Post Earthquake Haiku Therapy

About two weeks after the earthquake, I decided to play one of my favorite games … the community Haiku. It works like this: I write the first two lines of a Haiku, and everyone else writes his or her own last line. This “post earthquake haiku therapy” has been on our wall ever since, and I still half smile and half cringe every time I read it.

The first two lines are:
Seven point zero
What the hell is going on?

The five syllable final lines are as follows … with a little explanation of each person’s earthquake experience:

Betsy: Get under the couch!
I’ve already explained that my somewhat appropriate and sort of insane instinct was to climb under the couch in our common room to wait for the shaking to stop

Mary: Should we not get out?
Mary was with me and Kristen upstairs, and while her inclination to get the hell out was probably better than mine to climb under the couch … we didn’t go anywhere.

Kristen: Please stop shaking now.
I’d say this one’s self explanatory

Elissa: Uh oh … coconuts!
She was outside walking among the mango and coconut trees and incredibly, her first thought was what would happen if one fell on her head. If you’ve never seen a coconut fall to the ground, it could kill you.

Peter: Incinerator?
He was outside dumping a wheelbarrow full of trash into the incinerator when the cinderblock walls starting moving. He thought the incinerator walls themselves were about to fall. Miraculously, only a few of the blocks actually did fall.

Samanthaa: Uh guys, get out now!
She was also near the incinerator with Peter and ran with the kids on the soccer field toward the center of the soccer field, away from the walls that were waving and crumbling.

Jon: Don’t push, pull instead.
Jon and Corey were making dinner in the kitchen and had a huge pot of water boiling on the stove. Amazingly, it didn’t completely fall off the stove. They ran for a doorway and Jon couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get the door open …

Corey: Hold me Jon, I’m scared!
Corey the Guamanian is the only one of us who had any previous earthquake experience, so it was he who told Jon to get into a doorway.

Meg: I think we’re moving.
Meg was on the soccer field with the kids too.

John: hey guys, sorry I’m late!
John DiTillo wasn’t actually in Haiti on January 12th. He was a volunteer last year, and was safe at home in Hanibal, Missouri when the earthquake happened here. A month later, he had dropped everything at home and was back in Haiti. He’s picked up classes for volunteers who have since gotten involved in more time consuming outside of school projects. More importantly, he was a much needed shot of energy and enthusiasm at a time when we were getting pretty tired. Now he’s decided to stay on past June, and will return to LCS next fall as well. What a blessing.

About a month after the earthquake I started hearing an expression in Kreyol that sort of freaked me out a little at first, but which I have since come to understand and genuinely appreciate. One day in class I asked where a student was, and the response came, “anba dekonb” … under the rubble. I think she was really only in the bathroom or something. Subsequently, questions about “where’s your pen,” “has anyone seen my eraser,” and “where’s the truck” are all met with the same joking response … “under the rubble.” Now there’s even a Haitian DJ who mixed an upbeat tune that says, “put me under the rubble … pull me out from the rubble” and people around here sing it incessantly. It makes perfect sense to me now. Haitians are so accustomed to tragedy, but also love to laugh so much, that it’s only right that eventually there would be a collective national joke about the latest tragedy. We wrote a haiku, and they make morose jokes about being buried under the rubble. It’s the same thing really.