Here's us at the airport:
I took him to a house up in the mountains above the city where people on my team go to take a break from the crowded streets of Port. After I showed him around and we started eating the tasty (greasy) fried street food we had picked up, he said, "okay, I'm not waiting any longer to hear the end of the story from your blog. What happened next?"
First of all, I'm sorry that I wrote the first two parts of this story back in January and February and am only just now getting the next part out there. Second, I imagine that some people who know me and have read this blog are much more interested in what's happening in Haiti right now, considering that it's not in the news much anymore. But I'll try to sum up what I told my brother up there in Kenscoff.
For me, the story of those first couple of days is closely tied together with the story of J and R who miraculously survived the collapse of their 5-story apartment building. When I saw them on the back of B's motorcycle, I could hardly believe it. Even though I would have spent all night looking for them, I couldn't imagine how anyone could survive that fall. B told me that their next door neighbor, an American woman, was at a hospital down the street with M, and that her back was probably broken. They were lying in the yard with a few hundred other people, the hospital staff long since overwhelmed. B told me I should go check on another hospital that was closer to downtown to see if they could get her admitted there.
So I got back on the motorcycle and headed down that way. I got to Champs de Mars, the huge public space where the palace is located. It was already filling up with people. Before turning the corner to swing by the other hospital, I thought I should check and see if it's true what I had heard about the palace. From my memory, it was actually fairly intact at that point, and for the first couple of seconds I thought that its collapse may have been only a rumor. But once I saw the minaret-type rooftops on the left and right sides slumping towards the front lawn, I realized that it was just a matter of time until it would be demolished.
Today Champs de Mars looks like a refugee camp that's been there for years. The palace continues to decompose slowly. It appears to have had a few truckloads of rubble hauled away from the front of it, but otherwise it remains a poignant national symbol of What the Hell Do We Do Next?
I turned around and drove back up the hill towards the CDTI hospital that would hopefully at the very least have a few beds set up out in the yard where we could get J and R's neighbor set up with a neck brace or something. A block before I arrived at the hospital, I looked to my right and saw the Sacred Heart cathedral. The face of it had dissolved into a slope of bricks, coming up around the ankles of the life-size sculpture of Jesus on the cross which was perched on the corner of the front of the lot. This was another jolting moment, and I thought about the wedding I'd been to there back in 2007 which I wrote about here.
I wanted to be further along than this, but my battery is almost dead and it's probably best to just publish this and keep writing more later. My calendar program is now set to remind me each week to write on the blog, so I don't intend to leave this story hanging for much longer.
