Feeling the aftershocks of the 7.0 Earthquake in Port-au-Prince Haiti
By Lauren Hashiguchi
Photo courtesy of Lauren Hashiguchi
This past summer, I spent time working in laboratories and communities around Haiti. I was on Twitter and noticed that Haiti had a spike in tweets so I clicked on a link. I found out that two hours ago Port-au-Prince had been hit by a 7.0 earthquake. I spent a lot of time in Port-au-Prince, and am now left in my apartment thousands of miles away, imagining the utter disaster that even a small earthquake could render in a country with such little infrastructure. In Port there are hardly any road or traffic signs, shacks line the ocean and scale up the mountains, and I am sure the large buildings have ever been evaluated for structural integrity. As I write this, there still aren’t pictures or a lot of information online because its too recent, but I heard the national palace collapsed, and if the government-funded palace didn’t withstand the shock, I hardly want to venture towards thinking about how the people living in the smaller, poor buildings fared. A world away, I am trying to hope for the best, all while imagining the worst.
I remember spending hours sitting at a pick up point in Port, waiting for our ride to pick our team up to go to another work site. Of course, our communication was nonexistant, so our driver never came. We sat sweating in the sun, trying to talk with some of the Haitians who were lingering nearby, interested in why our group had chosen such a strange place to rest. Eventually, an American couple offered to take us to the orphanage they ran. They were already in the area picking up a women who was adopting three of their children, and it was no problem for six more people. So, we piled in the back of a dilapidated delivery truck among bushels of medical supplies and food. Together we bounced around in the darkness, listening to the sounds and smelling the city, imaging what we were driving past. After a while the truck stopped and we ventured out of the back of the truck to find ourselves in an orphanage with hundreds of children, all living under the care of an American couple. Among those children were over twenty disabled children, who the couple rescued from around the city. (In Haiti people are wary of disability because of vodoo, so many disabled children are abandoned in pits shortly after birth.) We spent the entire day there playing with the children. I met a twelve year old who was going to be adopted to my hometown, Portland, so I spent most of my afternoon telling her about all the places she could go with her new family. The children there were so loving of one other and of us, foreigners who came to them lost and weary.
Thousands of miles from a country filled with a resilient people and international aid workers, all I can do is remember the people who came into my life while I was in Haiti and pray for them.
As someone planning to enter a career of international health aid, I suppose this feeling now is something I should learn to anticipate. As college students, many of us are entering developing nations to serve the poor and along the way, we make human connections around the world. Now we begin to understand how strongly our friendships bind us to the lives of those living in poverty thousands of miles away.
www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/12/haiti.earthquake/index.html
