Haiti Earthquake

I’ve been having really bad problems connecting to the internet out here which is why I didn’t update yesterday. I had an assignment for the Sunday Telegraph which should be published tomorrow. Off to downtown Port-au-Prince today to cover the looting and violence which I’ve been told has got far worse over the past two days…

TO BE HONEST, I’m not really sure what to write today. I had a commission yesterday for a British newspaper, so my whole day was tied up at the UN compound at the airport. More on that when it’s published. But that’s not the reason I’m stumped for words. After spending the morning photographing another UN food drop at a refugee camp, this afternoon I was sent to photograph one of the largest of the mass graves that has been created to bury some of Haiti’s estimated 200,000 dead. We asked our driver if he knew where Titanyen was. Of course he did. The town holds a special significance for Haitians as one of the most feared places in the country. During the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s the area around the village was the dumping ground of “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s political opposition. Haitian mothers warn their naughty children that they’ll be “sent to Titanyen” if they do not behave.
Before we headed there I did some research on Titanyen’s location. I needn’t have bothered. I’d anticipated the smell but nothing could have prepared me for it. With a surgical mask underneath a tight bandana covering my nose and mouth, the stench of the mass graves alerted me to their presence with a knockout jolt. However, whatever protection I’d used to mitigate the effects of the smell offered absolutely no protection to my eyes. I was absolutely stunned. I’ve seen and photographed dead bodies before, but never bodies dumped, piled high, and left to rot in the blazing hot Caribbean sun. The smell left me retching a few times and not for the first time on this trip I entered a daze – my thoughts racing too fast trying to make sense of the situation.
Suffice to say, I didn’t eat dinner tonight. I had joked with the friend I made on the flight from Philadelphia to Santa Domingo that I’d save a couple of the miniature bottles of rum they were handing out in case I really needed it. Tonight I drank them.

THE SLUMS of Canape Vert Mountain were virtually flattered during the Jan. 12th 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Already one of the most deprived areas of the city, concern has now shifted to the residents of these areas who are left with nothing.

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ONCE I’d filed all my pictures from the morning food run with the UN a colleague and I hired a driver for the afternoon. We wanted to head to the downtown area of Port-au-Prince, notoriously dangerous before the earthquake with drugs, rape and murder common, and presumably even worse now. It was amongst the worst hit areas of the city with wide scale devastation. Almost every other building was collapsed and the area was all but abandoned to its own devices with security practically non-existent.  Survivors desperately searched through the collapsed remains for anything they could salvage and were elated with anything they found – even just a couple of bottles of shampoo. Small groups of Haitian police tried to stop people looting, or salvaging, depending on how you look at it, but their battled was in vain against such large numbers. Our drivers were incredibly nervous, and kept reminding us that it was not a safe area of town to be in, particularly with very little protection. Every time somebody spoke to us they stepped in to make sure everything was OK – we definitely learned that their concern for a couple of Western journalists was genuine.
After a couple of hours, US paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne started to enter the area to try to secure it. Their presence was largely welcomed with Haitians greeting the Americans as their “saviors”. Signs and graffiti across the area proclaimed that the French help was not needed, the US are their saviors – a bitter testimony to Haiti’s colonial past.
An overwhelming stench of decaying bodies plagued everywhere we went, and unlike what you’d image the smell was sweet, not to be confused with the stink of human excrement in the gutters.

5:53AM and I was awake in my tent after my first night in Port-au-Prince. It was first light and the assortment of various media and aid workers were all slowly stirring. I met up with a colleague of mine to check email and work out what we were doing for the day. We ended up sharing a car with a reporter and photographer from The Times of London, and headed to the UN Compound at the airport. From there we managed to organize joining a UN World Food Programme convoy that was heading into the Champ de Mars area of Port-au-Prince to deliver two trucks full of rice. As we headed into the city, more and more people started running alongside the convoy – men, women and children all desperate for food. By the time we arrived at our distribution location the crowd had swelled to thousands of people – between us we guesstimated around 5-6000 people were clamoring to pick up a sack of rice.
We were told this was the largest food distribution the UN had carried out so far, and yet tragically they only had enough to allow women, children and the elderly past the UN barricade to collect rice – many thousands went without. This led to chaotic scenes and near riots ensured. The Brazilian UN soldiers responded by spraying the crowd with tear gas and I myself copped it three times leading my eyes, throat and neck to burn – I coughed and felt like vomiting. It was absolute madness and in the heat of the moment a young Haitian man turned and looked at me. With both our eyes streaming and coughing our guts up he shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and fist-pumped me. It was a very strange feeling, a connection in the middle of chaos and desperation. Shortly after I photographed the lucky few who received food and then we headed back to our base with the Times team to wire our pictures.

AFTER a sleepless night in Santa Domingo I awoke and met my new friends from Food for Hunger for breakfast. I’d tried, unsuccessfully, to get us on a World Vision flight into Haiti, and they’d tried, equally unsuccessfully, to get us onto a UN flight. Their local man on the ground, Jose, advised us that the best route was via bus. He dropped us at the bus station and we queued for around two hours for tickets. We departed at 11:30am local time for an eight hour journey to Port-au-Prince, the largest city devastated in the Haiti earthquake. We made it to the border at Jumani in good time, on a bus full of returning Haitians, media and a large group of Americans who’d flown out to try and do some good. At the border we were held for over an hour as they very slowly processed the stream of vehicles heading into Haiti. Once we were in, the roads changed dramatically, we twisted and turned through the coastal roads and up into the mountains on unpaved roads, crawling along at a snail’s pace. The people in these outer areas were going about their regular business – watering cattle, collecting crops etc but as we drew closer to the capitol city we started to spot buildings that had ‘pancaked’ or collapsed during the earthquake. More and more tent settlements sprung up along the route until we arrived in the city in darkness and could still make out people searching through the rubble of collapsed buildings, desperately searching for survivors two weeks after the tragedy. I’d arrived in Port-au-Prince.

The journey started with a 6:50am departure from Burbank Airport in Los Angeles into Phoenix, Arizona. I then switched planes for one heading to Philadelphia and at this point I started recognizing a few travelers as aid workers and media – all sporting a scruffy face and tan combat pants that seem to be de rigueur in these circles. I felt quietly pleased that I’d packed mine. Once in Philadelphia and boarding the plane to Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic the nerves really started to set in. Here I was, without even a place to stay in the DR overnight, heading to Haiti on a wing and a prayer.
My conscience panged as I took my seat in first class. All of my fellow travelers in first appeared to be aid workers – I couldn’t help but wonder if it was money well spent by their charities. I paid for my upgrade out of my own pocket, perhaps they had too.
By sheer good fortune the gentleman I was sat next to asked if I minded switching seats so that he could sit next to his friend and as I was traveling alone I duly obliged and took my new seat next to David, an NGO working for Food for Hunger. We ended up chatting for most of the flight, and shared a few rum and cokes to ease the anxiety we were both feeling. David was being picked up at the airport and very kindly offered me a ride with two of the local guys working for his charity. We breezed through customs and immigration in Santa Domingo with a few cursory glances and mutterings of ‘Haiti’ and then David was met by Jose and Marciella from Food for Hunger. They agreed to give me a ride to the hotel Tropicana where the rest of their group were staying for the night. After getting a room in what can only be described as a very basic motel for $50 per night, I tried unsuccessfully to connect to the wireless internet and resigned myself to getting some sleep after a long day. I brushed my teeth, making sure to use bottled water to clean the toothbrush, set my knife and mace by my bed, bolted the door and headed off to dream of what lay ahead tomorrow.