Deyo

Today (Tuesday) I finally got a chance to go out, beyond the street our school is on, for only the second time since the earthquake. It was the sort of journey that I’ve become quite accustomed to in Haiti – driving all over town to drop people off, pick people up, run errands to buy things and talk to people and just get things done. Such journeys can take hours because of traffic – even before the earthquake – and often don’t include such luxuries as eating or bathroom stops. Tedious as these trips can sometimes be, today I was eager for the chance to get out, to see a little more closely what’s going on outside, and to take a break from school. These drives usually happen in the big white land cruiser, with a driver, 2 security guys, and the necessary passengers. This time there were 7 of us at first, then 4, then 10. It’s like a roving clown car all over town.

Our first mission was to drive 2 of the American staff (who came after the earthquake to help) to the Inter-American Development Bank to catch the convoy to the airport and their charter flight to Santo Domingo, where they will then catch a commercial flight home. American airlines is still not flying commercially in and out of Haiti, so Americans pretty much hitch rides home on charter and military flights. The drive there was slower than most drives through the city, but not outrageous by Haitian standards. Along the way I had the chance to see more of the widespread destruction from the earthquake. Certainly there are more buildings standing than fallen down, but the ones that have fallen leave such a bewildering impression. Some buildings look like tiered layer cakes where the top layer just slid right off and down the side. Others look like some giant Bigfoot creature simply squashed them with one step, while others are such confusing piles of concrete and rebar that I can’t fathom which laws of physics guided their collapse into their present states of disarray. There are a few huge buildings whose upper floors hang perilously over the street below, and gas station roofs rest peacefully on top of oil tankers beneath them. But amid all the chaos, there are buildings and homes that look totally unharmed. There are people out in the street selling food and clothes and those beautifully vibrant Haitian paintings of market scenes and country houses. It’s hard to fathom why one building fell and its nearly identical next door neighbor did not. I think in the months to come we will learn more and more about dishonest builders mixing cement with clay, and greedy contractors who cut corners in design and construction to save a dollar, and in the end cost thousands of lives. Time will tell, but for now the scenes of destruction really do defy logic to the untrained eye.

After some remarkably skilled driving and navigating around blocked roads and traffic jams, our driver Ganiel delivered us to the IADB where we met the other passengers on their way to Santo Domingo. There were two Nicaraguan architects who had earlier come out to the school to offer an additional expert opinion on the structural integrity of our buildings. I learned that one of them had graduated from Notre Dame in 1958. He told a story about wearing his Notre Dame hat earlier in the week and having a security guard at one of the destroyed hotels who had just turned around several cars up ahead simply wave him and his car through. Go Irish! He showed us some of his pictures of the scene in Port au Prince, including the destroyed cathedral, and the sight of three US Marines managing air traffic control on a folding table in the blazing sun alongside the landing strip at the Port au Prince airport. After a break in the air conditioned offices, we said goodbye to our friends and headed off to our next stop – the bank.

It took the banks about 11 days to open again after the earthquake, preventing many other businesses from opening and many people from going about their normal lives. People were buying and selling in Dollars and Euros even more than usual during those days. But finally on Saturday they opened again, and by today the Gourde was trading oddly higher than usual against the dollar. It was nice to be inside a totally professional, well organized institution after the craziness of outside. There was more air conditioning, and professionally dressed people, and the general feel of normalcy. The trader we met with told us that their phones and Internet weren’t working today, and it took her about 15 minutes to find the exchange rate and make the trade … but at least we got what we came for. We exchanged our “where were you during the earthquake?” stories and conversation about the exchange rate, and liquidity, and the importance of the banks in Haiti’s present and future, and then we went on our way.

The next stop was a grocery store in Petonville. I had actually been to this store once before – where, astoundingly, I ran into the one person I know who lives in Petonville. Patrick handed me 25 US dollars and told me and one of the security guys to go in and buy the stuff that we need that we haven’t been able to get since our usual grocery stores no longer exist. I found the store not too different from the last time I was there back in December. There wasn’t quite as much fresh meat and produce as before, the shelves were bit more sparsely populated, and there were guys with semiautomatic weapons inside – which I do not recall the first time. The cash registers also all had signs saying “cash only.” We bought syrup for French toast, soy sauce and hot dogs for fried rice, canned peas for many of our usual dinner concoctions and a can of Pringles to eat on the road. We’ll now be able to enjoy a few more interesting meals in the next few days!

Finally, we drove to Food for the Poor, a huge international aid organization that warehouses much more than food for distribution to charitable organizations and sometimes directly to individuals. Incidentally, much of the food that I’ve been eating in the last year comes from there as well. We have a group of students who have been going there each day to translate for some Jamaican doctors who are here working in the small clinic. We went to pick up the kids, and the US volunteer who was supervising them, at the end of their day’s work. On the way, we dropped off Patrick and Minel so they could make their way to the funeral of the sister of one of the staff members who had died in one of the collapsed university buildings. When we got near Food for he Poor, winding through some very small streets in a very crowded and poor neighborhood, we were informed that the way ahead was blocked because they were distributing food, and there was “dezod,” a wonderful Kreyol word that basically means trouble. So again, Ganiel the expert driver, wound through those same tiny streets in reverse, then swung around to the other side of the entrance, where we found the kids waiting patiently.

I know that many people in Haiti these days are not living lives nearly so functional and normal as this. The scenes on TV of machete wielding gangs and fights over bottled water and food are real, and in places like Site Soleil they may actually be quite common. But it’s also true that even in and around Port au Prince people are getting back to business … not business as usual … but back to some sort of normalcy. And that’s the “normal” that we managed to accomplish in five hours today, with a land cruiser, a skilled driver and 25 US dollars.