By Erik Parker
[Originally published in VIBE magazine April/May, 2010]

OH MY GOD! Are you alright?!” It’s the morning after the earthquake and my wife answers the phone. She’s frantic. In the twelve hours since the quake hit, she’s heard nothing from me. I’ve been trying to get a call out every 20 minutes or so, but this is the first time my phone has rung. I search for words.

“Yeah,” I tell my wife. “I’m alright.”

“I found out you were alive from Twitter,” she says, not bothering to clear the

frog from her throat at this ungodly 4 a.m. hour.

“Huh?”

“Do you know a man named Richard Morse? He was tweeting from the Hotel

Oloffson and he told me that the photographer you were with said you were

okay. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Really, I am.”

“Oh my God, I’m so glad to hear from you. Where are you?”

“I am with Vladimir in Carrefour. We walked here last night after the quake. It

felt like forever.”

“What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to walk back to Port-au-Prince in a little bit. I’ll call you later

when I get better reception.

“But are you okay?”

“I’m okay. I promise.”

Despite my reassurance, nothing is settled in Haiti. The ground rumbles at irregular intervals. Cries of Jezi! [“Jesus!”] cap off each tremor, while people sleep on the ground in open spaces out of fear of falling buildings.

With the threat of another quake looming, a new group shuffles into the yard where I’ve holed up with Vladimir Laguerre, my Haitian guide. The latest arrivals are bursting with whispers and nervous energy. Words are exchanged in Creole. Gasps emanate from a dark corner, and the voices speak quickly, with fervor.

Vladimir emerges from the huddle with a slow gait, looking off into the night. “These people who just came,” he says, as he sits down beside me, “they came from the area near water.” He breathes deeply. “They say the water is rising near the ports. I don’t know how true it is.” He pauses as if to process what he has just said. “This has never happened to Haiti before.”

A veteran Haitian journalist, Vladimir, 34, has been working as my translator and driver. His career as a TV sports broadcaster was stunted after he ran into a burning building to rescue three children. He pushed the final child out the door before the whole place erupted, leaving him with burns over 40 percent of his body. His disfigured hands have only limited motion and his ability to walk long distances is impaired. Vladimir is no stranger to horrific stories, but he furrows his brow at the news of a potential tsunami, ruffling his usually calm demeanor. “I don’t know how true it is,” he repeats, shaking his head slowly, “but this is what they are saying.”

Vladimir was here in 2008, when tropical storms and hurricanes flooded Haiti, swallowing large swaths of the country, drowning most of the crops, damaging more than 100,000 homes and killing nearly 800 people. Malnutrition and disease continued to claim lives over the following months. Vladimir need not mention this recent history. The memory swims in the minds of everyone here.

I lie back down and strain my eyes in the dark, searching for an escape route in case the water makes a move onto land. A two-story building looks like the only possibility, yet I can envision the water splashing through the window and swallowing the structure. With no tall trees or high mountain roads in sight, my mind maps out the quickest path to the building’s roof. The exercise does little to make me feel secure.

I place my head on the concrete, unable to sleep. My mind races, recalling the decimated buildings, the mangled bodies and the quake itself. I flash back to the one-woman triage we encountered when we first arrived in Carrefour after the quake. She was sewing up a lady who had several wide gashes streaming down her arm, exposing what appeared to be bone and muscle. The victim’s husband, a large dark figure, held up a bag full of clear fluid that dripped into an IV tube. She laid on a blanket spread out on the side of a dirt road. Cars and motorcycles rolled by, kicking up dust near the wound as they passed.

Vladimir and I took turns holding a light on the operation while using our free hands to shoo away flies and pour the reddish-brown iodine solution the nurse gave us to clean the wound. Whenever I grew restless and moved slightly, the nurse would bark: Limye! Limye! [“Light! Light!”]. With each poke of the blunt needle, the patient cried out as the nurse steadily stitched the wounds, squatting over her patient for hours until the job was done.

As we lay staring at the sky, everyone waited for another tremor, another quake, or even worse—in the name of Murphy’s Law—a tsunami to come sweep away all remaining earthquake survivors. Seeing no reliable escape route, I asked Vladimir if he’s ready to walk back to Port-au-Prince. “Let’s go,” he said before I could finish my question. I collected my camera bag with no time to process what I had experienced and no idea what horror I would soon witness. As Vladimir grabbed his own digital camera, I pulled my shirt over my head and wiped off the pale gray dust kicked up by the quake.

Before we hit the road, the ground vibrates softly. Cries of Jezi! fade in the distance as we walk off.

TWO DAYS BEFORE the quake, Haiti’s pre-Carnival celebration was underway. Haitians of all stripes put their differences aside and individual worries on hold. A live chicken was tossed onto a fire in the middle of a downtown Port-au-Prince intersection. A man who claimed to be a voodoo priest said it was a sacrifice to Erzulie Dantor, the fierce protector of women and children. “She’s a mean black woman,” he told me in English. “You sacrifice the chicken to make her happy. She don’t play around.”

The unlucky fowl flapped its enflamed wings. The more it struggled, the higher the flame grew, digging deep into its feathers until the bird flopped out of the pit and thrashed against the asphalt. It was a brief moment of relative relief for the pitiful bird. But this is Haiti, a country where lucky breaks are often met with deeper, more intense suffering from which no bird nor human is immune. Before the chicken could stamp out its burning wing, a man scooped it from the ground and tossed it back onto the fire.

This cruel lesson of pain, struggle—and then worse pain—is one that the people of Haiti have learned the hard way. Since Haitian slaves won their independence from the French in 1804 with a bloody slave rebellion, the first free Black republic in the Caribbean has suffered a string of false starts and setbacks. Political unrest, epidemics and natural disasters have been compounded by man-made brutality that exacerbates every other ill. Some 78 percent of the population lives on less than $2 per day, resulting in the oft-quoted stat about Haiti being the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

In such an extreme climate, celebrations like Carnival are vital to the national morale. This wild time of pre-Lenten partying allows for camaraderie. As the music blares, the trappings of poverty are wiped away with the blissful sweat of revelers. The chicken’s snap-crackle-and-pop was drowned out by a marching band’s triumphant horns and tambourines as jubilant Haitians chant along.

Daniel Morel, the noted Haitian photographer, chased after the commotion with his camera. We had spent a week together traveling from low-lying Port-au-Prince to the mountainous city of Jacmel investigating Haiti’s restavek condition (or “child slave” system) for my masters thesis at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. In the days before the earthquake, I busied myself tracking down interview subjects: restavek children, their families, politicians and social service workers. It was a dizzying experience.

One restavek child, a pretty 13-year-old girl who hadn’t seen her parents in four years, spoke of abuse and mistreatment. “Other kids can go to school,” she explained. “They have nice clothes. Me? I am dirty and have lots of work to do. And I don’t get to go to school.”

One family in the rural area of La Vallée gave birth to eight kids. When the father fell ill he couldn’t do any work in his garden. The goats and pigs he was raising died. The family couldn’t afford to feed all their children, so they gave away four of them to live with other families in Jacmel and Port-au-Prince. “It doesn’t make me feel good to send my kids to live with someone I don’t know,” the father told me. “I miss them a lot. If I can find a mandarin here and eat it, I think, ‘My kid could be here and we can eat the tangerine together.’”

Researching the story was a heavy undertaking for us all. So when Daniel dashed off into the street amidst the blaring Carnival music, I followed his lead, snapping pictures with my own university-issued camera. Sometimes I tried to document the moment. Other times I got swept up in the sweet vibration of the tuba and the joyful feeling of oneness as we all marched along.

All day and into the night, kids tossed up their hands and marched in short choppy steps.

Girls jump-stopped, pushed their bottoms in the air and gyrated to the pace of the thundering tuba. Wide smiles accompanied the dances as everyone stomped through the streets of Port-au-Prince in a rhythmic trance.

Two days later, the people of Haiti would be confronted with the reality of their precarious circumstances. An earthquake of 7.0 magnitude would turn an already ailing country upside down. The official Carnival celebration would be called off; some band members would be crushed under buildings. No one dancing that night could have fathomed the unsteadiness of the ground beneath their feet or the haunting tremors that refused to let anyone put the horror behind them. Who could have imagined any of it? The National Palace broken. The Ministry of Justice building, the jail, the cathedral, all reduced to rubble. The streets we marched on, littered with dead bodies. And Haiti, heavy with poverty, helpless against the destruction.

All of these things would soon come crashing down on Haiti. But that freewheeling night it was the chicken’s turn to feel the pain. As we made our way through the darkness, one fellow I met—a deportee from Miami—pointed to the crispy chicken, now lying in a lonely lot next to the headquarters of a Haitian band named New York.

“See, now you can write that Haiti is not a poor country,” he said with a smile. “There is so much food on the street and no one even eats it.”

We laugh at the absurdity of his statement. The laughter didn’t last long.

RUNNING THROUGH PORT-AU-PRINCE is the Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, something of a main road known as Grande Rue to the locals. In the midst of this hub of commerce Andre Eugène oversees an art gallery he calls E. Pluri Bus Unum. Tap-Tap [taxi] trucks rumble over the street in ornately painted blues, oranges and bright reds. Likenesses of celebrities—a pensive Wyclef Jean or Chris Brown smiling broadly—find prominent placement amongst the geometric designs. Art is everywhere in Haiti and Eugène and his “Resistance” collective of progressive Haitian artists is keeping the creative spirit alive.

The gallery sits in a dirt lot between homes. There is no roof, just cinderblock walls from which pieces of art hang while sculptures seem to grow from the ground. Human skulls taken from a nearby graveyard are reincarnated as gnarly statues. Truck tires are engraved, stretched and recoiled into mangled masterpieces. An old antifreeze jug contorts into an angry face. Automobile manifolds, fuel cans, a dented hubcap—first-rate junk is transformed into third world art. The pieces are filled with voodoo themes and speak to the paradox that is life in Haiti: There is beauty, there is poverty and there are delicate moments when the two overlap.

I came here with Daniel to buy some art from two young boys who work under Eugène’s tutelage.

I met them on my first day in Haiti. Alex was the cool kid who made sure to put on sunglasses before he posed for a picture. Racine was the taller boy who smiled brightly, laughed a lot and tried, in broken English, to communicate with me. He took care to teach me many Creole words in our first hour of meeting. Mache [“walk”], he said when we took the trip to the gallery at night by foot. He and Alex would laugh at my pronunciation of mwen [“my”]. “Mwaaaain?” I’d ask. Laughter. “Mweeen?” “Mwwwain?” Laughter and more laughter.

When I arrive, unannounced, Alex grabs my attention. I follow as he points out his pieces. “Mine,” Alex says, tapping his chest with an open hand. He points to a cluster of hanging art before ticking off the list of materials in stilted English: “Wood. Tire. Paint. Metal.” A proud hand pounds his chest. “Mine.”

Eugène sits at his table in a small room with a blue sky above, surrounded by gruesome statues stacked higher than the walls. Daniel absent-mindedly snaps a few pictures of him. I put my camera down, with only minutes of battery charge remaining. Before I can take a seat at the table with Daniel and Eugène, a dull roar starts up from outside the walls. At first, it seems to be rising from next door, then it seems to be marching down the streets toward us.

First thought: A train, a train. Wait. A TRAIN in Haiti!?

“Au-Oh!” Eugène yells, then bolts to the door, which slams shut behind him.

The walls begin to wave. Mounds of earth see-saw, rising and falling in turns. The statues dance an angry dance until they dive at me from their posts. I fall to my knees and take cover.

Last thought: Oh shit! This is an earthquake. An EARTHQUAKE in Haiti!

Just like that, the earth steadies itself, for the time being at least. I let out a breath and look over at Daniel who, like me, has been fending off toppling statues. Realizing that we’ve lived through the drama, we do what comes most naturally. We laugh. A gigantic laugh of relief. Unaware of the devastation beyond the walls that enclose us, Daniel and I replay the hilarious image of Eugène bolting to the door. But our laughter is interrupted by sounds of misery rising over the partitions.

I climb a mound of statues and peek over the wall. Down on the street, we see arms raised to the sky. Calls for Jezi can be heard all around. There is singing. There is chanting. There is screaming. There are cries. And then more pleas to Jesus.

Daniel and I push away statues and cut a path to the exit. As soon as we get out, he aims his camera and fires away, frantically capturing the tableau of wreckage along Grand Rue. Having spent a lifetime photographing unimaginable things in Haiti, he runs directly into the madness. I trot to the car, where Vladimir is parked on the side of the road.

“Where is Daniel?!” he asks. “Where is Daniel? We’ve got to go.”

The car parked in front of Vladimir’s is buried under a building that has spilled over onto the street. I walk around looking for Daniel, but I know he’s already gone. Running back to the gallery, I see a lady trying to get out of a building nearby. She’s elderly and heavy. White dust masks her face and blood is smeared over part of her arms. I duck into the building and try to help her along. She falls, slips right from my hands. I help her up and begin walking with her again. It strikes me that there must be many others trapped in buildings. Without a ceiling to fall on us, Daniel and I were fortunate. Many others around us were not.

With all my equipment out of memory or battery power, I start recording the scene with my iPhone. One man continues to polish his shoes in the midst of the ruin, as if his simple fastidious act—carrying on as usual—could restore normalcy to this broken mess. Another stops before me, gestures toward the heavens. He grabs my arm, the one controlling the iPhone, and speaks to me in Creole, wildly, loudly. He forces my hand toward the clouds, gesticulating madly. I don’t understand his words but the message is clear. “Say his name,” he seems to be saying. I oblige him. “Jesus,” I say once. Then again, this time louder. He looks at me with moist eyes. Apparently satisfied with my testifying, he glares at me for a beat before rejoining the mass migrating north.

Some limp by, completely covered in dust, their powder-white arms reaching to the sky like zombies in a B-movie. The injured are carried, or walk along with gaping bloody gashes. One man holds a limp infant in his arms, not sure if he is alive. A few people surround the man and child. Vladimir puts his head to the baby’s mouth to check for breath. “He is breathing, I think,” Vladimir says. The man shakes the baby, whose tiny limbs flail lifelessly. Another pokes a finger into the baby’s face and lifts one eyelid. To everyone’s relief, there is a trace of movement. The child is alive and sleeping soundly while adults in all directions despair.

Before long, we head back to the car to assess our position. “Haiti has never seen this before,” Vladimir says as he leans against his car. This is the second time he’s said this. The cries of Jezi come in waves as people walk north along Grand Rue toward Carrefour.

Vladimir’s bewilderment is understandable. The tectonic plates that lie beneath the Caribbean islands and the North American region have been connected since the 1700s, when the island experienced the last series of major quakes. The Enriquillo-Plantain Gaurden fault line runs from the Dominican Republic through Haiti to Jamaica. When it shifted below Haiti, it displaced all the earth that rested above. “This earthquake is not too uncommon,” says Dr. John C. Mutter, a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “What is uncommon is the extent of destruction which is entirely due to buildings collapsing. There have been level seven earthquakes in California but the death toll has been about 50 or 60 people. That is because we have much stronger buildings and we can build stronger,” he says. “But we shouldn’t wag our fingers at these people. In very poor countries you have to prioritize where you put your scant resources.”

Despite the facts and clear science explaining the quake, there will be some—Haitians among them—who supplant scientific method with spiritual reasoning. Most famously, the controversial televangelist Pat Robertson overlooked centuries of oppressive history to make the impossible claim that Haiti was “cursed.” According to Robertson, Haitian slaves entered into a “pact with the Devil” in order to thwart their French colonizers. As far-fetched as his claims sound, he wasn’t alone in his dubious supernatural assessment. “There is no possible response to people like Robertson who have their beliefs. They won’t change their minds no matter what,” Dr. Mutter says. “People who are educated from an early age can maintain a faith but they understand a difference between the things they believe as a matter of faith, such as an after life, and what you can learn from science.”

But Robertson isn’t alone. Amidst the commotion in Grand Rue, an elderly lady stops in front of Eugène’s place with a point to make. She begins to lecture. Perhaps our position in front of the voodoo art shop draws extra attention in this time of crisis. Vladimir translates: “Everybody wants to worship voodoo and now look what happens.” She waves her fists in the air. “God comes and punishes us.” The lady turns and walks against the traffic down Grand Rue.

With no clear way out and no real idea of where to go, we turn our attention to the surrounding wreckage and the people trapped inside. Scurrying up the street, we encounter a group coming out of a home: a man carrying a child on his back, a woman following with dusty grey hair.

“Ask them if there are more inside,” I say to Vladimir. And of course there are. We rush up to a home and peer down a dilapidated corridor, lined with the rubble of a fallen building. One man squats over a hole where a floor used to be.

“Do you need help,” Vladimir asks in Creole.

The man yells back and gestures toward the pile of rubble he sits above.

“There are others inside,” Vladimir says to me. “But you must be careful.”

The building is mostly destroyed. What has not fallen is hanging, sagging or cracked. Another shake may come and finish the job. I rush in as another man, the actual rescuer, emerges from the rubble with the child. Struggling to keep his footing on the jagged rocks, he passes her off to me. The child is ghostly white. Her body trembles as she squeezes tight around my neck. An entire group is praying in the middle of the street. I carry her out. Her head knocks against a low-hanging slab of concrete as she chants, uninterrupted, Jezi Sove’m! [Jesus saves me!]

A group, sitting in the middle of the road rejoices at the sight of the child. Her energy is contagious, electric. The street erupts in praise.

DARKNESS FALLS FAST, as it does this time of year. The car inches along. When not creeping slowly, it sits still in post-earthquake traffic that goes nowhere. “I have to get home to my daughter and my mother,” Vladimir says. He has not been able to get a line out to confirm their safety. “I’ve got to get back home.” I try to comfort him with a few words of encouragement. “Where they are, I’m sure they are alright,” I say. Vladimir is unmoved.

Our getaway vehicle, a 1996 RAV4, has transformed into a makeshift ambulance. We have picked up one lady, holding a crying young boy in her arms who is bleeding from somewhere. Her other child, a little girl of about 4 years, sits on my lap for lack of space. Another lady, who sells hot food on the street, was burned badly. She now occupies the front seat while her husband squeezes next to me in the back. As we creep along, there is a sad symphony of sound. The baby cries, the lady moans in pain, her husband tries to comfort her in hushed tones. There is singing from outside. Horns blow. Meanwhile, this car’s engine hums, but we go nowhere.

With no other rational choice, we decide to walk. I’m overcome by a feeling of helplessness as the lady repositions her son on her hip and grabs hold of her daughter’s hand. She gestures with her head in the direction of Carrefour. “Mashe,” [Walk] she says to the little girl. “Mashe.”

THE MORNING AFTER the quake, with the tremors still shaking our brains and the threat of rising water flooding our thoughts, we begin our descent into Port-au-Prince. Schools are decimated, a funeral home is destroyed and there is a fire at a gas station that people sprint past, scared it will blow any minute.

Before we make it out of Carrefour, we come upon two dead bodies lying on the sidewalk across from the United Nations base. Unaware of the magnitude of the disaster, I cross the street and ask a UN representative what they can do about the bodies, about the suffering. A women emerges who speaks to me in English. “We got a lot of people inside also, some of them already died,” she says. “If you want, you can go to the other side. You will see a lot of people on the street. We cannot count how many,” she continues. “It’s a lot of people and we have already done what we can do for them.”

It’s a matter of grim strategy for emergency forces to take care of the wounded before concerning themselves with the dead. After all, nothing can be done to revive a carcass on a street. But this fact doesn’t make the deaths any easier to bear for the living who walk among them.

In front of the Médicins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital, there are bodies scattered on the ground. People step over an elderly lady’s carcass. A young girl’s small body lies unattended. Her battered head is turned to one side. Her eyes are slightly open as flies exploit the gap. One man lies prone near the door of the hospital, a bloodied tourniquet tied around his leg in a failed attempt to save him. Another man sits on the ground in front of the hospital, smoking a cigarette. Next to him are two little boys covered in a sheet. He pulls back the cover to reveal their faces and tiny bodies. Their eyes are closed, as if not yet awakened by the morning sun. He’s expressionless in the way only shock victims can be, as if his features have turned to stone—that is until he’s asked about his sons. Tears come to his eyes and his voice whines out in pain. “What can I do,” he replies. “God gives them and God takes them away.” He repeats this maxim again and again, soothing himself with words that offer cold comfort to any grieving parent.

People stand on cars and try to look inside. But the hospital is overwhelmed, as are the capabilities of the UN, the many social service organizations and the Haitian government. An international outpouring of generosity has yet to reach the ground here in Haiti. The nurse who set up a one-person triage on the dirt road last night has made her way out here on the street, and is working on a patient. She looks in my direction and opens her arms expressing the enormity of the suffering and her own feeling of helplessness.

Despite the destruction everywhere, Hotel Oloffson’s structure built in the 19th century still stands on the hill. From there, Daniel Morel and Richard Morse have been tweeting the first dispatches, including photos, updates and information about survivors. In time I will take a seat in the Oloffson’s makeshift newsroom to add to their on-the-ground accounts of the devastation before I am evacuated to the Dominican Republic.

I’ll fly over the chaos in a helicopter. The beautiful scenery will hide the misery below. The sound of the engines will drown out the cries of the people I’ll surely leave behind. The gorgeous views may scrub away the stench of the bodies, but nothing can erase the looks on their faces, or the feeling on the streets just days before when everybody was dancing and singing their troubles away. [V]

[Originally published in VIBE magazine April/May, 2010]