Haiti first impression

I’ve been in Haiti for about 2 weeks now. I don’t really know because time becomes meaningless in a place like this. I haven’t updated the blog because I’ve just been too busy or tired but due to circumstances unforeseen I now have some time to catch up on things. Joe, who owns the local bar, has been plying me with cold beer this afternoon and it has settled nicely into my brain, like a tonic for this teeming humidity. So I’ll write, hiding in the shade in front of a coconut tree, with a pleasant buzz inside my head an annoying one (the bloody flies) on the outside.

You can describe Haiti much like the ingredients of a cake. You need a layer of apocalyptic catastrophe, a good part of failed-state/controlled-chaos and a base of underlying poverty to form the main ingredients. Spread through it like chocolate chips are things like the generous, patient perseverance of the Haitian women, the wide eyed enthusiasm and endurance of Haitian children, and the general ambivalence, laziness and aversion to labour of Haitian males of working age. This is set amid a Caribbean paradise of distant hazy hills, palm and coconut trees, humid sun drenched days and tropical beaches lined with coral reefs, where you can buy bottles of rum and cold beer on Sunday after a week of demolishing fatally damaged houses, sweating in the equatorial sun.

Haiti is beyond anything the vast majority of us will have any ability to reference with our normal lives so you will need a vivid imagination for the next few paragraphs while I describe the place. If you lack a vivid imagination I suppose not understanding this blog is probably the least of your problems!

I flew in from Miami via San Juan, in a twin engine Vietnam era prop plane at about 250 knots. Flying over the country in this fashion affords you an amazing view of the jagged mountains splitting the island that forms Haiti on the West and Dominican Republic on the East. The view is so good because the plane can’t fly above 18,000 feet which is less than half as high as a jet airliner.

As you descend into Port au Prince you can see the formations of tents near the airport that foretell of the devastation on the ground. For those of you who have played Sim City, especially early versions of the game, it actually looks like a city after a disaster, when all the tiles are rubble, so in that respect the developers of that game deserve some real credit. The Haitian lady next to me looked like a busty US citizen with a white suit, fake nails and big permed hair, but tears were streaming down her face as we flew over the ruined capital of her country. Personally I was just fired up to be going somewhere a bit edgier than a suit job in a skyscraper.

The plane circled in over the single runway airport and I noticed a river that had had it’s course changed by the earthquake, a brown stain on a green land, one branch dried and cracked, the other forming a swampy impasse as the water worked out the most efficient new route to the sea. It was full of garbage. I got closer view of a sight that was to become commonplace in the next couple of days: a smashed cinder block building, roofless with jagged, fallen walls, with a derelict old Mack dump truck parked out the front. In the space behind the building tents were set up accommodating the inhabitants of the ruins. There were United Nations semi-trailers and armoured personnel carriers parked in rows and four US Army Blackhawk helicopters spinning up as glided in.

We landed and I got through a thoroughly lacklustre examination by customs before walking into the sunlight to discover that Hands On Disaster Response had forgotten I was coming and didn’t send me a driver to Leogane, which is two hours away from the airport. I don’t speak a word of Creole and having come from Central America immediately assumed that all the men offering assistance at the exit to the airport where trying to rob me, or rip me off. If you’re a Latin male, I’m sure you understand what I mean…unless you’re in denial!

As an aside, if you are a drug dealer, peadophile, murderer or any type of criminal on a wanted list and don’t mind (massively) sacrificing your living standards for freedom from investigation I suggest you migrate to Haiti.

The earthquake that rocked the country in January crushed the soul of a society already staggering with corruption, poverty and a lack of infrastructure, rule of law, and hope. This is the first time I have volunteered for anything (other than surf life saving in Australia but that was mainly so I could row surf boats www.asrl.com.au look it up it‘s excellent). People I’ve spoken to who have been to Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and a variety of other places say conditions in Haiti are worse. I got a taxi with a guy called Joa from PaP to Leogane (30kms and two hours away) and by the end of the drive we were in a state emotional flatline. Neither of us were upset as such but we had ran out of reactions to the destruction and squalor we saw around us. You end up staring out the window as your senses are overwhelmed by glare from the relentless burning sun, thick swirling grey dust, plumes of black exhaust smoke, the roar of truck and bus engines and their horns, mountains of rubble, mounds of garbage lining the streets, youths washing in filthy water pooled in the gutter, dogs, chickens, goats and humans climbing on and sifting through piles of wreckage, hawkers selling everything from fried green banana’s to genuine “Rey Bans” in chaotic traffic composed of rusting, bashed cars and trucks driving though dirt, gravel or cracked roads, traversing blocks of a city that has been utterly pulverised. If you have ever seen footage of the Allied bombing of German cities at the end of WWII you will understand the streetscape, but there are more people here.

It really hit me when I saw the national palace, a once majestic white building in a colonial style, the seat of Haitian parliament and the centre of national government, cracked and crumbling, the dome collapsed onto its supports and split in half. It made me think of how I would feel if something did that to Parliament House in Australia. I am not particularly patriotic but politicians and parliament house represents who we are and to see it turned to dust would be traumatic. The block that held the judicial district just isn’t there anymore and the fact that Haiti lost half of all its government employees including half it’s judges and parliament, means that a nation already struggling with problems beyond the comprehension of us in the West, has been decapitated as well as decimated.

I do not believe conditions could be any worse in this country unless they were actively shooting at each other or they were starving to death.

I don’t want anyone to think this is a bleeding heart sob story write up on Haiti. If you care you’ll do something about it, if not then hopefully you’ll at least find the story an interesting one. Personally I wasn’t entirely overwhelmed with concern about the plight of the Haitian people but also rather excited about the chance I had to experience something out of the ordinary, so I admit my motivations for coming here were somewhat selfish. It gets interesting for me because of the work I have been doing here and the people I have met.

Hands On Disaster Response is an organisation based in Boston. They were formed during the response to the tsunami in Indonesia. The basic role of the organisation is to remove destroyed or damaged houses and to facilitate the rebuilding of homes so that people can move into buildings again, from the tents they have been living in since the earthquake.

What this involves in practise is getting a sledgehammer and demolishing houses that are still standing but too dangerous to live in, especially with the risk of aftershocks. You reinforce the beams with wooden supports, then stand on the roof and blow it out, leaving the beams. Next you weaken or remove the walls which are usually for partition purposes only and not structural, then fault the remaining columns, and pull the house over with a hand winch, or “come along”. Once the house is in pieces on the ground another team comes in breaks it up further and carts the mess out into the street where teams of government employees pick up the rocks, by hand, and throw them into dump trucks. We work from 7.30am to 11.30, have lunch for two hours and work again from 1.30pm to 4.30 pm. This doesn’t sound so hard but in practise I don’t think I’ve worked so hard in my life.

Haitians are deeply traumatised by the earthquake because it killed between one quarter and half a million of them, out of a population of about 10m people. This means most of them live in tents next to buildings that look otherwise intact, so they don’t get crushed by any further tremors that occur.

Port au Prince is the most chaotic, dirty, polluted, loud, hot, oppressive environment I’ve been in and I’m glad the site of the HODR project is in Leogane. About 90% of the buildings here in Leogane are either wrecked or slated for demolition but the city only had 90,000 inhabitants and as such the problems seem a lot more manageable here.

I joined a rubble clearing team on my first half day, and got pulled of it in the afternoon to help on a demolition. The guy running it was a hairy American guy called Bear and he wouldn’t look or speak to me so I didn’t look or speak to anyone and just did as I was told. That meant standing on a roof in 110 degree (Fahrenheit) heat hitting the 8 inches of concrete I was standing on with an 8 pound sledgehammer, for 4 hours. That afternoon I drank 5 litres of water. The next day I went back with the demolition team and we swung away at the roof till it was down. By 8am the sun is searing and it’s impossible to keep a shirt on because even if you want the sun protection the sweat makes it chafe your skin. The sun, while hot, isn’t as harsh as it is in Australia so it’s easy to prevent burning if you use plenty of cream. Bear left today with his girlfriend, Katie, to go back to New York and in the intervening two weeks we became great mates. He led the demo team and always got houses down fast and safely.

The thing about coming to Haiti is that you can’t have any illusions about the amount of good you are doing. You certainly aren’t saving the country and a lot of people will resent the fact you are there just because they think you’re getting paid to do the work! So you tell yourself that possibly you are making life a tiny bit easier for a small number of people, for a little while. If you’re happy with that, you can get on with making friends with some fantastic, interesting young people, mostly between 24 and 34 years of age.

I didn’t say much at all the first week I was here because I got the impression I was getting sized up by people who wondered how long it would take until I cracked. I suppose you could say I look fit and strong, which meant they were waiting for me to fail because it really is fucking hot here and the work is debilitating. It’s not unusual for five or ten people to drop from dehydration and heat exhaustion in a day. At any rate it turns out I can work reasonably hard when I have to and became great friends with the people I was working on demolition with first.

By and large the people her are from the USA, a few Canadians, with one or two other Aussies, a Scot and maybe some other nationalities. By and large they have been some of the most interesting, hard working, hard partying, intelligent and committed people I’ve ever met. Sledging a roof in the hot sun for no payment other than a meal (of dubious quality) at knock off time is a test of character but the people on the team always put in 100%, and often more, hence the handy location of the hospital next to our base. I’ll admit that breaking concrete is a pretty satisfying way to spend your day, and I’d say that any guy who claims to be too sophisticated to enjoy something as mundane as swinging a sledgehammer, is probably just too weak and soft to actually do it properly!

The base itself is in a derelict concrete building, two levels high around a central, tennis court sized open area, with no roof. There are bunks on the ground floor undercover but I set my tent up on cinder blocks, on level two. The use of bricks is to prevent flooding when it rains, which, unusually, it hasn‘t done since I got here. People tie their tents to columns of concrete sticking up out of the roof with rebar spiking out the top (rebar is the metal wire that reinforces concrete). From a distance it looks like rows of small skyscrapers with their tops smashed off and their windows blown out, like the remnants of a bombing campaign over Sydney or New York. Cast your eyes further down and the tents make it look like a small colourful slum. The heat is stifling, there is never any wind, always an abundance of mosquitos, an increasing number of flies and you have to pour a bucket of water into the toilets to get them to flush. When you get cut, no matter how small, it gets red, angry and infected (like an Irish backpacker!) and takes weeks to heal. The food is monotonously predictable (rice, beans, onions, chicken and fish head soup if we’re unlucky) but apart from the fish head soup (which is just a rancid as it sounds) it always tastes delicious. There is no seasoning like hunger! You shower in a stall with a bucket of water and a scooper to ladle the water onto yourself with. The water is cold from the tank on the roof but you wouldn’t want a warm shower anyway.

When the sun rises at 6am the temperature in the tent ($32 from Walmart you beauty) rises about 10 Celsius straight away so you have no option but to get out of bed. I’ve been getting two beer hangovers, I suppose from not being properly hydrated and sweating so much at night. Another clue to this is the fact that I didn’t urinate for the first week I was here, I suppose because everything I drank just disappeared out of my sweat glands. Maybe I was lucky not to end up in hospital too! I actually sleep directly on the cinder bricks adjacent to my air mattress most nights, because they are a bit cooler than the soft bed. And I’ve been sleeping like a baby! Sleeping on concrete is mundane now and doesn’t phase me at all. I’m fortunate in that the mozzies here aren’t huge fans of mine-some of the girls do it really tough, and look like they’ve got chicken pox every morning form being bitten so much.. I reckon being hairy makes it harder for the bugs to get to your skin although I’m keeping that to myself in case the girls all stop shaving. Horrible concept.

Anyway breakfast is oats or a (flyblown, from a garbage bag) breadroll with peanut butter out of a 5 gallon tub. If you want milk you put milk powder on the oats and add (room temperature) water. It’s important to force something down or you’ll pass out before lunch. Breakfast is the worst meal of the day, the other two are generally very satisfying.

The base is an alcohol free zone so it’s fortunate that right next to it is Joe’s Bar. You can buy any beer you want as long as it’s a Prestige or a Guinness. Down the road is a chap who sells beer out of a large esky, next to a latrine pit that funnels into the drainage ditch on the side of the road. There really is nothing more satisfying than sinking an icy cold one at Guttermans, drenched in sweat, filthy with dirt and concrete dust and aching from head to toe, chatting to your mates about the day, sitting on a rock next to a pool of polluted, septic water. Marypec (Gutternmans real name) likes us because we demolished his house for him and carted the mess away. The bar is at a t-junction in the road and conversation is accompanied by the growl of motorcycles and trucks, exhaust fumes and dust. The free market came to our rescue when Marypec’s daughter started cooking what I will expansively call sausages on a second hand, plastic coated shower rack. I have no idea what is in those tubular sections of pale meat or what the carcinogenic effects of the plastic being cooked with the snags is, but she puts just the right amount of tomato and chilli sauce on them, and at 5pm in the sun, I don’t care (or want to know!) what they’re composed of! At night you can go to bed around 10pm but you can’t sleep till about midnight due to the heat. You always know the time though. At about 11pm the dogs start barking, within 20 minutes every time. What is really happening is a pack of six or ten males are stalking a female and once they’ve cornered her in a back alley or against a rubble pile, they fight amongst themselves to see who gets to spend some romantic time with her. Dogs get stuck together after they shag, and they don’t know what is going on and look really embarrassed until they can separate their asses from each other and run away. I got a great photo of two dogs sheepishly avoiding eye contact, standing back to back on a crowded road in PaP, but can’t upload it due to bandwidth problems. I suppose we're lucky the same thing doesn’t happen to humans as well. Anyway at 2.30 or so the stupid turkeys start cockadoodledooing. Or is it chickens that do that. Whatever animal it is that’s responsible, I will eat it one day. I have actually had dreams about sniping them through a night vision site form the roof of the HODR building.

I found out that a 330 pound American ex NFL lineman is better at sledging concrete than a skinny surfboat rower from Australia. “O” came with his mate Scott form Dallas Texas and the two are the most unlikely pair of mates I’ve seen. O is a massive, African American force of nature whose predatory looks bely his humility and intelligence. His mate Scott is a skinny white businessman who, as I was to go on to discover, is about the most generous person I’ve met. Anyway working with O made me realise that these 8 pound hammers just aren’t big enough so yesterday I went to PaP and got a 10 pounder.