Haiti Day Nine: The Silent City

My first radio dispatch from Haiti hit the airwaves today on World Vision Report. Senegal offers to resettle Haitians in the land of their African ancestors. An intriguing thought, but many in Port-au-Prince aren’t ready to abandon ship just yet. Listen above. There’s also a slideshow, and an audio postcard of a church forced into the street.

The second day of mourning was a quiet one. Except for the near-constant sound of street preachers with shouts of hallelujah and songs of praise, the city was eerily silent today. People are really taking this mourning period seriously. Even the informal job sector was dormant. As if Haitians think President Préval will personally come and find them if they lift a finger during these three days.

I walked down a rocky road in the hills, where nearly every house had either collapsed or simply fallen off the cliff into the depths below. One man was digging a hole in the rubble where his family was killed on the first floor. The three-story building was pancaked so that you could see all three floors squashed to within six feet of each other. He was looking for important documents. Like searching for a needle in a haystack, only ten times harder.

That said, another man down the road showed me his friend’s damaged birth certificate that he somehow found in the pile that was her home. Of 14 people in the house, she’s the only one for which a birth certificate is still of any use. Everyone else died.

What’s left of the Haitian government is trying to convince people to move back into their homes. But that’s just for the ones who are only afraid. In neighborhoods like this one, people have no home to which they can return. Some have started building more permanent shelters with wood and sheet metal in the camps of Port-au-Prince. They’ll surely be living there for a very long time. And judging by the wretched condition of some of the camps right now, that’s not a problem anyone wants to have on their hands.