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.
