relief.

The terminal was of reasonable construction with rather dull painting and non-existent decor, air conditioned and surprisingly orderly...up to the immigration desk.  But once we had our passports checked and stepped past the desk, it was a baggage claim free-for-all.  Baggage claim wasn't dangerous or scary...there was just no order and no sense of direction.  Nobody was even certain that the baggage coming out was from our flight or another.  It may well have been from multiple flights as there was only one conveyor.  It probably took us 45 minutes to an hour just to get everything gathered up and get the group reassembled.

Then it got worse.

When we stepped outside the building, there were many, many people there to help us with our bags.  They were the equivalent of Skycaps and all were uniformed but apparently earn their living through tips.  They all spoke English and they were extremely persistent in letting us know that we needed help, specifically their help, with our bags.  It was an unfortunately long distance from the terminal exit to the parking area.  Father Yves Francois, who met us at the terminal, managed to hustle us to the waiting buses with what was, in retrospect, a minimum of hassle with the Skycaps.  It was stressful for most of us at the time because we had no idea of how long the badgering was going to last.

Our bags were loaded on one bus, we were put on another and we departed for Chantal.  Through PAP. During rush hour.  It took us two hours just to get outside the PAP metro area.

It has been 15 months since the earthquake - one of the worst ever in terms of lives lost.  The devastation is still evident in the rubble of the collapsed buildings.  The National Palace is in the same condition and posture now as it was immediately after the quake (I saw it but wasn't able to get a picture so here's one I found on Flickr).  Tent cities are everywhere and are enormous rabbit warrens of disaster relief shelter tents and makeshift tarp tents.  But remarkably, PAP is recovering.  Despite having crap for infrastructure before the earthquake and losing a significant chunk of that in the earthquake, progress is being made.  Buildings are being torn down (there were some big buildings that still looked perilous, but not as many as I expected) and the main roads and sidewalks are passable.  The trade off for this progress was putting all available garbage removal resources into rubble removal.  It was apparently a conscious decision of the Haitian government to do it this way.  As a result, the garbage accumulates in the gutter or in a few Dumpsters and is occasionally burned (more on that particular fragrance in a later post).  Having been in those streets and seeing the state of the buildings over a year later, I can't say I blame them, my inner public health wonk notwithstanding.

According to Google Maps, the trip from PAP to Chantal is 216 kilometers, about 134 miles:


View Larger Map

Google Maps also says it takes a hair over 3 hours to get there.  But Google Maps doesn't take unpaved roads into consideration.  Or three rivers with no bridges that need to be forded.  Or carnivals taking place during Lent in villages on the main road.  Our trip was closer to eight hours.

When we arrived in Chantal, we stowed our gear, got shown to our quarters and hit the sheets at 0130 on March 16.

Haiti reflections, intro

I've now been back from Haiti for five days.  I was back to work for two of those.  But my head and my heart are still in Chantal.

It was an incredible experience.  We saw an extraordinary number of people - over 8,000 - who had no other access to basic medical care.  The people, both the Haitians and the rest of the team, were amazing.

I kept a diary on my trip but I can't really do justice to the trip by simply transcribing it here.  I was so tired at the end of each day that I only recorded events, not what I thought and felt.  I'll try to get those down here on the site.