Samaritanism in Haiti – The Earthquake Response
August 8, 2010
Paul Burnore
July 3, 2010: I wake up at 5am as the sun begins to brighten the sky. I look up thru the mosquito netting in the top of my small tent. The air is heavy and it’s already 85F. The single sheet I sleep on top of is damp from night-time sweat. I wear only a pair of shorts – no pajamas, no undies, no shirt – and I feel as cool as I will all day long until the same time tomorrow morning.
Two nights ago there was a tropical storm, really a torrent which lasted 45 minutes and flooded my tent and everybody else’s. My 1-inch pad and single sheet were thoroughly wet. My pillow, which was a pillow case stuffed with clothes, was soaked throughout. The floor of the tent had about a quarter inch of water. I crawled in, wet anyway, and slept until morning, when I pulled everything outside and hung it on lines to dry.
I stand up outside my tent on the second floor roof, an unfinished slab of raw concrete with concrete columns and rebar sticking up, looking like a war zone. About 50 other tents are squeezed in on this slab, but I am the first up.
And I think about why I’m here with the organization called Hands On Disaster Response, doing physical labor every day in the 120 F heat, to help some Haitian people I don’t even know.
I am not a Samaritan – I didn’t happen upon this disaster in the midst of my daily business and spontaneously respond like the Good Samaritan in the bible parable. I heard about it on the news and chose to come here. I am simply a Volunteer with some time. Maybe I’ll be a Samaritan some day. Maybe I’m a Samaritan wannabe.
Haiti is only a one hour 20 minute flight from Florida, but the differences couldn’t be greater. A few weeks ago Haiti looked as if the quake had just happened. 98% of the rubble from the quake remains uncleared and thousands of bodies remain in the rubble. 1.6 million people remain in relief camps made of tents and tarps – I saw tent camps everywhere I travelled, in dusty fields, up mountain slopes, even in the narrow strips in the middle of highways and in the center of traffic circles. Most of the camps have no electricity, running water, or sewage disposal, and the tents are beginning to fall apart. The UN provides police services with Sri Lankan troops, but crime in the camps is widespread. These conditions exist in spite of massive aid. Enough international aid had already been raised to give each displaced family a check for $37,000.
An accounting of where all of the aid has gone is impossible. Much is still unspent. If you travel up the mountains just west of Port-au-Prince, as I did, you’d see hundreds of mansions perched on cliff sides alongside terraced planting fields, overlooking the devastation in the capital. Many of these mansions belong to middle men who profit from foreign aid. Timothy Schwartz, in his book, Travesty in Haiti, actually visited hospitals, schools and orphanages in remote parts of Haiti before the earthquake. They had received hefty donations and aid but he found that not a single orphan was being cared for in any orphanage and not a single sick person was being cared for in hospitals receiving donations and aid. No one before had ever checked.
It is a culture of corruption and greed, and it has been that way for quite awhile. Haiti is what’s called a “failed state” – it has a dysfunctional government, a ruined ecology and a collapsed economy. The government claims it can’t clean debris up or resettle the homeless because it must prepare for the hurricane season.
June 30, 7am: we are in our base camp loading equipment for our various projects into small pickup trucks – all of them are overloaded with wheel barrows, sledge hammers, shovels, water containers and up to 16 volunteers. Our 4 rickety trucks make numerous runs to get our 140 volunteers out to 12 projects in the Leogane area. This place was the epicenter of the earthquake.
The volunteers have come from all over the world. Half of them are under 25 – many are students between semesters, many had just graduated or dropped out, a few are new PhDs working before their first academic job, a few are disaster junkies who go from working one disaster after another because it’s exciting – and it comes with accommodations and board. And that’s okay with me, because it counts.
There are dozens of 30-50 year old professionals who have taken time from their jobs, usually their vacation time, to contribute to this effort. At 62 I am the third oldest volunteer. The oldest is 71, a retired Penn State professor and returned Peace Corps Volunteer. The next oldest is 65, a lawyer and HODR board member.
July 8, 1pm: We arrive at an elementary school which collapsed, a rubble site like a war zone – concrete pillars and rusted rebar sticking out everywhere, in every direction. As we swing sledge hammers and load wheelbarrows with concrete rubble all day, we find things – diaries, notebooks with accounting figures, dolls, VHS tapes, clothes. Fortunately we find no bodies. But we all know, when sledging an entire second floor concrete slab which had collapsed onto the first floor, that we can find anything.
We dump the rubble along the roads in enormous piles. It takes 12 -14 people around 10-14 days to clear one site, which could be a house or an elementary school. But after us they are ready for rebuilding – and we contact our fellow NGOs, like Habitat, who are ready to work a cleared site.
July 6: For the school re-building, we have completed the trusses and frames at our base. Our logistics manager has spoken to the local UN commander who is giving us a flatbed truck to transport our material. We have full UN military support – god bless the Sri Lankans and their blue berets and machine guns – we safely transport in several trips all our pre-fab work.
When we arrive at the school building site, young kids run out to help carry our boards and saws and hammers and buckets of nails to the foundation. The local minister, who is always the school principal, keeps our compressor next to his bed inside his 2-room hut, but he sleeps outside on the lumber pile we leave so thieves won’t take it.
The minister’s wife makes our lunch – beans and rice. After we wring out our socks and put them in the sun to dry, we lay down in the shade to rest. But the local teenage boys come and want to arm wrestle the “blancs.” They don’t care about winning, they are genuinely delighted to be with us and laugh with us.
The large island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic was discovered by Columbus in 1492, was called Hispaniola and was soon operated as a slave staging area. Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic in 1804 but struggled with foreign intervention and dictatorship for the next 200 years. The Duvalier dictatorships starting in the 1950s ended with the democratic election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in December 1990. Aristide was a populist Roman Catholic priest who won 67% of the vote in elections largely deemed free and fair. Haiti is 90% catholic and 100% voodoo. But Aristide was ousted twice in spite of the help of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Haiti was failing as a state long before Jan 12, 2010, when a 7.0 earthquake leveled the capital.
July 7, 4pm: We stop work, load our trucks and return for our 5pm dinner of beans and rice with tomato sauce and onions. Beans and rice again. Every day in fact. Dinner is served in two big iron pots under a tent covering outside. One bowl, one spoon, one helping per person. After dinner I wash my sweat-soaked shorts and socks and bandana, and take a bucket shower of warm water before the daily 6pm group meeting. I hang my wash on the line to dry and put on yesterday’s shorts. For a short time, maybe 15 minutes, I wear a dry, relatively clean pair of shorts.
July 9, 6:00 pm: Every day, HODR holds a group meeting in the large rhinoceros tent just outside our concrete walls. Each project leader describes his or her team’s accomplishments of the day: demolition, sledging & rubbling, school building, compost toilet installations, disaster readiness training, hospital and orphanage work, interviewing locals for the next projects. Most vivid to me are the hospital and orphanage reports. Maria stands up. She is a licensed nurse and hospital team leader and she always reports in a loud, confident voice. “It was a good day today.” She says. “We had 4 volunteers and they were terrific. We received new medicines and got them labeled and stored properly. Only 2 babies died – and an old man. But we saved another old man who had journeyed 3 days to get here, saved a woman’s leg before gangrene set in, delivered 3 underweight babies, put six malnourished infants on a nutrition program and administered medication to a dozen or so older people suffering with malaria. We did some good.” She does a fist pump, she laughs and jokes, she acknowledges the applause and then sits down and quietly cries. This happens every day.
July 12, 7pm: It’s dark and we have 3 hours before the generator is turned off at 10pm, officially quiet time. Some of us walk through the dirt streets of the collapsed town with no electricity to see which shop keepers have candles and which have chest freezers sitting on the edge of the dirt road, run by small generators, with cool drinks or beer inside.
The HODR executive director is David Campbell, who created the organization in 1994 in response to the Indonesian tsunami. He and Marc Young, the International Project Director, lived in camp, in tents, and ate beans and rice along with the rest of us. I spent several evenings talking with David and Marc. This was a shoe-string organization and, because of my past experience, David asked me what could be improved. I had several specific suggestions and we talked past lights out. I ended up creating a list of Safety Procedures for each of the project leaders, posters with Emergency Procedures for volunteers, and later sent a template for an Evacuation Plan should a hurricane or earthquake or fire strike.
I’ve found that smaller, leaner, focused organizations like HODR and UUSC and even Habitat do the most effective jobs because they are right there doing the work and know how donations are actually used.
So back to why am I here?
Okay, I love the adventure of living and traveling in Haiti, although that is only part of it.
Being in Haiti put me more closely in touch with reality, in some way, than my comfortable life in Atlanta. Perhaps it’s that life is reduced to the basics of survival, food and water, closer to elemental human needs, to life and death – with the veneer of our entertainment-saturated culture removed.
In living closely with more reasons for despair than I’d ever seen, I was exhilarated. Because work here has a deep, direct, immediate, real effect on people standing in front of you. You see it. You arm-wrestle with it during lunch breaks.
I’m here also because this work affirms the most important UU principles:
· the inherent worth and dignity of every person
· respect for the interdependent web of all existence
· compassion in human relations.
I’m here because spirituality to me is, largely, Connectedness – and working here feels very connected, connected to people in dire need, connected to the basics of life and death, and connected to the principles I believe in.
We cannot solve the Haiti crisis – or perhaps any real crisis that comes with human existence. But that shouldn’t stop us. Maybe the massive scope of the Haitian crisis makes it unsolvable. That we can’t help everyone should not stop us from demonstrating compassion to a few people where we can.
What we should strive for is to do a few things well. Doing a few right things well can make a huge difference and help us avoid the sense of futility we may feel in the face of such a crisis. Such actions connect us more closely to life – through compassion and being a neighbor in the sense that Jesus intended. We can be Donors, Volunteers, Samaritans – we can be compassionate Unitarians to people beaten down on the side of the road – no matter where they live.
I think that Paul Farmer, who seems to me the ultimate Samaritan, would agree with me.
May it be so.