Generosity, outrage, misery, courage and dare we say –“racism”

An intense sense of outrage, I’m told, has arisen in Haiti. Imagine yourself wandering the streets of Port-au-Prince after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake. Your home and all possessions are gone, some family members were killed, others you can’t find though you’ve looked for days. You’ve never before seen so much activity at the nearby airport, so many planes from many countries waiting their turn to land on one of the four runways. You get hungrier and hungrier and oh, so thirsty as the days go by. Yet no one comes around with any kind of aid. You assume those many, many planes are bringing in food and water and medical supplies, and you have to wonder where that’s going. You and the thousands around you, weak and hungry with no place to go, many severely wounded, have not seen one bottle of water or even a Band-Aid. You feel abandoned and desperate.

Working alongside other survivors, you’ve dug with your bare hands for hours in search of people still trapped in the rubble, scared to death in the effort you’ll get trapped yourself. Sometimes you come across someone and sometimes they’re alive. You cannot wash their wounds or slake their thirst or offer a morsel of food.

You’ve helped make tents from bedsheets and rags, you’ve comforted injured as best you could without being able to assure them help is on the way, you’ve held children in your arms who cannot understand, who long for mama and papa. You’ve helped bury dozens of bodies, you’ve slumped to the pavement after nightfall, hoping you’ll sleep a little to face another day. The unbearable stench grows worse by the hour.

Then, a full week after the earthquake hit, you see U.S. military vehicles coming down the street toward you. Your heart leaps for joy and you run to receive a share of the bounty. The soldiers are not carrying water. Or bread. Or medicines. Decked out in full battle gear and helmets, they’re carrying GUNS! Dozens and dozens of soldiers and they’re carrying guns. Zipping past you as though you weren’t even there.

You can’t know at least one U.S. helicopter carrying relief supplies to another location, did not land to facilitate distribution, but only dropped the bundles and rushed away. Your devastated Haitian brothers shouted after them, “We are not dogs! Don’t throw food at us and run away. We are not dogs!”

Meantime, hundreds of doctors and other medical personnel have been tenaciously treating the injured in all still-useable health centers and setting up additional makeshift hospitals. They have run out of medical supplies while planeloads of needed supplies are being turned away to give priority to military personnel with their guns. The United States is in charge of Haiti’s airport.

Doctors Without Borders, denied clearance for landing in Port-au-Prince, diverted their planes to the Dominican Republic and transported the goods into Haiti by truck, adding three days to delivery time.

Dr. Evan Lyon, a surgeon with Partners in Health, reports that in just 24 hours a group of doctors transformed a large empty room into a surgical theater and that 1,000 people are triaged and ready for emergency surgery but the doctors have no pain medication, no medical supplies, and few surgical instruments. “Some of the doctors have gone to hardware stores to buy hacksaws to use for amputations.” Some are substituting vodka for anesthetics.

Dr. Lyon also spoke of operating by flashlight, no electricity yet, and nightly searching the neighborhood for victims until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. “The military is only concerned about security,” he said. “But there’s no insecurity here. You can hear a pin drop in this city. It’s a peaceful place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that’s ongoing.”

Then there’s Margaret Trost and the What If? Foundation. The first day since the earthquake that the children’s feeding program was to start up again, Trost sent us this news:

Dear Friends,

This morning I was stunned to learn that there was another earthquake in Port-au-Prince. It registered 6.1 on the Richter scale. “The shaking was so hard,” Lavarice, our program liaison said when we spoke briefly by phone this afternoon. “Everyone is traumatized by the last week and terrified to go into any building.” The cooks at St. Clare’s, who were on their way to the rectory to prepare today’s meal when this morning’s earthquake struck, did not feel safe to enter the building. With gas stoves cemented into the ground, there’s no way to move them outdoors and no way to guarantee safety indoors right now with all the aftershocks. (There have been over 40 aftershocks in the last week.)

Unable to cook rice in the kitchens, the food program staff instead focused on distributing the water and canned food (beans, sardines, corn) that has been trucked in from the Dominican Republic.

Lavarice told me that hundreds of people were served. Lavarice continues to coordinate deliveries and is also working on setting up satellite food distribution locations in other neighborhoods. It’s hard to believe that no relief from the Port-au-Prince airport has arrived in the area to supplement what we’ve been able to do.

Partners in Health: pih.org    What If?: whatiffoundation.org